In the Mind of Matt (It's Not That Scary, I Swear)

A Book, a Movie, a Show & a Game: Some Influences of Bennytown

6/14/2020

It’s no secret that I’m a huge pop culture junkie, and that that is reflected in a lot of my writing. Themes and images from fiction have a way of sticking with me, and so, with Bennytown right around the corner, I thought I’d share a few of the major pop culture influences that led to this tale of twisted theme park terror.

A Book: The Shining

Alright, I’m a child and horror fan of the late 20th century, you knew the odds were fairly high that I’d be in to Stephen King and, yeah, he is without question my favorite author. I have a lot of issues with a lot of what he’s written due to some of his eccentricities and writing quirks, but the man is an undeniable master of horror. While The Shining is far from my favorite King book (that is, and shall forever be, The Stand), as a classic of haunted house literature and a lead character being slowly driven mad by their past catching up with their present in a location with a dark and twisted history, I had to keep it on my bedside table while working on Bennytown.

A Movie: Alien & The Thing

Okay, this one’s cheating a bit because it’s two of my all-time favorite horror movies, but since they both have a similar theme that was a major reference point, I’m including them here. What do both of these sci-fi horror classics have in common with a book about a haunted theme park? In short: workplace horror. It’s difficult being around a lot of our coworkers during even the best of times, but when things go to hell and the average workplace annoyances become a pressure cooker of mistrust and fear, well, that definitely makes for some fertile ground for horror. Though Noel doesn’t have to deal with any of the otherworldly horrors of the Nostromo or Outpost 31 crews, their plights were never far from my mind.

A Show: American Horror Story

Full disclosure, I have a love-hate relationship with this series and haven’t watched any of the seasons since Roanoke really. It’s a messy grab bag of horror tropes and episodes just trying to be more shocking than the last than scary, but, this was a pivotal influence for me in my exploration as a horror writer. When it came to horror, my mind before had generally thought of horror stories as simply being one thing. A haunted house story was a haunted house story, a serial killer story was a serial killer story, a monster story was a monster story, and so on. While I never had any arguments with this line of thinking, my mind has always been overwhelmed with ideas that I want to put into a story, and that had never seemed permissible. Seeing the kitchen sink storytelling style of American Horror Story that quite often worked just flipped a switch in me that said, hey, you can put whatever you want in a story so long as you can make it make sense.

A Game: Outlast

Despite my horror bona-fides, I have a confession to make: I’m pretty easy to scare. It’s easy to scare me with movies, but if you want to utterly destroy me, just put me in the middle of a well made horror video game. I’ve lost it playing games like Five Nights at Freddy’s, the Resident Evil 2 remake, and especially the nightmare factory that is Alien: Isolation, but for my money one of the scariest experiences I’ve had is playing the Outlast games. Better than most games I’ve played, they’ve created that beautiful, instinctive fear of being hunted. You’re helpless to fight back, and more often than not you’re bathed in pitch blackness. I make it a point to praise horror movies that are frightening in the daylight and don’t rely on darkness as a cheap road to fear, but Outlast brings a true terror to the darkness, and considering the madness and the number of scenes in Bennytown that rely on pitch blackness for their fear, Outlast was never far from my mind.

There are a lot more influences that I could go into, but that would create a much longer, much more rambling article and discussion I shall probably save for another day. Until then, be kind to each other, take care of yourselves, stay safe, stay healthy, stay informed, be kind to each other (I know I said this twice, and I don’t care because it bears repeating) and I hope to see you at Bennytown…

Bennytown will be released on paperback and Kindle on June 23, 2020.

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What on Earth Possessed Me to Write Bennytown?

6/7/2020

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(Quick head’s up, this story is a bit on the long and rambling side, and goes to some fairly dark places, but if you’ve ever wanted a look into the mind of a horror author, well, I welcome you in.)

One of those questions authors are used to hearing is, “Where do you get your ideas?” For most projects my answer to this is usually an explanation that combines my scattershot and random attention span with my love for a fairly broad array of pop culture subgenres, with pretty much every story I write a love letter to one genre, or film, or book, or a collection of sources along those lines, and while Bennytown’s origins aren’t terribly different, it has its own winding and weird history that I shall share today for those interested.

But first, let’s talk a little about what exactly Bennytown is.

Bennytown is the story of Noel Hallstrom and his relationship with the titular theme park after he gets a job at the park on his 16th birthday. Though initially excited to get a job at America’s favorite theme park, he slowly becomes aware that there are mysterious, even evil goings-on happening throughout Bennytown, and that the park may have designs for him. Interspersed with tales that stretch across the park’s 60-year history, Bennytown is a tale of madness and terror hiding beneath the colorful façade of family friendly fun.

Okay, that’s the story. Well, I should say that’s some of the story; I like to get a little crazier than that. But out of all the stories in the world, why did I choose this? Well, there are two major influences and a bit of tragedy that helped birth this story into the world.

For the first influence, let me answer with a picture.

