Haunted House Fun Times Part 2

MAD DOCTOR OF THE WEEK

DEXTER

Technically, Dexter doesn't have a degree (being he's still in grade school), but counts for a mad doctor on the grounds that he is intelligent enough to have a giant lab hidden behind his bookcase and build mechs. He's mad in the fact that he hasn't solved a way to keep his sister Deedee out.

This brainy kid spends the majority of his time in his lab, making robots and lasers and awesome science stuff that most people would think impossible. In the show, conveniently named Dexter's Laboratory, the main gag is Dexter making something and his sister Deedee coming in and breaking things somehow.

His lab is unknown to his own parents, who apparently think he's reading books or something in his room all day and never come to realize the explosions and rockets going off are high-tech science equipment.

Oddly enough, Dexter has an accent that no one in his family has, his most famous line being, "DEEDEE, GET OUT OF MAH LAHBORITORY!"

OTHER FUN TIMES

Finals for this class are coming up soon, and mine is related to mad doctors. It'll more than likely be performance art. Keep your eyes out for that.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE, PART 2

And now, we finish off the second half of the haunted house!

Here's the room that I was in about five times. It's filled with old machinery for the factory. The job here is to direct people to this narrow walkway in a timely manner. I often times followed them while twitching so they sped up. Once they started walking down the passageway, I would take a shortcut to the end of the room, then start following the group again once I saw them. If they never noticed me, I would utter a, "bye." Other times, someone noticed me eventually and screamed.

They continue on to the dark room, where you hang onto a rope and walk through a dark room (creative names, here). Someone is assigned to go through the room and scare people, from either tugging on the rope or putting their hand on it to scare people holding onto it. At the very end, the lights will hit and a crazed butcher screams and smashes against some bars.

After this was the dot room, which involves eye tricks. The room is painted black aside from white and yellow dots on the walls. The performer is in a costume to imitate the walls. When the strobe light is on, the performer moves around to create an optical illusion for those walking through. It's a great concept, though people performing in the dot room probably went mad from the lights.

The cannibal room was after this. It was a commonly missed room because it's not directly in the way of the main path, and often times people would peek in rather than walk in. The room is designed to smell like rotting flesh, as the performer that was there every night had no sense of smell in the first place. After awhile, he found a giant spider puppet and started using that to scare people. The spider scared me once, too.

The corn field made a return from last year, as people found it particularly frightening. It's a big room with corn stalks hanging from the ceiling, with a fog machine and strobe light. Whoever was assigned to this room (I was in this one once) basically just snuck around and scared people as they wandered through.

The final area is the body bags/maze area. The first part of the room are filled with body bags that are attached to the ceiling, so they swing back and forth when walking through them. After this was a maze, where I was working at twice. The point of this area is to confuse customers and direct them the wrong way. I oddly found that people are very trusting of you in the maze, and often times take your advice on a way to go despite their better judgment.

This maze included a dead end that looped back to the body bag room (complete with an elderly lady to scare people), a room that makes loud noises when walking in, and the phones. The phones were made so when you pick up the correct phone, the lights go out. This gives the performer the chance to run in and get right next to the group before the lights are turned back on when the phone is put back on the receiver.

Another part of this room was the recording echo. When making a noise, an instrument picks it up and plays it back as an echo at different pitches. What I commonly would do is randomly kick the walls of the maze, and after kicking enough times, would make it sound like a stampede coming through. Other people would scream things like "Marco!" with someone going "Polo!" as a reply. There were times where customers screamed, heard their scream back, screamed again, and repeated the process a good number of times.

And that's the end of the haunted house. Make sure to get tickets next year if you didn't come this year!

Haunted House Fun Times

MAD DOCTOR OF THE WEEK


DR. STRANGELOVE

From the movie Dr. Strangelove or also known as How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Dr. Strangelove is a former Nazi that designed the doomsday device the Russians used in the film.

Dr. Strangelove spends all his time in the film in the war room, bound to a wheelchair and having an uncontrollable arm. His arm has gone so far as to strangle him and even give the Nazi salute randomly as he's talking to others.

Being he designed the doomsday device, most of the characters ask him for advice on what to do next. Once the doomsday device goes off, the doctor suggests living underground and due to the population issue, believes that for every man should be ten women.

A fun fact about the film, the first test screening was scheduled on the same day as JFK was assassinated. Because of this event, they pushed back the film's release to January rather than weeks after the tragedy.

HAUNTED HOUSE MAD DOCTORS

It's finally time! The Soap Factory's Haunted Basement is now over and I'll go over the mad doctors involved.

