So I went to the haunted house in the East Village yesterday with a bunch of friends. I had heard about this haunted house a few times before about how scary it was and that it was really ultra popular and famous. I read an article online about how it was developed to have highly psychological terror instead of the more conventional people in costumes with chainsaws and things of that nature. In the article they talk about how they put a call out to artists, designers and other creative types to design rooms to be used for the haunted house. They received over a hundred responses and they whittled them down to the thirteen scariest and I guess that’s what I saw last night.
Not so scary really.
I think I could’ve gone for some more people in masks and scary makeup trying to grab me from the darkness, because this stuff wasn’t that scary. I could very easily see how some people would be completely freaked out by several of the rooms if not all of them, but I guess I’ve watched too many horror movies or I’m just really jaded. I even saw some people coming out who looked rather distraught and one woman looked like she was crying a bit.
In addition to the basic setup of each room (the backgrounds and details are missing from this comic for simplicity sake) they had some people here and there who would jump out at appropriate times, but even those weren’t that scary. The scariest part for me was this strobe light hallway with some people in makeup and this one section that was completely dark in a narrow hallway where basically you had to grab onto the person in front of you to get by. Other than that it was obvious the limitations of the rooms and where people could jump out from and since you were expecting it there wasn’t much impact.
Though in retrospect I was pondering the inherent difficulties of doing a good haunted house. You’d think that having something really jump out at you could be tons scarier than watching it in a film, but then again, in real life you understand that there’s really only so much they can physically do. I’m curious what some of the great Japanese horror film directors could come up with in a haunted house. Now that would be worth seeing ’cause I’m sure they could think up some really freaky stuff.
The thing is that I had really much higher expectations not just because of the reputation, but because most New Yorkers are so jaded that need some extra oomph to freak them out. So you’d think that the New York artists would understand this and go that extra step to find something to push them over the edge. Sadly this didn’t seem to be the case.