See that kid in the striped shirt working the counter? This was me in 2001, 16-years-old, working my first ever job at Universal Studios Hollywood. For two years I worked there serving ice cream at Louie’s Ice Cream, and I gotta say, as first jobs went, I had a lot of fun. It was a job, sure, and hardly a glamorous one, but it was one at a theme park I’d loved since I was a kid. I got to take a behind the scenes look at how a major theme park was run, and even managed to get pretty good with a soft-serve machine (almost twenty years later, I can still do a pretty mean swirl on a small cake cone).

I left when I was eighteen to focus on college, but the experiences I had while working there, both good and bad alike, stuck with me, and I knew that they would one day influence a story in some way, shape or form.

(Side note: I will say that contrary to what might appear in the book, my experiences on the whole were almost universally positive and that I have little but nice things to say about the people behind the scenes at Universal Studios, who were absolutely professional and positively enthusiastic in their work, even when things got difficult.)

As for the other major influence, I shall answer with a book recommendation.

I was really trying to figure out if I could talk about my influences in regards to talking about a haunted, family friendly theme park without mentioning the “D word” in this case, but since that’s almost impossible to avoid, I’ll try to make it quick (please don't sue me Disney). When I was in middle school, Dad got a copy of Mouse Tales: A Behind the Ears Look at Disneyland, because he was a huge Disneyland fan and liked a good dark true story or two. Since he had a very odd idea of what I was and wasn’t ready to read at any given age, he passed it on to me when he was done, and I was hooked.

Sure, being an almost-teenager, I was more taken by the dark stories of death and sordid behind the scenes controversy than I was the impressive tale of how the park seemed born from pure determination, but it was a fascinating read all the same. Reading this before we got really invested in this whole “internet” thing, I felt like I was holding onto forbidden knowledge of the dark underbelly hiding beneath false cheer. It was as if the book was a dark totem that I bore to disperse knowledge to my unaware peers.

In my defense, I was perhaps 11 when this happened, so, I probably had an outsized view of these facts which were otherwise public knowledge. Even so, it’s a fun if occasionally grim book, check it out!

The simple knowledge of what can happen behind the scenes of a cheerful-looking theme park combined with my own knowledge of working one such place always sat at the back of my mind as a potentially horrifying story, but it took a while before I could find the right hook. Still, around 2014-2015 an idea had begun to form, and I began to write the beginnings of what I thought would be a fun, scary story of life working inside of a haunted theme park. It wasn’t quite Bennytown, but it was a step in the right direction, and one I was truly excited for.

Right around the end of 2015, I managed to make some pretty good progress, and then, well, I hit a bit of a speed bump.

The man in the picture above is Scott Carter, my dad, and since he basically raised me on his own after my mother passed when I was 3, he and I were also best friends. Even after I became an adult and moved out, moved on and got married, he and I would talk almost every day, and since my office job was only a few minutes away from his house, I would have lunch with him most days of the week.

At least until December 31, 2015, when I came over for lunch to find out he’d died suddenly in the night from a heart attack.

This, well, kind of set off what was going to be a fairly rough 2016 for me (though I hadn’t anticipated quite how rough it would be on everyone). I sank into a pretty long period of depression and not wanting to deal with dark and violent stories of death and madness, so I put Bennytown on the backburner for a time while I sorted my life and mind out. It took a lot of effort, and a very understanding wife, but in time I saw that light at the end of the tunnel.

And that, weirdly, is where I found Bennytown again, as once the grim nature of the story no longer got to me, writing gave me focus and was one of many steps that helped me on the path to dealing with my depression. I won’t say it fixed everything, and that I don’t still deal with it from time to time, but being able to focus on a completely strange and unreal world with elements that were completely in my control definitely helped. It took some time, and some soul-searching, and a lot of drafting, but I was finally ready to put Bennytown out into the world.

I could go into detail on the trials and tribulations of the submissions process, and how I’d nearly lost all hope the book had a future and was brought back from the brink by a poster I won in a Jurassic Park trivia contest (long story) before it got picked up by my final publisher, but those are stories for another time.

Until then, be kind to each other, take care of yourselves, stay safe, stay healthy, stay informed, be kind to each other (I know I said this twice, and I don’t care because it bears repeating) and I hope to see you at Bennytown…

Bennytown will be released on paperback and Kindle on June 23, 2020.

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I'm Baaaaaaaaaaaack!

6/5/2020

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So... uh, 2016 was one heck of a year, wasn't it? I know it was rough for a lot of people the world around, and with the death of my father in late 2015, it was not the best year for me or my mental health. I won't claim that I didn't let the maintenance of my website slide, because when it felt like my brain was eating me alive and I needed one less thing on my plate it was an easy thing to let slide, but I never fully went away. I'm mentally healthy and happy again, I'm still here, and I have been writing up a storm because I couldn't stop writing if I wanted to. One of the many delightful curses of being a writer, you might say.

Some of that writing has been published and seen the light of day. A lot of it hasn't. Like any writer, however, I believe in what I do and will keep putting it out into the world until the world wants to see it, and now that I'm in the kind of place where I'm ready to start talking about it again, here I am.

It also doesn't hurt that I've got a new book that I am incredibly excited about and want to talk about in more detail here.