Each night is always different, with different people volunteering and different numbers of volunteers. I often times was wearing a nurse outfit, sometimes with industrial gloves (other times we couldn't find one and couldn't use them). I was also commonly twitching my head throughout the days at the haunted house.

Another mad doctor was created by one of the people who commonly had the role of a clown. Wearing a red lab coat and a mask covered in blood, he worked with his other clown buddy and often times played the accordion.

One night, my boyfriend came along to help and we ended up being a mad doctor and nurse combo, me twitching at people and he slamming a shovel around in the boiler room.

THE HAUNTED ROOMS

Because mad doctors work at haunted houses (see above), it feels only right for me to go through each room involved and explain what happened.

When customers first walked in, there was a trained professional dressed as a priest that would fly around in a harness, sometimes looking like a disembodied head because of how dark the costume was in the dark basement. I never saw this myself, as I was always busy with my own room when they were flying.

The second room would be the doll room. Decorated as a bedroom with dolls decorated all around (thus the name), the person assigned to this room was responsible for three buttons: one made the blanket move by itself with air pistons, another made a doll move, and the final one caused the picture of Jesus Christ to spin uncontrollably on the wall. This room had a good number of "uncles" (the code word for when people give up and want to leave), as people are terrified to begin with from having to sign a waiver to get in.

The second room was the mirror room, a room that I had a role in twice. The original idea behind it had to be changed drastically due to timing issues, and later on had quite a few things removed to try to slow down customers who would go too fast for the actress to get a chance to scare them.

There are two rooms, one that the customers walk through and the other containing the actress. They were built to be a reflection of one another, being separated by one wall with a trick mirror. The one with the customers was lit and had a noose hanging from the ceiling (used to have a dummy resembling the actress but was removed, the noose was later removed as well on the final days). The mirror would show their reflection until the actress in the other room hit the lights, making the mirror into a window to see the other room. The scare that often happen was the mirror room girl would have a noose around her neck and play dead (don't worry, the noose had velcro), then click the lights off. On the second click, she would be up at the mirror and screaming and hitting the mirror, causing customers to go to the next room.

The next room was rather simple, though caught guests off guard. The floor was built to move when stepping in a certain spot, so when customers walked through, the floor would sink down.

The room after that was the clown room, making a return with some improvements since last year. This time, the room was modeled to be like a clown sactuary, with chairs and a pipe organ for the clowns to prey to their "Gods" (which were taxidermy animals with different animal parts put together, like a squirrel fish and an armadillo chicken). I was a clown twice. Levi was a clown every night except Halloween. Since clowns work best in numbers, it was almost garanteed that there were two clowns in the room at all times.

The scare that I often did with Levi would be me playing the organ while he pretends to be a clown dummy in the chairs. When customers walked in, Levi would wait for them to get far enough up the isle to leap up and yell. This was the signal for me to get up to yell, as the customers are looking at Levi. Then we drove them out of the room to the next one, sometimes chasing and sometimes insulting customers (signed a waiver, so they couldn't do anything).

Clowns chased the customers to the door room, which was a circular room with the walls being doors. What happens in this room is that customers are locked inside with no means out. People on the outside will either tease the customers by telling them things like, "It's the door on your left," or "Come on, jiggle some doorknobs." When they felt satisfied, the people on the outside would cause the room to spin around and flicker the lights. Sometimes someone would jump into the room after it was done spinning for another scare until customers were released to the next area.

The bridge was the next area, where customers cross a bridge to go near the TV creep area. I did the bridge area once. The role for the bridge person is to drive the people into the next area, often time smashing a shovel around and running at them to get them to keep going. They also have control over the fog machine in this area.

At the end of the bridge is a TV hooked up with a nightvision camera, displaying the customers on the TV. There's another camera in another room, where the performer would be located. The TV is designed so that it overlaps the two camera feeds, so when customers watch the TV, the performer in the other room looks as if they're in the same room. I did this room once. This room is often times the one that's dropped if there aren't enough volunteers during the night, being it's not particularly scary (though quite innovative).

In the next room were the skeletons. Generally having two performers involved, one would wear a hula outfit and the other in all black. The hula outfit one was used to make people more confortable as the lights flickered, dancing to the music. Eventually the lights would go on and the one in the black outfit would move, causing customers to freak out. The room is painted with special paint that shows up under a certain light, so the paint in the room would glow (like the crime scene outline on the ground with blood).

That's about half the room. Next week will be a tour of the final half!