Scary Salad
october 26, 2008 08:49pm – in Korea
The total lack of Halloween here makes me miss it more than I ever thought I would. This week I'm doing a few Halloween-themed lessons, and it's got me looking up all sorts of fun facts about the Halloween history and modern tradition.
One article I'm going to give my freetalking students is going to be about "haunted attractions," (to keep things clear, I have to define these separately from "haunted houses"). It's got me thinking about my relatives' annual haunted front lawn, and about the mazes at Knott's Scary Farm.
I've always hated those haunted attractions I refer to as "scary salad," where an assortment of ostensibly scary material as roughly lumped into a big bowl of scary, and served all at once. You can't respond emotionally to a ghost, followed by a zombie pirate, followed by a killer clown. At best you will be momentarily startled, and yet the best minds in the business, those concerned with special effects and makeup seem to be focused on these sorts of things.
Naturally the limitless possibilities of Scary Salad give experts the opportunity to flex their professional muscles, and there's plenty of skill on display at Knott's every year. Just look at my friend allison's Myspace Resume. And you can't deny the epic ambition of my uncle Mike's haunted front lawn (visible on Google Street View).
But to my mind, skill and ambition won't reach people's souls. I envision a haunted house that really engrosses the visitor. It could terrify slowly, escalate from mild creepiness to all-out screaming terror at its conclusion (and, like any good Gothic horror, finish on a note of pitch-black humor). The missing ingredient, in my opinion, is narrative.
I envision a haunted house, where fake news reports shown in line give the visitor some background information, characters, and themes to follow. A missing girl, a serial killer on the loose. As they traverse the haunted house, they'll not only be terrified, but they'll follow a story to its conclusion. Including a mind-bending story twist right before the ending. Sure this sounds ambitious, but so do the prosthetics and animatronics that routinely get budgeted.
But it would also be important for those same craftspeople to rope-in, if not tone-down their displays of ability. On their night out, people will see so many severed limbs, and so much fake blood that those things lose their meaning. They key to capturing people's imaginations is to create an unbroken illusion.
With care taken to defy expectations, and create aesthetic unity these "haunted attractions" could be, if not a work of art, then at least something something worth taking seriously.