This is Bennytown, my new horror novel about a theme park with a truly dark secret. I know the world may not be the brightest place at the moment, but I am hoping this will be a fun, spooky (and admittedly rather gruesome) escape for those who enjoy a good scare. I'd go into more detail, but I intend to talk a fair bit about Bennytown in the coming days, so I won't get into too much detail here. Bennytown shall be released on June 23, 2020, and is already available for preorder (click on the cover above to get taken to Amazon!)

I think I'll leave things here for now, but I shall be posting more details on this tale of terror in the coming days. Until then, I hope all of you reading this out there are being safe and healthy and taking care of yourself and others when the opportunity presents.

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The Long Halloween Diaries 2016 - Queen Mary's Dark Harbor

10/22/2016

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

The Queen Mary in Long Beach is a must see tourist attraction pretty much any time of year, hearkening back to a day when massive ocean liners were king and a vital form of transportation instead of floating cities rife with crime and various stomach diseases. Of course, in addition to the opulence, the ship has its dark sides. It was called into service to ferry soldiers during World War II, and like any hotel, it lost a handful of guests and crew over the years. The ship has a reputation for being one of America’s most haunted places, and while we’ve never actually seen anything to confirm or deny this reputation (despite having taken its ghost tour that you can attend any time of year), I have an easy time seeing the ship as a creepy place. There’s something about the 1940’s aesthetics combined with the complete and utter blackness that you can only really find in the deep, iron hulk of a ship that just makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

So, naturally, this is the perfect place for a haunt.

Dark Harbor is one of the standout haunts in Southern California, and one of the main reasons for it is how little they half-ass the experience. They could have just put one haunted house in (or by) the ship, vaguely themed it to something retro or ship-based and called it a day, enjoying the extra money they make on top of being a tourist destination and active hotel, but no. Dark Harbor sets itself up as an event to rival even the theme park attractions nearby, with six mazes, a carnival of terrors atmosphere, and numerous other attractions. Now I’ll admit, they clearly don’t have the room or budget to pull off a lot of what the major theme parks do, you won’t find makeup and sets on the level of what you’ll find at Universal Studios or Knott’s Berry Farm, but what you will find is enthusiasm. Year in and out the scareactors here are arguably the scariest I’ve seen at any Halloween event, charging, following, taking advantage of the darkness and coaxing out any screams you might be hiding away.

So, did this year live up to the high bar set by past years? Well, Fiona and I with our dear friend Ashley got a few front of the line tickets and went to find out.

It's Dark Harbor time!

THE MAZES

As per usual in Dark Harbor, there are three shipboard mazes and three landlocked mazes. Having learned from previous years, we decided to do all the shipboard mazes first. This has several benefits, as the shipboard mazes get incredibly hot (especially given Southern California’s tenuous understanding of the concept of fall), and the more crowded they get, the more of a conga line of people they become, cutting down on the scares.

As well, and I cannot stress this enough, front of the line passes are essential. With lines that can get up to 2 or 3 hours long, the front of the line passes are the only way to see every maze.

Soulmate

The first shipboard maze, Soulmate, was the tale of ship ghost Graceful Gale and her search for the perfect man. The perfect man, of course, being one she makes from chopping up various suitors. Naturally, because of this, this is a maze full of beautiful women, body parts, and sheets of flayed skin all over the place. While not necessarily the scariest maze, it was a great way to begin the night.

Lullaby

Creepy little girls are a horror staple for a reason, and Lullaby, the story of ship ghost Scary Mary, allegedly a little girl who drowned in the ship’s pool, really milks this concept and makes this easily the scariest maze of the night. Going deep into the ship’s bowels, we enter Scary Mary’s playground, a mix of toys and dead bodies, and unrelenting jump scares from Scary Mary around every corner. Every person at one time or another in our group burst out screaming, and I cannot stress enough how much the maze’s talent elevates this one. The actresses playing Scary Mary were equal parts terrifying and funny, often following us around for a while and bantering, only to lead us into another scareactor and even more screams. The fact that part of this maze actually takes us over the ship’s pool, where several kids actually did drown in real life, adds the extra spook factor here.

Scary Mary didn't want to let us go, clearly.

B340

Like a lot of Halloween attractions, Dark Harbor often creates character icons to add personality and backstory. Some of them, like Graceful Gale and Scary Mary, work well and organically with the theme of their maze, while others just feel a bit tacked on. Samuel the Savage, of the maze B340, is one of the latter. The maze is allegedly a trip through one man’s madness as he was locked up on the ship, but the maze itself is more just a semi-random collection of weird imagery taking us through the Queen Mary’s old engine rooms. It’s alright, but nothing to write home about.

Circus

For a maze that really doesn’t fit the aesthetic of the Queen Mary in any way, the Circus maze has always been rather entertaining. Taking full advantage of this year’s creepy clown craze (a stupid craze I refuse to acknowledge beyond a reference), the creepy clowns in this maze were on the hunt, confusing and scaring and just generally having a blast messing with us. Arguably more of a funhouse than a maze, Circus had a lot of classic funhouse sorts of gags, like shifting floors, spinning tunnels, mirror mazes and an honest to god ball pit we had to walk through that made this maze a scary blast.

