Notes from Maine - 2022/07/31
It would be really interesting to work in a haunted house—like at an amusement park. A friend of mine managed one when he was a kid (just out of high school). This would have been back in the 80s. The staff were all late teens/early twenties. They were theater kids and goths. From his descriptions, the job involved makeup, acting, construction, maintenance, improv, and lots of creativity. When they went out for supplies, they drove a hearse. During the day, if attendance was low, some of the actors would roam the park, scaring children and trying to drum up business.
The attraction ran for ten years until the owner decided that giant lawsuits were probably on the horizon if he kept it open. The Haunted Mansion at Disney is fun, campy, and incredibly safe. The one my friend managed didn’t fit any of those adjectives. Staff and visitors were sometimes injured. They had people in their teens and twenties doing unsupervised construction to change walls and add secret passages. A serious accident was only a matter of time. Before that could happen, the place was closed and the fire department was invited in to burn the place to the ground.
Recently, all the haunted attractions I’ve attended take place outdoors. There’s a great one less than an hour from here in Auburn, Maine. It’s part of an orchard, so you arrive at the orchard’s gift store to purchase tickets and wait for your group to be called. Then, you walk on a self-guided tour through the rows of apple trees where they’ve set up different spooky scenes. None of the actors are allowed to touch you (or cut you), so you’re not in any physical danger. They will do their damndest to sneak up behind you though. Sometimes, you walk into a scene with mannequins in various states of dismemberment. As you walk through the fake bodies, appreciating the details of the models, one might stand up and jump at you. They’re good at hiding real people in a scene and then convincing you it’s fake.
At a haunted walk in New Hampshire one year, they had people dressed up as porcupines, scuttling around on all fours. They moved in such an unnatural way, it was hard to believe that they were human. Another time, we turned to see that an actor had snuck up behind us. Fake knives, blade against blade, were inches from us and the actor was looking us right in the eyes. Then, the actor stood to their full height. They were on stilts and stood about nine feet tall. I have no idea how they managed to crouch down to eye-level like that and so effortlessly stand back up. There is some real talent out there, working to try to scare people.
I’m thinking about this in July because I would have to start right now if I wanted to design a haunted walk. There’s little to no narration to these attractions. The story has to be told visually or from natural dialog of the actors. To make something both interesting and scary with no prose would be a huge accomplishment.
If there’s anything missing from the local attractions, it’s overall plot. You can piece a few things together, like, “I think that mad scientist guy was attaching human heads to porcupine bodies? Maybe those are the things we saw running around?” Or, “I think that guy with the fake chainsaw was supposed to be a part of a cannibal cult?”
But how cool would it be if you could track a whole story from start to finish and then have a big payoff at the end? A lot of them already employ the idea of, “Things have gone awry, and somehow there’s a real killer loose in our woods.” You have to find a sneaky way to surprise people who are already actively looking for surprises.
It’s a fun puzzle to think about, but ultimately would be way too much work. I don’t have the exuberance of a twenty year old. I would be the person demanding to shut the thing down before someone sues us. I’ll keep that dream tucked away in the back of my head until next year. Maybe I’ll be hit with a burst of inspiration for the perfect haunted walk. Until then, it’s fun to wait for fall so I can see what other people have come up with.
