In Search of the Perfect Haunted House: A Midsummer Nightmare

I've always been a fan of haunted houses, at least in theory. I say in theory because I'm always a little disappointed with the level of scares these places actually provide. They have to appeal to a wide market that includes younglings, so the punches are always pulled.

So imagine my delight when Josh Randall, the creative director of the Vortex Theater Company, emailed me to let me know his company was putting on an off-season haunted house called "A Midsummer Nightmare" that is designed to "bridge the gap between scary as an amusement and something that is actually scary as hell."

Read about the whole experience after the jump...

There are a few rules in place that make Midsummer Nightmare a very different haunted house experience than you're used to: First, no one under 18 is admitted, which allows them to get away with some incredibly graphic scenes that you certainly won't see in any of your standard Halloween houses. Disgusting, weirdo sexual stuff. No actual nudity or anything (aside from a young actor's skinny bum with a snake coming out of it... or going in, there was some debate), but there are some things here you would be shocked to see in an R-rated movie.



The second rule, and the one that really sets this house apart from others, is that YOU MUST WALK THROUGH ALONE. That's right, no giggling with friends and playing tough with wisecracks--it's just you and the ghoulies. Oh, and a couple shots of whiskey, offered at the entrance to steel yourself against the horrors that await.

"The horrors" might be an overstatement, however. As fresh as the scenes presented in Midsummer Nightmare are, they still fall prey to the same basic issue as other haunted house scenes--they aren't scary. There is a sense of division in haunted houses between the audience and the performers--as if the scenes were merely interesting dioramas in a twisted natural history museum. The visitor is an observer of terror, not a participant in it. But watching people act scared or pretend to do something strange or gross is not scary.



Not to say there are no scary moments in Midsummer Nightmare, they just don't involve staged scenarios splashed with fake blood. The beginning of the experience is extremely well-conceived and indisputably terrifying. You are told before you go in that you will have a flashlight, but what you actually get is a keychain with an LED so dim you could point it at your feet and not see them. Indeed, it dawned on me as I stepped into the darkness that the light wasn't meant to help me see, but to help me BE SEEN. This kind of thing makes me very nervous.

Very soon into the walk your flashlight is confiscated and you are ordered to sit in a pitch black room. There may be others sitting in the room as well, but there isn't enough light to tell if they are other patrons or performers. You are left to imagine what's in the darkness around you, and just when you think your eyes are starting to adjust they set off a flashbulb in your face which not only blinds you but fills the darkness with all sorts of colorful phantoms, residual impressions left by the bright light. The time in this room had me so scared I was clenching my fists and teeth and making crazy faces--until I realized the performers had night vision goggles and then I tried to tone it down a little out of embarrassment.



I don't want to give away any more of what's in the house. It's a pretty short experience (as all haunted houses are, at least in New York) and I don't want to spoil too much because this is something you should definitely make it out to if you're at all interested in this kind of thing. While it remains tied to some of the conventions of traditional haunted houses, it puts you face to face with some grotesque scenarios you've never seen (or imagined [or wanted to imagine]), and introduces some brilliant new elements that make it well worth the $6 to get in. It deserves to be supported because it is an important stepping stone to my dream haunted house, one that doesn't rely on detached observation but immersion in an experience the visitor doesn't know the boundaries of, a house that demands more of its audience than simply "look." A Midsummer Nightmare makes some big strides towards this type of experience. I can't wait to see what Vortex comes up with next year (fingers crossed!).

"A Midsummer Nightmare" runs through June 13th at the Sanford Meisner Theater. Tickets can be purchased at www.midsummernightmare.com

New York Haunted House Showdown: Blood Manor vs. Nightmare: Ghost Stories

We at Geekanerd would like to help you make some informed decisions regarding your Halloween expenditures. And with haunted house tickets being about $30 a head, it would be a shame for you to waltz into the wrong one. So here is our in depth, exhaustive review of the two heavy hitters in NYC: Nightmare: Ghost Stories and Blood Manor. Hit the jump for the full report.

Nightmare: Ghost Stories
Where: 107 Suffolk Street at Rivington, Manhattan
How Much: $25 for the house, $5 more for the Maze, and $50 for a VIP ticket that lets you skip the line and gets you a "goodie bag."

Nightmare's scares are purportedly based on the paranormal experiences of your fellow Yorkers. There's a poster on the wall as you wait to enter the house that runs through a dozen or so types of ghosts that you may be seeing inside: poltergeists, apparitions, phantasms, etc. I've never been much of a ghost man myself, preferring more natural horrors like insane people with sharp instruments. Fortunately they don't stick to their mission statement too strictly, as the only ghosts I remember seeing are a girl that walked through a curtain as if it were a wall (a cheap illusion that is ultimately shattered when you have to walk through the same hole to continue through the house) and a possessed girl twisted into an unnatural position up on the ceiling.