Intrepid

Oh man, if this wasn’t the disappointment of the night. Based on the premise of being the haunted shipyard where the Queen Mary was built, the Intrepid maze got off to a good start as we walk through a train carriage, and falls apart after that. What could have been a creepy, loud, industrial themed maze lacked traditional maze walls, instead making up much of its run with chain link fence. When so much of what makes mazes scary is controlling the attendees line of sight, so they can’t see what’s coming next, the fencing completely took away any potential scares this maze had, and made it the weakest maze of the night.

Deadrise

An old standard of Dark Harbor, the Deadrise maze takes a walk through the ship (actually a series of interconnected shipping containers) that brings it back to its ghostly World War II days. As ever, this maze is a creepy highlight of Dark Harbor, with numerous phantom sailors hiding around every corner just waiting to terrify (and the one great jump scare at the end that I’ll refuse to divulge, but it works EVERY TIME). If I were to have a complaint, it’s that this year’s attraction relies too much on water effects, splashing the ground and making it slippery. While they do add a nice spark to the event, they also make you lose focus of the scares and focus on not falling down, which is an unneeded distraction when you’re trying to get in the haunt mood.

OTHER ATTRACTIONS

Cheers from the Dark Harbor Freak Show!

Dark Harbor has a number of other upcharge attractions, including a paintball gallery, a “freak show”, and the Panic 4-D experience. While we didn’t have the time to partake in them all, I will say that the Freak Show and Panic 4-D are well worth their $5 tickets. The Freak Show is a mini-maze unto itself, taking you through shipping containers where you get to banter with the ghostly skeleton Sparky and his terrible jokes, and a maze of pure white theatrical fog, where ghostly beings haunt you with every step. Once you get to the freak show stage and bar, you can sit down, have a couple drinks, and watch a stage performance. While this year’s Freak Show lacked a lot of last year’s spark, namely the actual freak performers, the fiddler and fire dancer we got to watch this year were still quite entertaining.

Plus you get to take pictures sticking your heads through things, and that’s never a bad thing.

The Panic 4-D experience is even more fun. A short, 3 or 4 minute 3-D animated movie taking you through the haunted ship while being chased by monsters, the cheesy 4-D effects that simulate being poked in the back, or having insects run over your feet, or getting blasted with foam, add a delightfully cheesy element to an otherwise straight terrifying event.

In conclusion, Dark Harbor is one helluva time, and a must see of Halloween events in Southern California.

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The Long Halloween Diaries 2016 - CreepLA

10/17/2016

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CreepLA is another entry into LA’s expanding list of interactive, theatrical haunts, and though last year’s event wasn’t particularly stellar (though it was still entertaining), we were still quite excited to add it to our 2016 Long Halloween.

Excitement!

The premise of this event involved dropping us into the art world. We’ve been invited to attend an exhibition based on the works of controversial 70’s artist Erebus Burwyck, whose works exploring human darkness and sexuality brought him equal parts acclaim and scorn. During his final performance, he mysteriously disappeared, and only recently his cult-like following has found the audio tape of this last performance and invited us to take part in listening to it for the very first time.

Now, while this premise sounded intriguing, I was still a bit on the hesitant side. A lot of haunts promise similarly in depth stories and kind of forget about them after a scene or two, and with CreepLA’s previous, inaugural, year being mostly a collection of dreamlike scenes, I was skeptical that they’d be able to pull off something with a story. While the first few scenes are promising and work along those lines, it does unfortunately fall into a trap of random and surreal horrorish scenes, which was disappointing. Combine that with an abrupt ending and, well, the experience was much more imperfect than I think they meant it to be.

Nitpicking on such things aside, however, the event is still a fun, interactive haunt. While the scenes in “the darkness” are a semi-random collection of dreamlike horror standards, they still manage to pull a lot of the standard gags that make interactive haunts great. At various points, the group is split up with people taking their own individual little adventures through nightmares. The performers are intense and good at throwing us around, both mentally and physically, making you feel uncomfortable in nearly every way you could be uncomfortable without ever trying to fully push you over the edge. There was running, and crawling, and hiding, and maybe even a little semi-inappropriate touching (always be sure to read the waivers at the beginning, ladies and gents), or as we call it in LA, a pretty okay Friday night.

Perhaps the highlight of this event was the lounge area right before the event. Lounges are something I’ve found increasingly common in haunts, as they’re often a better alternative to waiting in line, and give the haunt a chance to sell drinks and snacks (which, hey, buy a bottle of water or overpriced cup of wine; haunts are really difficult to make a profit on these days), and often are a good way to hype up the event to come. Wandering actors create a surreal experience as they would often stop to accost us, staring at us strangely or sitting at our table and randomly reading our palms.

Clearly I made a friend. One I had to run like hell to get away from.

Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but it’s all in a day’s entertainment when you go to these.

So, while the CreepLA experience doesn’t live up to all its promises, it does offer a fun, moderately creepy time during a busy haunt season.

Event Score: 7/10

We were creeped.

Thank you for joining us this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

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-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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The Long Halloween Diaries 2016 - Sinister Pointe: Fear the Mark

10/12/2016

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

As Halloween haunts go, you can generally rely on one of two strategies: either you will be brought the same event year after year (with perhaps a new coat of paint and a few new creepy masks for good measure), or you will get a company that constantly reinvents itself on a year-by-year basis. Both of these strategies have their pluses and minuses, and both of them have plenty of examples about how to do it right and how to do it wrong. In principle, I will always applaud places that try to do something new each year, even if they’re not entirely successful, as trying something new in haunts is generally admirable.

