2008 Woodie Awards
The Painful Haunted House
BILL GALLAGHER, OBSERVER STAFF WRITER
Issue date: 10/13/08 Section: Life & Leisure
The object of a haunted house it to scare visitors, but a really good haunted house has to make people feel uncomfortable in between scares. This is achieved through the atmosphere, what you hear, what you see, what you feel, and sometimes what you smell (if the operators are especially dedicated).
A haunted house I visited last year, however, was uncomfortable for entirely different reasons.
On Halloween, I had been taking a aimless ride through the various areas that bordered my home town of Dumont when I came across a somewhat low budget looking haunted house set up in a park. In the spirit of the season, I decided to check it out. I have been to several haunted houses of varying quality in my life, including an Evangelical hell house and one set up by kindergartners, but none were as bad the one I attended last year. The awfulness of this particular haunted house became an obsession of mine and over the past year I have spent an intermittent amount of time going over my memories to find out what exactly made it so bad.
Most haunted houses try to establish the mood by playing some stock organ music along with some ambient sounds like chains, creaking doors, or moaning. Some use total silence to build up suspense for the shock moment. This haunted house, however, decided to employ as much noise as possible, including blasting death metal at the highest volume possible, to the point that no one could hear anything. In fact, the entire haunted house was an assault on the senses. The overuse of strobe lights meant that everything appeared to move like it was animated through a flip book. As such, it was nearly impossible for the performers to shock or scare the attendees; they could not startle us with noise (since we could not hear much of anything over the music) and the surprise when they jumped out of corners was negated by the disorienting flash of strobes.
Even in areas where the music had dissipated and there was lack of strobes, my new found sight and hearing only allowed me to experience a different form of unpleasantness. The performers were enjoying their act far more than the attendees, and their constant overacting and laughter distracted us from any scares they were trying to induce. What was worse, they seemed to be either ad-libbing or making a conscious decision to use cornball lines like "Welcome to the kitchen… Hell's Kitchen!" that makes one cringe.
A haunted house I visited last year, however, was uncomfortable for entirely different reasons.
On Halloween, I had been taking a aimless ride through the various areas that bordered my home town of Dumont when I came across a somewhat low budget looking haunted house set up in a park. In the spirit of the season, I decided to check it out. I have been to several haunted houses of varying quality in my life, including an Evangelical hell house and one set up by kindergartners, but none were as bad the one I attended last year. The awfulness of this particular haunted house became an obsession of mine and over the past year I have spent an intermittent amount of time going over my memories to find out what exactly made it so bad.
Most haunted houses try to establish the mood by playing some stock organ music along with some ambient sounds like chains, creaking doors, or moaning. Some use total silence to build up suspense for the shock moment. This haunted house, however, decided to employ as much noise as possible, including blasting death metal at the highest volume possible, to the point that no one could hear anything. In fact, the entire haunted house was an assault on the senses. The overuse of strobe lights meant that everything appeared to move like it was animated through a flip book. As such, it was nearly impossible for the performers to shock or scare the attendees; they could not startle us with noise (since we could not hear much of anything over the music) and the surprise when they jumped out of corners was negated by the disorienting flash of strobes.
Even in areas where the music had dissipated and there was lack of strobes, my new found sight and hearing only allowed me to experience a different form of unpleasantness. The performers were enjoying their act far more than the attendees, and their constant overacting and laughter distracted us from any scares they were trying to induce. What was worse, they seemed to be either ad-libbing or making a conscious decision to use cornball lines like "Welcome to the kitchen… Hell's Kitchen!" that makes one cringe.
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