The Highlights:
A room densely packed with stiff, tattered mummies and lit by a strobe light. The exit is on the other side of the room and you have to maneuver your way through the mannequins, brushing dangerously close to them. Your savvy haunted house-going mind knows that among the fakes are one or two "live" mummies, but the strobe light makes it nearly impossible to keep track of what you're seeing. A flash of human eyes among the mass quickly disappears and you're left wondering if you ever saw them at all.

A small room with squishy body parts and guts and excrement under your feet, and a little pot-bellied woman with a knife who eyes you up and down, giggling and muttering to herself about what a fine specimen you are. Oh, and it smells rotting-flesh awful.

The most scared I got in the house was in a claustrophobia-inducing pitch black section of the house that had some "dead end" offshoots that led nowhere. Things were backed up, so our group would be standing still in the dark for minutes at a time. Everyone would reach out and touch the person in front of them every once in a while to see if we were moving yet, and while it was partly a relief to not feel someone because it meant I could move on, it was also scary because I didn't know where the hell to go. Due to the offshoots and the little hidden hallways the actors always seemed to pop out of, it became a very real fear in my mind that I had stumbled down the wrong path and wouldn't be getting out for a long time. It didn't help that every once in a while there was a loud bang from the other side of the walls that squeezed me from both sides and I was convinced the whole thing was going to come down on top of us.

The Maze, which was just a bunch of black flats set up with no decoration or spooky lighting, provided some good fun. It was inhabited by some great actors who always seemed to know just when to pop out from around the corner and into your face. It was also the only time I felt isolated, because I struck out on my own away from the group. Being face to face with a dead girl is much spookier when there are no other people in sight.

The Letdowns:
A general lack of creativity permeated the house. Most of the actors had on white or black leotards, regardless of the situation they were supposed to be a part of. For example, one cool setup involved walking "underground" through a hallway filled with deep sand (cork, actually) that swallowed your feet. It led to a glass display where someone was stuck in a coffin, buried alive. It would be unsettling if the unfortunate victim was dressed like me, but the ballerina look really ruined it.

Overall, the sets were sparse and the fun factor low. If I had paid for the visit, I'm afraid I would have come out feeling a bit stiffed.


Blood Manor
Where: 542 W. 27th Street, Manhattan
How Much: $28 in advance, $33 at the door, $48 to skip the line

Outside of Blood Manor, an eight foot tall two-headed creature stalks up and down the line, leaning down to gurgle unintelligible things into guests' ears. An 11 year old boy is nearly in tears yelling at the group he is with: "I ain't going in there! One a ya'll take me home! I'm not joking, I ain't going in there! Please! Some eight foot freak looking at me! He was breathing on me! It ain't funny!" His voice gets higher and higher as his pleas continue. From the beginning it's clear Blood Manor doesn't take itself as seriously as Nightmare. I laughed (albeit nervously) more than I yelped in this one.

The Highlights:
If you know me or have been reading G'nerd long enough, you may know I'm a Robert Rodriguez slut. So imagine my joy when I turned a corner in the house and saw the neon sign: "Titty Twister: Open From Dusk Till Dawn." There was the Cheech lookalike greeting us at the door (unfortunately not giving the infamous "Pussy Speech"), the Selma Hayek lookalike vampire stripper hissing for a tip of our blood, and the exploding band lookalikes playing (well, miming) that awesome jam from the movie: bum bada dump dump dum dum dawwwng. This G'nerd's dream!

In general the house is much more dense than Nightmare. There are more rooms, and each set is dressed to the extreme. There's an obese blood smeared guy sitting at the head of a dinner table munching on the last bits of his guests, guys chasing you through strobe-lit rooms with chainsaws, and even a section where you don 3D glasses for a surprisingly fun effect. Simply: these guys aren't afraid to have some fun, and their fun becomes your fun.

The Letdowns:
There are a lot of animatronics and fake people where real people would be more fun. The guy in the electric chair, for instance, would be a lot more intense if it were a real guy writhing and screaming rather than a hissing animatronic jolting stiffly back and forth.

It really wasn't very scary, aside from the strobe light chainsaw bit.

And the Winner Is....

Blood Manor. Despite not being scared, I had a great time in the house. I felt like there was a lot of variety and care in each setup, in contrast to Nightmare's sparse and slightly homogeneous rooms.

Nightmare: Ghost Stories photos by Jaisen Crockett
Blood Manor photos by James Edstrom