As such, we generally look forward to whatever is being held by Sinister Pointe. Over the past three years we’ve attended, we’ve traveled through high-tech houses that simulated going to the underworld and through Bloody Mary’s mirror, and took part in an innovative experience where one of us would be in a dark room populated by monsters while the other watched their partner on night vision cameras while offering instructions on how to blindly solve puzzles. It didn’t quite work, but it was fun.

Either way, Sinister Pointe has consistently offered interesting and interactive experiences, and with this year’s theme, Fear the Mark, promising four separate paths that we could be sent on throughout the night, we were excited.

Unfortunately, the first thing we were greeted by was the less-than-stellar logistics of the event, which did sour a lot of the experience of the night. There were two lines, one for regular tickets, the other for front-of-the-line tickets, but to say neither line moved terribly fast was an understatement. While letting people go in at groups of 2 to 4 people at a time did make for a more intimate, scarier experience, it also created long, snaking lines. Couple that with the fact that, once you’ve gone through one of the four experiences, you have to get back in whichever line you paid for to get in the second one. All told, all four of the experiences probably take about 30-40 minutes together, and even with front of the line tickets, we were there close to two and a half hours due to the wait in line. I fear trying to do the math for how long it’d take going through all four experiences in the normal line, though I get the impression a lot of people probably skipped out on that.

That said, long waits are a good way to make friends in line.

Now, all that out of the way, how were the four experiences themselves? Well, despite some minor technical difficulties (like a projector randomly changing from creepy imagery to the Optoma logo) and a lot of the set pieces looking rawer and more unfinished than their past experiences, this one was still a ton of fun. The four separate paths are chosen for you at the beginning by a fortune teller, who will send you into the realm of one of four separate (fake) pagan deities: Rebus, the trickster god, Arcane, the god of madness, Tormentum, a god of torture and pain, and Infernal, a fairly general death god. While the presence of the gods themselves wasn’t really much of a thing, the four realms were mostly distinct (save for a few hub areas that each of the four experiences connects to at predetermined intervals). There were trippy effects, from mirror and glass mazes in near pitch darkness, crawl tunnels, and small holes to be shoved in by various demons and damned souls. We crawled under (fake) barbed wire and dead bodies, and had a lot of fun bantering with the very talkative talent throughout the maze.

And, admittedly, the various brands and fake tarot cards we got by the end of the night were great souvenirs.

So, I’ll admit to being torn by this. While the poor logistics of the event really took it down a notch, we still had a lot of fun. In the end, I think I would recommend this event, but I would have to advise on the issues with lines, which I’m sincerely hoping their working on improving.

Event Score: 6.5/10

Though I’d be remiss if I didn’t share that this event probably created my favorite picture of Fi and me ever taken.

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The Long Halloween Diaries 2016 - Night of the Living Dead at the Maverick Theater

10/10/2016

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

(SPOILER ALERTS FOR A 50+ YEAR OLD MOVIE; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!)

It is impossible to overstate how important Night of the Living Dead is to the genre of modern horror. From bringing to screen a level of violence and terror that had never been seen before (let alone on such a shoestring budget), to its subtle and not-so-subtle social commentary, and the very fact that it more or less created all the rules for zombies that films abide by to this day, it’s one hell of a movie. While certain parts of it don’t quite hold up (Barbara’s portrayal is easily one of the worst characters in any classic horror film), it’s a classic for a reason.

And so, in hearing that a local theatre company did a stage adaptation of Night of the Living Dead every October, we knew we had to take a look.

The Maverick Theater in Fullerton is a tiny theatre, (though larger, and more an actual theater than where we saw Evil Dead: The Musical), but with a lounge area featuring a bar before hitting the main stage, as well as a boarded up doorway featuring some very hands-on zombie performers…

They quite liked Fi.

…the tone for the show is set quite well. Once the power goes out, the screaming starts, and we’re ushered into the main auditorium, through a stage that reasonably recreates the original’s 1968 farmhouse set, we know we’re in for a treat.

I can go into the plot, but if you know the 1968 original, you know this one. It’s 1968. Zombies are patrolling the Pennsylvania countryside. A group of disparate survivors gathers together and spends a whole lot of time arguing the virtues of boarding up windows vs. staying in a basement. Zombies attack. More boards vs. basement arguing. Something explodes. More boards vs. basement arguing. People die.

You get the picture.

The stage production trims the original film’s runtime from about 90 minutes to a lean hour, which, while sacrificing a surprisingly small bit of character development, actually works pretty well, since most of what’s cut is Barbara running barefoot across the countryside and long semi-montages of boarding up windows. Certain scenes are admittedly more perfunctory, and the characters of Tom and Judy, barely even characters in their original incarnations, are now just blank slates who fill time and die while occasionally providing some comic relief. While the comic relief is welcome in this play that adds a distinct tone of gallows humor to the original story, it only serves to highlight how borderline unnecessary the characters are in this incarnation (not to give a hard time to the actors, though, who did a fine job).

