filmmaker2
06-21-2005, 08:20 PM
This is a little story I post every once in a while, I think I posted it last year on this board, and I've added a little to it since and thought that some of you folks might like to read about a little haunted house operation that was put together by some people in West Covina back in 1984.
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“THE BIG HAUNTED HOUSE” Part One
Now, this is a story about a Haunted House Attraction that was done in the Halloween season of 1984. It was huge--I can’t say I remember with accuracy how many rooms or “themed areas” there were, but there were at least 40 of them. This was one of those walk-through attractions, of course, the kind you have probably seen, but I feel this one was unique, because it was a one-time affair that was never to exist again. Why? Because it was being constructed within the ruins, if you will, of an old elementary school in West Covina, California. A few interested kids from my high school were invited to go and volunteer their time there during September and October. The staff of the charitable organization running the event told my friends and me that the school was being demolished. They had acquired
permission to use it for this purpose, and this was now the school’s last hurrah before being bulldozed and replaced with a shopping center. What a wonderful opportunity!
I was developing my skills as a makeup artist at the time, and all too eager to check the place out and see what creatures I might build, or who might look good wearing a rubber monster appliance or some greasepaint. A bunch of us got into a car and
drove out there one Saturday, around noontime. A tangible atmosphere was noticed immediately as we arrived. The buildings looked like they had been around since the 50’s or thereabouts, but very likely the school itself had been around longer than that, perhaps the 1930’s. I felt strongly that we were looking at a rebuilt version, which now was old itself, and crumbling.
Very strong in the air was that sense of this being a “one time thing,” and an opportunity to have a lot of fun. A lot of West Covina schoolkids were about that Saturday, and they were all anxiously waiting to be given something to do. It was clear that no one considered this job to be any sort of “work.” Everyone wanted to dress up a room, and everyone eventually wanted to be a ghoul once the run of the show started. Everyone wants to try their hand at acting--at bringing a fantasy, even a scary fantasy, to life just for a moment.
The school consisted chiefly of a number of “strip-shaped” buildings, you know, a bunch of classrooms all in a row next to each other, connected as one long structure. There were four or five like this, each strip consisting of six or seven classrooms. Then there was a large multi-purpose building with a very high ceiling, a kind of building I was familiar with from my elementary school days--a cafeteria, stage, and movie theatre all in one, depending on how you set things up in there.
Then there was a strip building that was just for the offices--the teacher’s lounge and principal’s office. This last building was turned into the headquarters for the haunting staff, and also housed the sound effects “control center.” There was a
very talented sound designer named Tom (whose last name I forget), and Tom had started adapting the school’s public address system to blast out different audio tracks. And this guy was a maniac. He was always running around, stringing wires and attaching speakers to the walls, hiding the speakers, testing this sound and that sound...a real wacko...he balanced the volume for every single speaker in the attraction, and considering that there were more than forty rooms, well...there was a lot of audio going on in there.
People were also bringing in speakers and amplifiers, to give the show some extra volume. The main sound system room was in one of the office rooms, and consisted of a number of reel-to-reel tape decks and a simple computer control system, such as existed at the time.
The beginning of construction, or perhaps I should say destruction, had already begun. Before the sets went up, an important consideration had to be seen to: the general layout. A continuous path had to be determined, and anything blocking that path had to be eliminated. So, the classroom strip buildings were adapted for this--the walls dividing the rooms were being sledge-hammered down, creating makeshift doorways that would allow the haunt attendees to zig-zag their way through the rooms without having to go in and out of the structure.
Being the type that likes old books, I went hunting around for the school's library that day. I found it, and was overjoyed to see that nearly all the books were very old! But I opened one of them up and found that it had been thoroughly chewed up by bookworms. They were all like that--nothing I wanted to take home, I'm sorry to say. The library was severely, and appropriately, worm-eaten.
It looked like the school hadn’t been used in quite some time--had mouldered away for years, empty and quiet, the blinds drawn. I wondered how many people living in the city had grown up going to this school.
But anyway, not long after the interested parties showed up and introduced themselves, the building began. Rooms were delegated to various groups and the teams then went to work, bringing in whatever they needed and building things as they went. I was not in charge of a room; my job was to try to provide makeups, masks and props for rooms that were lacking them. I walked around and talked to the various room supervisors to ascertain which of them needed the most help. I had a VERY small budget of $200.00 which the show had provided so I could buy latex, plaster and clay.
The first strip building featured, as one of its rooms, an indoor hillside set constructed of a wooden framework and canvas, all covered with dirt and leaves. The canvas had holes cut in it, so that actors in zombie masks would crawl out of the “hillside” to menace the people walking on the path. After menacing a
hauntgoer, the zombie would go around the side of the hill and go back under the canvas, so that it could pop out again and scare some more people. I thought this was a clever “zombie-recycling” idea. They wanted me to make five or six zombie
masks for this room, and I started work on these, making them very cheaply and quickly, by painting layers of latex on a head-cast of a friend and peeling off the “mask,” then adding cotton and latex to create a creepy zombie texture.
Inside this room, my friend Scott and I had placed a dummy of the character "Jack" from AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (the skeletal Jack). We spent a lot of time on it and set it up so it could be puppeteered through a hole in a wall and could talk to people passing by. But really it was badly placed. The way it turned out, people going through the maze passed it by and never looked at it, because their attention shifted over to the actors in the zombie costumes. Our dummy languished sadly in the gloomy corner.
But this “zombie room” was known for being a most dangerous room to work in--and not because of the zombies. Not long after the leaves and dirt were hauled in to dress the place, people were seeing the dreaded Black Widow Spiders, who found the room to be an ideal nesting environment. Some insecticides were
employed in an attempt to eradicate the spiders, but the black widow sightings continued for the duration of the show...
