LEARN HOW TO SCARE PEOPLE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE
ScreamWorld teaches our theater critic how to scare people.
A woman lies on a medical bed. She is pale and green and emaciated and nearly nude. The side of her leg is splayed open, the mouth of the wound peeling outward, revealing bone and flesh. A doctor stands over her yelling “help me” to passers-by. The doctor has puss and scabs and tumors on his face. He is infected. He is deranged. He is so crazy he just might come after you.
In the corner of the room, a woman sits on a wheelchair with long hair covering her face. You don’t know if she will move or if she’s already dead. The corridors of this medical ward are tight, with corners you can’t see around, with dead people you don’t notice until it’s too late.
Medical settings are scary enough as is. They have long hallways with hard, cold floors, filled with people wearing masks and holding scalpels and needles. Many people have bad memories of hospitals. They are where sick people are, where blood is stored, where people go to die.
The medical ward in ScreamWorld, one of Houston’s popular haunted attractions that open up this time of year, is just one scene of the near-one-hour-long maze through strobe lights, loud sound effects and gore-filled rooms, featuring a paid cast of more than 60 actors. This is perhaps the most visually gruesome scene in ScreamWorld, a dusty hospital that has supposedly been devastated by a plague, which has resulted in zombie doctors clawing over their murdered patients.
Just a few feet away, in the warehouse’s backyard area, a few actors are on break, munching on hot dogs and complaining about headaches. How they scare masses of people just looking for some Friday or Saturday entertainment, night after night, was a mystery to me. I mean, how do you scare people who know what they’re in for? I wanted to find out the secret sauce.
So, for a night, I was that doctor. I was to show up on time and be in makeup, in character and on cue, with 10-minute breaks in between (you’re given a stopwatch when the supervisor comes to relieve you). My job was, simply put, to scare people. Despite the sarcastic teenagers who talk back. Despite the costumers closing their eyes and ignoring the scene. Despite the drunks. Despite the husbands pushing their wives into the arms of chainsaw-wielding murderers (the workers say this is a common tactic by men to mask their fears).
But I had ammunition. The staff hands you cough drops, so you don’t lose your voice — I still did. The hallways are dark, so there are places you can hide that even dis-
cerning guests won’t notice. Other actors can distract the guests while you plan your popup scare. If something isn’t working, or you’re bored, you can switch stations with another actor. Everyone here knows how to improvise. And there aren’t too many rules for actors, besides the cardinal one: “Never touch the customers.”
The actors show up two hours before the 8 p.m. opening of the doors and are rushed into a dressing room that smells like armpits and hairspray to be put in costume and makeup. Oatmeal is mixed with liquid latex, then airbrushed red, black and white to create the illusion of scabby, decaying skin for a walking corpse. Then you’re whisked outside to the “blood station,” where a woman splashes you in a combination of water, syrup and dye.
A supervisor walked me through the hidden hallway that spans the outer perimeter of ScreamWorld to my station. The medical ward, which is halfway in, means the actors have a challenge: By the time your deranged doctor pops out and screams at, say, a group of five teenagers, they have already experienced the same thing many times in the past 20 minutes. Standing over my corpse, I shuddered and shook. When people walked past, I yelled at them. There’s no script. “Help me” was a good start, but then I tried out “Look at her” and “You did this to her.”
Some people were getting scared. Most weren’t. Many held their hands over their ears and eyes, briskly walking past my scene. I was encouraged to interact with the prop, which meant I could pretend to eat the “patient.” I chose not to do that. Originally, it was a male corpse on the table, but the other actors swapped it out because they wanted to “give me a girl to work with.” I was shaking a bloody limb at the audience at first, but then, overthinking the entire situation, I abandoned it because the girl corpse wasn’t missing a leg.
Frustrated, I crawled under the medical table and hid behind the white cloth, which was barely
thin enough to see through. The floor was sandy and dusty. I had to either hunch or lay on the ground. Seeing that I had “disappeared,” another actor came to take my place standing over the dead girl, and smiled when I popped up to stretch my neck. “I didn’t see you there,” she said.
I went back under. “Be careful,” the actor told me. “Don’t get hurt.”
“I can do this,” I told myself, controlling my breathing. “Subtle acting” had backfired. Tossing a metal can on the wall, creating a loud noise, was ultimately ineffective. Screaming random names at people, in the hopes of freaking out the one “Michael” that happened to walk by, didn’t work.
I focused on looking out for the first person to walk by. They walk very fast, and if I came out too late, the surprise would be ruined. Then I saw the flurry of legs through the white cloth. I waited one second, so the party could train their eyes at the corpse on the medical table, perhaps thinking that this is a “background” scene with no actors.
Then, revealing my hand first, I burst out screaming, reaching for the party but never touching them. “Ahhhh!” A girl screamed at the top of her lungs, her eyes glaring at my zombie face, as I yelled “Help me! Help me!” She jumped, then scurried toward the end of the hallway, where she was ambushed by another zombie doctor. She kept on running.
Her face, that look of surprise, was so genuine. I wondered if I had ever seen that expression directed at me before this night. I was part of her nightmare.
I don’t know if ScreamWorld is art, but I felt like a star singer receiving a standing ovation. I smiled my zombie smile, then ducked back under the table, shoulders hunched and nose crinkled in the dusty air, and waited for the next victim.