The acting in this play was uniformly great, and while there were some undeniable opening night jitters in play, they didn’t detract too much. The standouts were, hands down, Alexander Harris’ Ben and Briana Donze’s Barbara. Harris gives Ben a sense of power and calm strength, being eaten away by the horrific situation he’s found himself in, while Donze’s heavily rewritten Barbara changes her character from a shrill catatonic to a woman driven mad by the end of the world, but one who’s willing to do what it takes to survive. It doesn’t help her in the end, but it makes for a much more palatable show.

The production was top notch for the small space, with the farmhouse feeling both real and claustrophobic (which is a benefit in working with a play with a lot of zombie attacks). The zombies were, well, zombies, but there were a lot of them, and they clearly had a lot of fun plying their undead craft on stage. The fights against them were well choreographed for a local stage production, and they managed a few over the top gags that really make you take pause and say “WOW” for such a production.

For a taste of what I'm talking about.

Unfortunately, due to the truncated nature of the play, the original’s dark ending is both kept intact and still robbed of a lot of the impact. It is a shame, but relatively understandable given the small scale nature of what they have to pull off.

Regardless, any complaints I have are minor, and this is a production I highly recommend checking out if you get the time. They will be running from October 7-30, at the Maverick Theater in Fullerton.

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The Long Halloween Diaries 2016 - Reign of Terror & Los Angeles Haunted Hayride

10/8/2016

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

Today’s Long Halloween blog will be twice as nice, because I’ve got two events to talk about! Well, all right, mostly it’s because I don’t have as much to say about them despite enjoying both very much, and with the Long Halloween packed with as many events as we have scheduled (and Fi and I having been various levels of sick this past week), I’m going to have to do a little multitasking here and there to properly cover everything.

Sorry.

So, without further ado, let’s check out stops 4 and 5 of the Long Halloween!

REIGN OF TERROR

The Reign of Terror haunted house is one of the great “don’t judge a book by its cover” houses in Southern California. Situated in a mall in Thousand Oaks (right above a Gold’s Gym if you’re really specific), you wouldn’t know that there was a haunt hiding here if it weren’t for a few signs and a line of people waiting outside.

Okay, the fat guy wandering around outside wearing a flayed doll’s face and wielding a wrench might’ve been a clue too, but I digress.

Once inside, though, you’re readily transported to one of the coolest queue areas I’ve seen for a haunt. Anticipating long lines (and believe me, around this time of year, the lines get looooooooooong), they’ve transformed the interior portion of the queue line into something befitting a Disney park, walking through a haunted cemetery full of animatronic skeletons and other beasties. There are several scenes to walk through, and after getting a safety spiel from a talking skeleton, our hopes were reasonably high.

And, for the most part, our hopes panned out.

Boasting 95 rooms separated into 8 separate themes (covering classic themes, like Haunted House, Haunted Mine, Zombie Outbreak, Cannibal Hillbillies, Circus, etc.), Reign of Terror is supposedly one of the biggest haunts in the region, and on this it mostly succeeds. The sets are impressive, though the true scope of the event is easy to lose considering how claustrophobic most of them are. The sparse cast of actors, combined with a large number of animatronic effects, makes the best of a limited space, and while not the scariest event you’re going to find around here, this one does still have its fair share of spooks and screams.

If I were to have one complaint, it’s that the themed sections don’t break up particularly well, and sometimes run from one to another without much of a transition, which can be a bit on the disorienting side.

Praise, though, must go to the enthusiastic cast, and some of the trippier effects that they manage to employ in sections, especially the Circus themed area which plays with a lot of funky illusions. As well, praise has to be put toward the points in the maze where cast members will stop and slow people down, which on paper is a bit irritating, but in practice helps avoid the conga line effect that jam-packed mazes will often get.

We clearly had fun.

So, while not the most inventive or original of haunts you’re going to find around this season, for an event with a rock-bottom ticket price that’s quite large, Reign of Terror is one of the best you’ll find.

Score: 6.5/10

THE LOS ANGELES HAUNTED HAYRIDE

Well, this is going to be an odd one to write about, but I’ll do what I can. The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride has been a stalwart in our Long Halloween celebrations for five years running now, an impressive feat as it is one of the few we’ve done since the beginning, as well as for the fact that it’s actually not all that good.

This needs some explaining. When it comes to quality events, the Haunted Hayride is usually near the bottom. Despite attempts at making you believe there is a story, there never is one, just an assembly of scenes that are slightly horrific in nature. As well, the makeup and set pieces are limited and not terribly good, and perhaps the biggest sin of all is, well, that it’s not all that scary. Once you’re on the titular hayride itself, you get used to the typical types of scares they do in a hurry. Drive up to a location, scary people come out, come close to the hayride vehicle, make some noise, try to scare people, wash, rinse and repeat. After the first few incidents of this in the ride, screams usually get replaced by laughter, and by the end a fair bit of heckling comes in to play.

Top it off with hay not being terribly comfortable to sit in after a while (and still being stuck around my apartment nearly a week later) and, well, you’ve got something that might be called a not-that-great experience.