(Part Two of this story will describe the general layout of the haunted attraction,
and how the whole thing went.)
(INTERMISSION...........................)
*******************************
“THE BIG HAUNTED HOUSE” Part One
Now, this is a story about a Haunted House Attraction that was done in the Halloween season of 1984. It was huge--I can’t say I remember with accuracy how many rooms or “themed areas” there were, but there were at least 40 of them. This was one of those walk-through attractions, of course, the kind you have probably seen, but I feel this one was unique, because it was a one-time affair that was never to exist again. Why? Because it was being constructed within the ruins, if you will, of an old elementary school in West Covina, California. A few interested kids from my high school were invited to go and volunteer their time there during September and October. The staff of the charitable organization running the event told my friends and me that the school was being demolished. They had acquired
permission to use it for this purpose, and this was now the school’s last hurrah before being bulldozed and replaced with a shopping center. What a wonderful opportunity!
I was developing my skills as a makeup artist at the time, and all too eager to check the place out and see what creatures I might build, or who might look good wearing a rubber monster appliance or some greasepaint. A bunch of us got into a car and
drove out there one Saturday, around noontime. A tangible atmosphere was noticed immediately as we arrived. The buildings looked like they had been around since the 50’s or thereabouts, but very likely the school itself had been around longer than that, perhaps the 1930’s. I felt strongly that we were looking at a rebuilt version, which now was old itself, and crumbling.
Very strong in the air was that sense of this being a “one time thing,” and an opportunity to have a lot of fun. A lot of West Covina schoolkids were about that Saturday, and they were all anxiously waiting to be given something to do. It was clear that no one considered this job to be any sort of “work.” Everyone wanted to dress up a room, and everyone eventually wanted to be a ghoul once the run of the show started. Everyone wants to try their hand at acting--at bringing a fantasy, even a scary fantasy, to life just for a moment.
The school consisted chiefly of a number of “strip-shaped” buildings, you know, a bunch of classrooms all in a row next to each other, connected as one long structure. There were four or five like this, each strip consisting of six or seven classrooms. Then there was a large multi-purpose building with a very high ceiling, a kind of building I was familiar with from my elementary school days--a cafeteria, stage, and movie theatre all in one, depending on how you set things up in there.
Then there was a strip building that was just for the offices--the teacher’s lounge and principal’s office. This last building was turned into the headquarters for the haunting staff, and also housed the sound effects “control center.” There was a
very talented sound designer named Tom (whose last name I forget), and Tom had started adapting the school’s public address system to blast out different audio tracks. And this guy was a maniac. He was always running around, stringing wires and attaching speakers to the walls, hiding the speakers, testing this sound and that sound...a real wacko...he balanced the volume for every single speaker in the attraction, and considering that there were more than forty rooms, well...there was a lot of audio going on in there.
People were also bringing in speakers and amplifiers, to give the show some extra volume. The main sound system room was in one of the office rooms, and consisted of a number of reel-to-reel tape decks and a simple computer control system, such as existed at the time.
The beginning of construction, or perhaps I should say destruction, had already begun. Before the sets went up, an important consideration had to be seen to: the general layout. A continuous path had to be determined, and anything blocking that path had to be eliminated. So, the classroom strip buildings were adapted for this--the walls dividing the rooms were being sledge-hammered down, creating makeshift doorways that would allow the haunt attendees to zig-zag their way through the rooms without having to go in and out of the structure.
Being the type that likes old books, I went hunting around for the school's library that day. I found it, and was overjoyed to see that nearly all the books were very old! But I opened one of them up and found that it had been thoroughly chewed up by bookworms. They were all like that--nothing I wanted to take home, I'm sorry to say. The library was severely, and appropriately, worm-eaten.
It looked like the school hadn’t been used in quite some time--had mouldered away for years, empty and quiet, the blinds drawn. I wondered how many people living in the city had grown up going to this school.
But anyway, not long after the interested parties showed up and introduced themselves, the building began. Rooms were delegated to various groups and the teams then went to work, bringing in whatever they needed and building things as they went. I was not in charge of a room; my job was to try to provide makeups, masks and props for rooms that were lacking them. I walked around and talked to the various room supervisors to ascertain which of them needed the most help. I had a VERY small budget of $200.00 which the show had provided so I could buy latex, plaster and clay.
The first strip building featured, as one of its rooms, an indoor hillside set constructed of a wooden framework and canvas, all covered with dirt and leaves. The canvas had holes cut in it, so that actors in zombie masks would crawl out of the “hillside” to menace the people walking on the path. After menacing a
hauntgoer, the zombie would go around the side of the hill and go back under the canvas, so that it could pop out again and scare some more people. I thought this was a clever “zombie-recycling” idea. They wanted me to make five or six zombie
masks for this room, and I started work on these, making them very cheaply and quickly, by painting layers of latex on a head-cast of a friend and peeling off the “mask,” then adding cotton and latex to create a creepy zombie texture.
Inside this room, my friend Scott and I had placed a dummy of the character "Jack" from AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (the skeletal Jack). We spent a lot of time on it and set it up so it could be puppeteered through a hole in a wall and could talk to people passing by. But really it was badly placed. The way it turned out, people going through the maze passed it by and never looked at it, because their attention shifted over to the actors in the zombie costumes. Our dummy languished sadly in the gloomy corner.
But this “zombie room” was known for being a most dangerous room to work in--and not because of the zombies. Not long after the leaves and dirt were hauled in to dress the place, people were seeing the dreaded Black Widow Spiders, who found the room to be an ideal nesting environment. Some insecticides were
employed in an attempt to eradicate the spiders, but the black widow sightings continued for the duration of the show...
(Part Two of this story will describe the general layout of the haunted attraction,
and how the whole thing went.)
(INTERMISSION...........................)