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| Making A Haunted House | Theory on Plots | Halloween Home |
| Halloween '01 |
After the notoriously sucessful Halloween Party in '99, I had all year to think of new ways to scare my friends. It became challenging because I also wanted to change the path people would take, and there were not many alternatives besides just going through the rooms in the opposite order. I also had originally planned to use 2 more rooms: the back room which contained things like the furnace and the washing machines, and which had a staircase leading to the other new room, the garage. These two rooms were never actually used in the final product (parental permission problems!).
I finally came up with an original way to have the guests navigate through my basement. Here's the dirt on '99:
The first room was yet again the orientation room, except it had expanded. To give you a better idea of this year's layout, I made a rough floorplan of it. The arrows might be hard to follow, but that's the path we took. After laying down the same rules I had last year, we would walk to our right and approach a black curtain. Then I would stand infront of it and start to say something, but then a clown (scary clown) would burst out from behind the curtain. The group would be forced backwards, by both the clown and me yelling "go back!". Once they turned around, they would find themselves literally face to mask with another, more gruesome clown. That part almost gave some heart attacks.
I'd then lead them into the bedroom and slam the door shut, trying to convince the people that they were safe. More convincing was needed after they turned around to see the scream guy (who was already familiar with my room (last year)) tied down to my bed, but the bed didnt look like a bed becasue the matress was taken off and it was touched up a little with spider webs and the like. I had to repeatedly tell the guests that he was securely tied down and that nothing would happen. They were then walked over to the closet in my room where I would ask them a classic question. "Do yo believe in monsters in the closet?"
It was funny becasue there were yes and no answers among each person, not becasue that's what they believed, but because that is what they were hoping to be the correct answer so they wouldn't have to actully open the closet. Well, in either case the closet DID have to be opened, so I then asked them to prove that monsters did or didn't exist by opening the doors. Nobody wanted to, do I did. That's where the trusty 2nd tour guide came in. Yes, this year he made a miraculous return! So my buddy would say that he wanted to take a closer look and then moved himself infront of the crowd and stuck his face in. Suddenly, from behind the hanging clothes, two hairy hands would grab poor brian and pull him in. He was lost in the mass of clothes for a seccond, but hey, his hand burst out again and he asked me to grab it. Despite the strog feeling that I had done this before, I grabbed his hand...and only his hand as I soon discovered and threw it onto unsuspecting guests. This little gag didn't work nearly as well as the year before, probably because of the combination of no strobe light and how familiar it was.
I finally shut the closet and said to forget about the idiot and led the people around the end of my bed, where the scream guy was still struggling with his ropes. We would be just about out of the bedroom when then prisoner raised his arms and let out a triumphant roar seconds before springing off the bed and chasing us. Yet again, I come to the rescue and open the bathroom door, leading everyone to safety. The bathroom was illuminated dimly by my weaker black light. We would catch our breaths for a second, and then I'd pop the question. No, not that question, this question:"Hey, you wanna open the shower curtains?"
No volunteers, as usual, so I go up to them and whip them open. The moment the shriek of the curtains is heard, a hooded murderer leaps out of the shower and grabs for the screaming guests. I yell for them to open the other door and they naturally do, and we exit the bathroom. I don't think many people noticed that in the next room there was a small setup at the end of the pool table; right infront of them as we exited the bathroom. It consisted of a dummy wrapped in toilet paper and dripping blood around his neck. It looked what too many dummies look like: fake. So maybe it was a good thing they did't see it.
The pool room was my proudest creation that year. It was disguised to look like a labratory with a centerpice that would creep out anyone. It was a body laid down on the table covered with a white sheet. There was one of those mechanical moving hands coming out from under the sheet, which made people do a double take, and convinced some wierdos that there was really a person under there. As they worked their way around the pool table, A wet hand would come out from under it and grab the people's legs. That was amazingly funny, because the reactions were so frantic. A few people jumped and screamed and kinda did a dance, then started yelling that something grabbed them. I would have to insist that there was nothing under there, and sometimes got into little arguments. Some more neat things about this lab room was the "Warning: Police Line Do Not Cross" tape that was wrapped around the pool table and the insane amount of spider web that was all over the wall. At the end of the pool table there was also a small setup of a humidifier disguised as lab equipment spewing out smoke and next to it was a chopped off leg with some random metal pieces next to it. I don't think anyone noticed those small details all that much, but they were the kinda things that people would have noticed if they weren't there the second time around.
As I was saying before I interrupted myself, I'd get the guests to slowly round the pool table and head back to the orientation room. By the time we were just about to pull the curtain back and move into the final room, though, the "fake" body on the table would rise up, groaning. This usually convinced people to pick up their feet and go into the last room.
The grand finale room was also covered with spider webs, and there was a man halfway coming out of the fireplace. Another body was laid down on the couch. I'd take my time walking through the set, glancing at everything, until I came up against a black curtain. About 3 seconds after I'd stopped, thick smoke would burst out from the side and then a chainsaw would rev up. I'd pretend to be scared and back up, away from the curtain, and then Mike Myers would pull it up and come out with the chainsaw. That was enough to send the guests back to the orientation room, where they would encounter the two clowns agian, and then those two bozos wouls send them right up the stairs.
One extremely funny moment in the training session for this Haunted House was when we were walking through the whole thing from start to finish. Apparently, the Mike Myers mask was giving Tom, the guy who was playing him, a hard time. He was having trouble seeing out of it, but didn't tell me until after the disaster. Everything was going as planned, the smoke triggered Tom to come running out, I left the scene, but looked back to see what he did after the people were gone. What I saw was so funny that I couldn't stop laughing for like 10 minutes. There was tom, in this gas station uniform and a white mask swinging his chainsaw tangled in the cobwebs. He then proceeded to fall on the ground, still swinging the saw and while doing so managed to remove all the cobwebs from the wall and onto his body. Funny stuff.
Although this Halloween was given much more thought and much more time, it wasn't as good as the first. Some of the things that happened did't flow well and I made the mistake of trying to use every square inch of my basement. It turned out to be too crowded and cramped in places like my room. The layout was also a little too...dumb. Sticking to straight paths is a little harder when planning, but is a lot easier later down the road.