But, if you’re looking for some cheese in your Halloween experience, well, the Haunted Hayride is one of the best places you can go. While not scary, per se, the actors are so earnest and the experience so inherently Halloween-y that you just can’t go wrong for some good spooky fun or a good laugh. As well, for its price, with the number of attractions you have available, it’s a pretty good stop for the season.

It's hard to go wrong with a Scary-Go-Round

There are three main attractions set around a sort of carnival boardwalk, with snacks, a “scary-go-round”, a shop, pumpkin decorating, psychics, and all other sorts of seasonal activities that almost make this seem like a family-friendly event, at least until you see the monsters wandering by and doing their best to scare the unwitting and unawares (some of which, like the pregnant zombie with the baby bursting from the stomach, do border on the tasteless).

Of the three main attractions, the main focus is of course the titular hayride. With a queue line that gets ridiculously long, this is a ride that’s best aimed for at the beginning of the night, unless you’re up for a crazy long wait (or unless you’ve ponied up the dough for a VIP, front of the line pass, which isn’t entirely worth it at this event). I’ve gone into some detail about this particular event earlier in the review already, so I won’t go crazy here, but I will note that this year’s prime difference from previous years’ events, where they actually force you out of the hayride vehicle for a separate walkthrough horror experience, doesn’t really add or take away from the hayride in any significant way. It just, well, kind of is.

The two other main attractions of the Haunted Hayride experience stand out much more and are far more fun. The Trick or Treat experience is a short little walk through experience, where you walk down a small corridor of themed house facades, knocking on doors, yelling trick or treat, and then getting candy from the creepy denizens within. With the houses being surprisingly well made, and the Sour Patch candies they handed out being, well, Sour Patch candies (yum), this was a surprising highlight of the night.

The final, and always our favorite of the Haunted Hayride attractions, is the House of Shadows. A pitch black, dark maze, made to disorient, this one’s always a highlight mostly because it’s a lot of fun to go through with a group. Given the high chances of getting legitimately lost, it doesn’t matter that they don’t have many monsters within to scare you and are mostly relying on darkness and strobe lights for atmosphere, it’s still a ton of fun. This year’s maze was semi-themed with a cross promotion to Universal Studios’ upcoming horror film: Ouija: Origin of Evil. While the themeing was light, they did have a couple-few fun scenes, though given the fact that Universal thought this attraction was a suitable place for cross-promotion over their own Halloween Horror Nights does not give me much hope for the film’s quality.

And still, good times were had.

All told, despite being weak in a lot of respects that make for fun Halloween haunts, the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride still makes up enough on charm and enthusiasm to be a ton of fun.

Score: 4.5/10

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The Long Halloween Diaries 2016 - Evil Dead: The Musical

10/1/2016

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

The Garage Theatre in Long Beach isn’t all that impressive from the outside; in fact, it’s barely a hole in the wall. Clearly a converted business along a street of businesses, it would be easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it, looking almost like a dark secret. When we get inside, we see a couple rows of folding chairs, and a set of large, bloody curtains cutting off half the room. The floor is sticky, and they’re selling ponchos at the box office up front.

If this sounds like it’s going somewhere sleazy, relax. I’m just talking about a showing of Evil Dead: The Musical.

As a huge fan of the Evil Dead franchise (especially the cheesy first film, before things got all slick and quippy), this play’s been on my radar for years, but as it’s never really hit it as big as a lot of other off Broadway shows, I never thought I’d get the opportunity to see it. Thank god for the Halloween season, though, and people willing to offer entertainments beyond usual jump scare haunted houses.

Now, here we come to a bit of a difficult situation, as I’ve never really written a theatrical review before. So, in this case, I’m going to comment based on what I thought of the show itself, and what I thought of this particular performance I saw.

SPOILER ALERT: These ponchos were very necessary.

The Show:

From top to bottom, I think this show was a lot of fun. While it doesn’t have the catchiest soundtrack in the world, its songs are great and fun in the moment, with numbers such as “Cabin in the Woods”, “All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons” and “Look Who’s Evil Now” being particular standouts.

As well, the play is a solid retelling of the first two Evil Dead movies, with a little Army of Darkness thrown in for good measure. The original trilogy of films is notorious for its poor canon and constantly retelling the same story due to various rights issues making footage from previous films difficult to get the rights to, and the play condenses them well within one, funny timeline. And yes, the tree scene is still intact (and due to the nature of this particular theatre, happened about six inches in front of us), though is way more tasteful than its usual film incarnations.

As well, how can you not love a play with a major part for a singing, wall-mounted moose head?

The Performance:

I haven’t seen this show performed by anyone else, so I have no idea how to compare it, but as a semi-regular musical watcher I think this show knocked it out of the park. There wasn’t a weak spot among the seven member strong main cast, though there were a few certain standouts. Steven G. Frankenfield was amazing as Ash, getting a lot of the cocky swagger of Bruce Campbell, while still being likeably vulnerable during some of Ash’s lower moments. And much like Bruce Campbell, he’s quite accomplished at being splashed with gallons of fake blood. Nori Tecosky plays the dual role of ditzy Shelly and brave archeologist Annie so well it took a while for me to figure out it was only one actress, and she knocks her big musical number (“All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons”) out of the park. However, for the life of me, the best of the bunch is Jazzy Jones’ portrayal of Ash’s demonically possessed sister, Cheryl. She goes from nerdy to scared to snarky comic relief demon so naturally, and really throws herself into some of the play’s more intense and weird moments (like the aforementioned tree scene).

