No Skeletons in Our Closet: The Ultimate Guide to Bally's Scared Stiff Pinball

Scared Stiff, released in 1996, is a bit of a sad story: Bally/Williams’ pinball division was plummeting in sales. Money was tight, and so Scared Stiff was gutted as far as interesting gadgets were concerned, meaning the game shipped without the intended air-brushed bone flippers, light-up skull pile in the corner, and others. In any case, Scared Stiff is legendary, combining horror with comedy, and is packed to the brim with various innuendos and double entendres, all owing up to the iconic aesthetic of the game’s hostess, Elvira and her B-movie horror theme.

Scared Stiff is often considered to be a sequel to Elvira and the Party Monsters and became the second entry in a trilogy after Elvira’s House of Horrors hit the scene twenty-five years afterwards. 

Scared Stiff Production Details

• Design: Dennis Nordman, Mark Weyna
• Code: Mike Boon, Cameron Silver
• Mechanics: Win Schilling, Joe Loveday, Bob Brown
• Art: Greg Freres
• Sound: Paul Heitsch, Dave Zabriskie
• Music: Paul Heitsch, Dave Zabriskie
• Callouts: Tim Kitzrow, Cassandra Peterson

Scared Stiff Pinball Machine Playfield Overview

Quick Scared Stiff Tutorial

• Soft-plunge into the “Spin Spider” hole. Flip both flippers to stop the spider on the backglass and get an award. The best two are the coffin and the crate, which progress you toward their respective multiballs and give you a free restart when the multiball would otherwise end.
• The main multiball (Stiff in the Coffin) is lit by shooting the left ramp (with the bone monster on it) to light locks and the left loop to collect them. During that multiball, alternate ramp shots for jackpots or trap up and loop the right ramp for decent value.
• If you’ve collected the Coffin award from the web, Stiff in the Coffin will automatically restart for free when it ends, regardless of how many jackpots you’ve scored.
• Bashing the crate over and over again gets another multiball (Terror from the Crate). It’s dangerous and less valuable, but it’s a multiball.
• The same rules apply: if you’ve gotten the Crate from the web, Terror from the Crate will restart automatically when it normally would end.
• Collecting all six “tales” starts a wizard mode. The tales are completed by playing both multiballs, hitting the bumpers a bunch, shooting the left ramp a bunch, hitting the 1-2-3 “Leaper” targets, and completing the top “Deadhead” lanes. Doing so starts a final mode with high potential if completed and is very possible to do, even in competitive environments.

Skill Shot / The Spider

The true skill shot is to shoot the ball into the upper hole, but you should ignore that. Instead, shoot for the “Spin Spider” hole located in the center-right side of the table. This is not only more valuable, but it’s also safer and easier. Basically, there are two gates on the way up. You want to make it past the second gate, but not by much. You’ll end up in a little lane that, if you stay in, the ball will drop into the player-controlled spinning spider hole. Too hard, and you’ll leave the lane; too soft, and the ball will drop to the flippers. You can plunge again if you don’t make it through either gate.

The Stiff In The Coffin

• If you’re comfortable looping one ramp over and over again, you can get into a rhythm of doing that twice at the same time, one each ramp with each flipper. It’s tough to get going, especially since the ramps don’t take the same amount of time as each other, but as long as you don’t hit the balls into one another, you’re in good shape.
• This also means you’re draining one ball intentionally since there are three balls in play. But a rhythm is still possible with three balls. It’s like juggling!
• Alternatively, you can trap up and try to make each shot individually. It’s slower and not easy to do, but if you’re a more controlled player, it’s possible. The challenge is stopping the balls as they return to the flippers since the ramps tend to return balls very fast.
• Some players opt to just trap all balls on the left flipper except for one and loop the left ramp all day, even without a jackpot lit there. Aside from increasing the value of the jackpot, the left ramp continually increases in value and becomes very lucrative. While jackpots are still worthwhile, repeatedly looping the left ramp is comparably valuable and is safer, provided you can trap up that way. Do not loop the right ramp: although the display says it’s worth 50k per Web award collected, the game isn’t scoring that. (It does still increase the jackpot, however.)

Do not start Stiff in the Coffin without collecting the Web award first.

Terror From The Crate

Tales Of Terror

• Stiff in the Coffin we’ve already talked about, but completing the tale just means starting the multiball.
• The Monster’s Lab is awarded with a bunch of pop bumper hits. The bumpers are accessed via the left loop (which will alternate between feeding the bumpers and the top lanes if lock is not lit), though some renegade balls might sneak their way into that bumper area from in front of the crate. If you’re struggling to get hits, there’s a web award (looks like a lightning rod) that spots a bunch for you.
• Eyes of the Bony Beast is awarded after a few hits to the left ramp. You more or less do this for free on your way toward Stiff in the Coffin.
• Terror from the Crate is also lit by starting the multiball of the same name.
• Night of the Leapers is lit by hitting the three “leaper” targets. It’s also a switch frenzy worth some good points. You’re basically guaranteed to get this just by playing a multiball.
• Return of the Deadheads is lit by completing the top lanes, accessed by the left loop or the inner loop (right of the crate). It tends to be elusive - don’t forget to change your lanes! It gives you a silly animation on each trip through the lit lane, but you have to complete all three lanes to collect the tale. It also advances your bonus multiplier. The two skulls on the Web each also spot one deadhead, if you’re getting close. But shooting the lanes is likely easier.

The Stiff-O-Meter

This is a one-ball mode. The goal is to alternate shots to the ramp and to the crate; each shot awards lots of points and increases your Stiff-O-Meter level by one. The goal is to reach level 10 - Scared Stiff - which awards a whopping 5,000,000 points and makes the entire machine go haywire. After that, Monster Multiball instantly begins - a four-ball multiball during which all ramp and crate shots are worth 1,000,000 points a piece and are all always lit. It’s the most lucrative scoring opportunity in the game - even more so if you happen to combo it with Double Trouble.

To reiterate, getting three tales is pretty easy since Stiff in the Coffin more or less gives you Eyes of the Bony Beast along the way, and Night of the Leapers is basically guaranteed to start just by playing a multiball. The other three are trickier; the Lab and the Deadheads both require shots to the loops, which don’t really give you anything else of value, and Crate is both not worth very much and difficult to start. Still, it can be worth going for if you get close just by accident or if you get those Web advances which can make it easier to start.