BEIJING, Oct. 30 -- A moaning damsel crawls out of a wardrobe. Distressed souls wander in obsolete operating rooms. Bloodstained nurses hand out sanguine drinks in plasma bags.

These shows of holiday spirit are part of an effort by business-minded Chinese performers to profit from Halloween. Like the career fear-mongers in Disney's Monsters Inc., the louder you scream, the more they get paid.

Long criticized for shabby settings and clumsy scaring skills, China's independent haunted houses nevertheless have a sizable following among the young, heating up the haunted tours days before Halloween on Oct. 31.

In Beijing, long lines of young couples waited to be scared outside the Ghost Times, an Asian-themed haunted house that has received thousands of customers since it opened in mid-October, said its creator Raymond Wu.

A thousand miles away, the Chimelong Paradise in Guangzhou welcomed Halloween by setting loose hordes of zombie staff to roam the park and lure customers into haunted sites like the "Gothic Deserted Zone" and the "Biochemical Lab."

The park has received over 200,000 visitors since its Halloween season opened on Oct. 16, and at least 50,000 are expected on Halloween. "These numbers are amazing, considering now is the slack season for China's tourism," said a manager of the park.

Making people scream is a big business in China. Chinese horror movies generally fare well in the box office despite their monstrously bad quality, and the country's manufacturers supply much of the world's demand for macabre decorations and costumes.

But commercial activities featuring ghosts remain a niche business in China and risk being labeled as "spreading superstition." There are not many stand-alone spook houses in China despite their popularity among the urban young.

"Haunted houses are loved by student couples -- it's a great time for boys to display bravery and girls to 'play the woman,' or a group of young girls holding tightly to each others' hands to toughen up against the ghosts," said Lin Yajun, an office clerk in Beijing and a haunted house devotee.

Frazzled urbanites are another group these businesses cater to. Wu said his facility offers a place for people to scream out and "let go of their pressures and resentment."

Not every wraith reaps huge profits, though. The Fujiang General Hospital in the city of Fuzhou is in the red as too few customers dared walk through its dim wards of delirious patients and corpses. Its operators tried to play up the scare through design elements, such as electrical candles that turn off at the eeriest moments.

High costs and unsteady customer streams are major problems haunting the business. The fact that people are unlikely to be scared by the same tricks twice prompts most ghost houses to go on performance tours, staying in one city for a month or two before coming back with a new theme the next year.

TRICKS FOR TREATS

While foreign spook houses play up fancy make-up and technology, their cost-wary Chinese counterparts stress the use of warm-blooded labor, with "living" ghosts cast play the leading roles.

"I can tell how many customers are coming and whether they are couples or friends by their footsteps and voices, and their screams in previous rooms tell me how bold they are. For different customers I use different strategies," said Fan Bingtao, a white-haired witch at Ghost Times, whose tricks include dropping a fake hand in front of visitors or a black sheet over their heads.

Fan has an incentive to mix up her methods. Her boss gives a cash bonus to the "scariest ghost" selected by customers to encourage the team to be creative.

Wang Lei, a college student moonlighting at the Fujiang Hospital, is a horror movie fan and has developed his own tactics. "People are alert when approaching a corner or a screen, so I avoid haunting these places. I know how to strike by surprise," he said.

But ghosts have their fears: too much horror can cause injuries or legal troubles. People with heart disease are not allowed into the Fujiang Hospital, and ghosts there are told to be lenient on girls. Once an insistent elderly customer walked in, and the ghosts were just too frightened to do anything.

THE DEVIL WEARS SNEAKERS

One grim fact facing Chinese scream-makers is that outside their loyal customers, the general public remains conservative about ghostly entertainment.

At the Canton Fair, China's largest trade fair, sellers of scary toys and decorations said they mostly export to foreign markets as the tastes of Chinese consumers are still too "light."

Their loyal customers are also getting pickier. Many of them criticize Chinese haunted houses for lacking attention to detail.

Lin said Chinese facilities rely too much on sudden scares instead of working on a spooky ambiance. She once visited a haunted house that mixed vampires with Japanese ghosts and pulled awkward tricks like banging a gong near her head.

In one anti-climatic moment, she saw a specter wearing sneakers.

"I suddenly felt it was not scary at all. Ghosts are bare-footed in the story, not wearing sneakers!"