The production itself in this tiny theatre was also fantastic. They made the most of a bloody curtain and half a cabin set, getting a ton of mileage from almost nothing. Being a tiny theatre with only thirty seats, and an Evil Dead production at that, the ponchos they sold up front proved to be necessary. Numerous things, from demons to babies to a whole lot of blood would fly at the audience, and if you’re sitting in the front row (which you really should do for a show like this), you will get wet. Very wet.

So, you know, don’t wear anything you wouldn’t mind getting dirty.

This is what I looked like with the poncho I wore.
Without it, I'd probably look like I belonged on an episode of Forensic Files.

Conclusion:

A fun, trippy, bloody night at the theatre, I would highly recommend this show to anyone who loves the Evil Dead or enjoys the theatre and Halloween events.

Hail to the king, baby!

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The Long Halloween Diaries 2016 - The Tension Experience: Ascension

9/26/2016

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

I can’t tell you how long we’ve been in the back of this van. The hoods over our heads block out all but the brightest of light. We’ve been told not to speak, and I’ve lost track of counting the streets a while ago. Every so often, we stop, I can hear the van door slide open, and someone getting out. Then we’re moving again. Classical music blares in the background, distracting and disorienting me. I know Fiona is nearby, but I can’t reach for her.

Then we stop, and my mask comes off, and the madness begins.

So starts The Tension Experience: Ascension.

The Tension Experience is a new haunt for 2016, and as such we were a bit hesitant about attending (having been burned by untested events in the past, we generally prefer to go places that have been established), however with good word of mouth, we decided to give this one a shot.

Tension all about mystery, and the fact that I’m not going to give away any serious spoilers about it probably won’t help you get a serious idea of what it’s about, but I’ll do the best I can. What I can say is that it isn’t a traditional haunt, it’s more a part of the growing field of immersive theater, where you sign yourself up to be a part of an interactive experience, where you’re part of the show. Some of these shows push you more than others, while some you’re just along for the ride.

Tension is one of the ones that pushes you.

From the very moment you park in their dingy-looking parking lot to the moment you’re in the van, to the very end of the show where you’re standing, confused and talking about just what the hell happened with the rest of the people in your group, it is an experience that gets in your head and tweaks it in every way it can, for better and for worse.

The story is layered and in depth, but ultimately unnecessary to the actual experience. As attendees, we’re brought into the cult of the OOA. It’s a quasi-religious organization, and if you check out their website or any of their real-world experiences they’ve been holding since about April, you’ll get a lot of story. I mean, a lot of story. It can be a bit daunting, and a bit intimidating, but know that not much of it really matters in the long run.

And… all right, I’m going to get to my complaints about the show before I get to what I really loved about it. This is a new show, and a lot of that shows. They make a lot of promises, like it being an immersive experience customized to your personality and actions, and when there it feels like a fairly linear (if often non-linear) experience where your choices don’t mean much. A lot of tantalizing story possibilities are brought up, without resolution, like a frightened woman sneaking me a note at show’s beginning that had information that never came up again. They rely a little too much on shock tactics (overwhelming each of the five senses in fairly unpleasant ways in one section) and had several long, empty stretches where we were just sitting in blind silence. While disorienting at first, it got boring in a hurry after a while. As well, and this is just a personal phobia thing, if haunts could stop cramming things in our mouths in an effort to seem more extreme, that’d be very appreciated, thankyouverymuch.

As well, if you’ve got problems with nude strangers, or changing your own clothes in public (long story), this may cause some issues.

Now, complaints aside, I want to say that I really like this show. At nearly two hours in length, it has a way of overwhelming the mind and getting into your head, creating a feeling of intensity and paranoia like I’ve never felt before in a fictional setting. Perfect example: more than an hour into this experience, I’m a mess, I’ve been covered in things and had all sorts of things done to me, and I look at myself in a mirror. I don’t see myself anymore, I see this haunting, intense face, the face of a guy who’s survived a horror movie. After the experience is over, Fi and I get home, and we still wonder if we’re in it, knowing rationally that we haven’t been followed, and yet still full of paranoia. I write this article the next morning, and I still have a weird feeling like I’m being watched.

The non-linear portions of the show, where groups are split up, encourages conversation afterward as you find out what separate and unique experiences you and your friends had, as well as the strangers you were with. It creates an odd sense of community in this way, when we’re left to clean up after the show together, talking with people who were strangers hours before like they’re close friends due to this bizarre, shared experience.

As well, all my complaints about how the show physically tests you aside, I found a lot of the experience of it pushing boundaries to be both fascinating and thrilling. I was uncomfortable, the people around me were uncomfortable, and yet for two hours I was able to forget about the world and feel like myself because of how much it pushed me.

And at least one of the plot twists, which I won’t share, has me both deeply amused and feeling betrayed all at once.

Well done, Tension. Well done.

So, while it is imperfect, The Tension Experience: Ascension is still an exciting and different new immersive experience, and one I would highly recommend for people who are willing to push themselves.

Score: 8.5/10