Mar 22
Essentials
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Italy
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Costa Rica
seen from Spain
Essentials
CREEPY, CREEPY, SCARY
Creepy, creepy, scary.This can become hairy.The house is haunted and dark. I came on a simple lark.But now that I’m here,I’m frozen with fear. A party is to be held for us all, But to evil creatures, we might just fall. Down to the basement, we go,This is silly, even I know.Saws are swinging up ahead,Looking to chop off a head.Traps fall from the low ceiling.My wet feet have lost their…
View On WordPress
The Haunted Basement Serves Up New Scares in a New Location
The Haunted Basement isn't resting on its laurels as a Twin Cities Halloween institution. Learn about what's new for 2019.
When asked what motivates the folks who put together the Haunted Basementevery year to scare the hell out of people, operations director Walker Friend doesn’t mince words: “There is something to be said about being able to absolutely terrify someone so much that they have to quit the experience. It’s fun. It’s just a blast. You get to play with other actors . . . It’s a lot of fun scaring people.”
View On WordPress
For fucks sake.
So we have this really fucking ancient cash register that is a big slutty bitch. It ran out of paper. We get like 1 customer every 30 mins.
But hey. My cash ran out of paper and I had to change it. LETS SEND 30 FUCKING PEOPLE TO THE STORE AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.
I WAS STANDING THERE ON THE PHONE ASKING MY FRIEND HOW TO FIX THE FUCKING PAPER AND PEOPLE JSUT KEPT COMING IN.
FAK
Describing my awesome night being a volunteer actor Creep in a haunted basement, long and unnecessary but wanted to share some awesomeness:
I got assigned a room all by myself, which I didn’t think they’d let me do as a volunteer but I feel went pretty well. It’s a forced perspective room that looks like the Twin Peaks red hall and I was dressed in an evening gown and a bedazzled horse mask and carried around a champagne glass. Sort of Illuminati or secret society evening party idea. FYI: This is an art installation haunted house, and as an actor, what I do with the patrons is up to me to figure out. The waiver for Haunted Basement is notorious for freaking people out on its own.
It was 5 hours of playing around. Exh-aus-ting but super fun and really rewarding. The hardest part was that the mask was really squeezing my brain, and along with the constant noise from other rooms and my room being so bright, I had a headache halfway through. But I wasn’t about to go without wearing it and I was having way too much fun to stop anyway.
My room wasn’t a jump scare for sure, more unsettling, so I was trying to come up with good ways to play that up. One of my favorite moments was unnerving this one guy, I could tell he was already kind of freaked out when he walked in and saw me posed and waiting. So I came up real gently and put my hand under his arm, walked him around the room without saying anything and then just stopped. I waited a long time to see what he would do and he didn’t move an inch (it had to be at least a minute), I had him eating out of my hand. This worked on a number of people, especially because if I felt they might get comfortable I’d make a loud noise and they’d jump a mile high.
Sometimes I’d stop them and just gently run my finger down the inside of their arm. Got one girl to shiver so hard that anytime I moved after that she flinched. Haha! It’s maybe a little terrible, but I swear I’ve been waiting to do this since I first realized I could jump out and scare people coming down the stairs growing up at my house. (it was perfect combination of a stairway into a perpendicular hallway)
Amazing how scared people were of a 5′2″ girl in a party gown.
Not everyone was affected by the room, which I figured would happen. It’s not particularly scary so much as weird and unnerving. I was a little worried when I tried to stop a guy twice the size of me and he kept moving forward, thought he was going to push me over because the hallway was really small at the end. A couple guys were just unfazed and thought it was funny, but I knew everyone was getting their just desserts at some point that night. If it wasn’t my room, it was going to be the vomit room or the neonatal room (where they apparently got a couple guys to wear adult diapers) or any of the other terrifying rooms. My room seemed to work best with 1-2 patrons at a time. This was the first Crash Test night where they are figuring out the timing and group numbers. A couple big groups made it really hard for me to do anything, plus I had limited vision in the mask. The first group had more people than I could see and I ran into a women, spilled juice all over her and myself. No more juice after that. In a bigger group they seemed to be able to tell I was unmatched. Maybe it would be more effective to just be roadblocking the exit at that point, so they have to walk around me and continually wonder if I’d jump at them.
Another challenge was that most everyone was expected to go out a tiny door at the end and I didn’t want them injured while they tried to squeeze through. Kind of awkwardly trying to chase them out without really being able to chase them is hard.
Apparently someone ahead of me was giving a few patrons a mission to give burnt Santa a piece of chalk. Sometimes I’d put my hand out to grab their hand and they’d give the chalk to me instead. So, as punishment, I walked them around the pole and sang “Ring Around the Rosie” before chasing them out. My favorite moments doing that were once when the guy knew what was coming and as soon as I started the song he went, “Not that, oh my god, no.” (I super giggled under the mask at that) Another time one guy gave me his chalk so I did the dance and then pushed him out the other exit (it’s ADA accessible but the bigger exit is kind of hidden), his partner was left so I chased him out the smaller one. Just wanted to make them feel like they’d done exactly the wrong thing.
Such a great experience. We’ll see where I’m placed tonight but I really enjoyed being in a room where I could just be unsettling. I’ve been worried lately about my acting abilities, often times feel like I’m not talented at all, but I’m taking a chance with this company and saying no to some dumb projects with friends from college who have already screwed me over this year. Maybe I’m not great at auditioning and maybe I just need to find people who see potential in me and are willing to give me a chance. I saw a lot of patrons who seemed to like what I was doing, that is a win in my book!
When I design (when I’m doing it right) I am taking a piece of content and finding a perspective on it that I can turn into an image. All I’m doing is writing a story. And I don’t understand how you can write a story without understanding your characters, their motivations and the world they occupy.
MVA Creative Director and designer Joshua Namdev Hardisty breaks down how we view design over at Medium.
Our Pinterest board for researching the Haunted Basement poster.
Visual references to visualize a poster concept for The Soap Factory’s Haunted Basement event.
2 angles we explored: people hiding (or trapped) behind fabric walls and the dehumanizing environment of prison showers (both were specific scenes in that year’s events).
Search terms included: Prison showers, Alcatraz showers, steam, Latex Fetish, Shrink Wrap Fetish, Distorted Body Texture, Institutional Typography, Distorted Typography, Abandoned Hospitals, Horror Movie Posters
