What are “things I never thought I’d be alive to enjoy,” Alex.
Chinese Democracy is currently streaming on MySpace. But who knows how long that’s gonna last. I like it, I think. I can’t decide if I like it because it’s legitimately good or if I just expected it to be much worse and am in like a musical state of hypothermic shock. I’ll listen to it again tomorrow and see how I like it then.
I spend a huge amount of time and money every October on haunted attractions. Normally, Kyle and I ride out into the deep hairy midwestern wilderness every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the month and drop down five to fifteen bucks on the opportunity to be the target of nebulously threatening performers with harmless chainsaws and rubber masks. It’s fun. It’s not something you have to think too much about. You wander through dark corridors and appreciate the decor and occasionally leap to one side and mutter an expletive when some actor or other pops out of the wall.
Haunted attractions are fun like Richard Laymon novels are fun.
They’re fun like Evil Dead is fun.
They’re fun like hating the Saw movies is fun.
But, since I am needlessly thoughtful and contemplative and often find myself constructing superfluously elaborate imaginary scenarios, here’s a thought: Is it possible to construct a haunted attraction that is fun and frightening and aspires to something higher? Can haunted attractions be literary in scope? Cinematic in presentation? Dare I even say it, for risk of becoming forever the world’s least favorite pretentious ass-hat… can haunted attractions be art?
It would be a balancing act, wouldn’t it. You ain’t gonna win any friends with some overstuffed piece of performance art puffery dressed up like a haunt. So the scares have to be there. The chainsaws, the sliding panels, the gore, the guys shouting monosyllables. But let’s say this… let’s say that the haunt in question thinks of their trappings as less of an excuse to make sixteen-year-old blonde girls piss themselves, and more of an interactive theater experience. Let’s say they adopt as their cornerstone, the phrase “Experiential Narrative.”
So what does that actually mean? Broken into the tiniest pieces possible, it basically means that the ticket-holders are paying to have themselves immersed in a fiction for a period of time, to experience a horror story as a character instead of as a passive member of a readership or an audience.
Whether this approach would be practical or financially successful is not something I’m prepared to argue one way or another. But the industry seems to be headed this direction. The phenomenal success of haunts like Dead Acres/Haunted Hoochie in Columbus Ohio (a hyper-violent, effects-heavy thematically-solid romp through a bizarre realm of filthy, homicidal freaks) seems to point toward a desire for more cohesion. But cohesion is only the first step. Can haunted attractions be theatrical art?
I open the floor to discussion.
Hmm… one wonders how many previously dormant websites with a vaguely horror/macabre focus have revamped with the exact same blog title.
I’m back, ladies and gentlemen! New design. More simple and stripped down than the last incarnation. I intend to provide my long-suffering readers (all six of you… hi, Mom) with more regular updates and web-exclusive content. Thanks for coming back, ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate your support.
