Two kinds of haunting
Oct. 27th, 2017 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureI'd say on the whole that I dislike adrenaline, yet I love rollercoasters and haunted houses.
I think Ann Radcliffe would be helpful here. You know the bit:
“Terror and Horror are so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.”
Terror, then, in the literary or recreational sense, as the state of unbearable alarm at what is about to happen, and horror as the mind-stopping rejection of what actually is happening.
Let's keep that in mind.
(Spoilers for this year's local haunted house attraction)
So.
Some years ago A. took us to a haunted house out in a farmer's field. The lineup was over an hour long. We barely made it in before closing. I had to pee like a bandit.
It was amazing. Vignettes were staged with actors in full makeup and elaborate sets -- a terrible filthy dreamscape of rooms opening into rooms into dark tunnels into cornfields. The scares were cleverly contrived and sometimes multipart, and played on all sorts of fears beyond startlement. The actors were excellent in that while of course they could not touch us, we never felt that boundary -- we always wanted to run away before they could, you know, get us.
We had the best time. And like all perfect experiences it haunts me a little. I want to recapture that delirious communal fear-play.
Last year I tried to find the site again and ended up at a more generic sort of yelling-and-zombie-dummies place, which was fine, but neither hilarious nor terrifying (it does adjoin a very fine corn maze, though.)
This year, LB, S and I went -- at my impulse and urging -- to another haunted house, this one down by the water near the cruise ship terminal. LB bought some mini-doughnuts, and we consulted the ticket-taker.
$15 for one attraction, or $20 for both, she said.
What's the difference, we said.
In one they're all dead, she said, and in the other it's dark.
Might as well do both, we said.
The first attraction was called Dead City, and to my delight it was another fully staged fright sequence. It was not quite so perfect as that first one, but it had all the right parts, and we ran out the other end laughing and screaming at the same time.
The second attraction was the Darkness Maze.
In retrospect, it would have been a good idea to read the warnings painted in large threatening letters along the entry wall. (What did they say? I don't know. I didn't read them.)
To begin with, this was indeed a maze in the dark, or rather the usual sort of long twisty switchbacking corridor that these attractions usually comprise -- first in a deep twilight, and then in complete darkness. The sound, too, was muffled, so that while I was constantly reflexively saying "Guys? Guys?" it was eerily difficult to judge how far away the others were.
After a bit even I got the hang of it, feeling along the wall for an opening, turning the opposite way at an unexpected corner. There was even a little bit of pleasure in finding the knack. But the dark did strange things to my consciousness. I found I was hunched down as though the ceiling were low about my head, though in fact there was no ceiling I could reach.
The packs of teenagers fore and aft of us created another sort of alarm, a social fear of being too slow or too easily confused -- though they were also reassuring in their noisy shrieky there-ness. The past and future could not be quite so undefinable if people were giggling in them.
There was a bit where the floor shifted under your feet, and that was interestingly unsettling, and a ramp you had to find your way up -- all right. Then S. said "There's something soft here," and I thought he meant an actor or creepy bit of setting, but no. There was no door, only a sort of bulging, yielding surface.
"That can't be right," I said.
"But it is," he said, and then I felt him move into the surface. I pushed after.
What it must have been was something like two thick tarps or bouncy-castle-like balloons, inflated by fans to press up against each other, so that you went forward between them.
What it felt like was utter physical horror. And you didn't just shove out through that cloying pressure -- you went forward into it, step after step, so that you had to let go of the empty space behind you and only hope for the empty space ahead that you could neither see nor feel.
I did get out the other side, but aghast.
Next, we had to hunker through a low tunnel, and not a short one. "This is not good at all," I said, and LB laughed hollowly.
Then the opposite -- a tall but very narrow space where the walls brushed your arms.
I would not make a spelunker, no matter how much I like the thought of bright caverns.
Then, oh god, another one of those suffocating channels.
"Put your arms up," I told LB in the dark, patting her coat, "And make a space for yourself." She dove through like a shark. I stepped in myself -- and the pressure was even greater than before. I stopped dead.
"Oh, guys, I don't know, I don't think I can," I heard myself say. I was completely swallowed by the stuff, trapped by the pressure.
It wasn't even that I thought I'd have to be ignominiously removed by the staff. I felt I would die.
"Just come through!" LB and S called, and since they said to I did.
The rest was mere tunnels. The lighting gradually improved, as though the creators knew we'd reached our limit. There were strangely textured things hanging in our way, and I think we were supposed to have had some sparks and blasts of air, but somehow the timing didn't work out, and it was really just a walk in the dark to the exit.
I'm sure much scarier attractions exist, but I'd never been through anything like that, or nothing that wasn't an actual cause for immediate panic.
It was, in its way, a proper horrorshow. No jump scares, no zombies. It used only my own animal fear of confinement and suffocation. I see the art of it; it was, though so simple, very nearly unbearable.
After that there was quite a bit of wandering about in the open air gaping and staring with fixed horror at the stars. Then we went for a pint. We chose a pub mostly remarkable for being largely empty and extremely well-lit.
{rf}
I think Ann Radcliffe would be helpful here. You know the bit:
“Terror and Horror are so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.”
Terror, then, in the literary or recreational sense, as the state of unbearable alarm at what is about to happen, and horror as the mind-stopping rejection of what actually is happening.
Let's keep that in mind.
(Spoilers for this year's local haunted house attraction)
So.
Some years ago A. took us to a haunted house out in a farmer's field. The lineup was over an hour long. We barely made it in before closing. I had to pee like a bandit.
It was amazing. Vignettes were staged with actors in full makeup and elaborate sets -- a terrible filthy dreamscape of rooms opening into rooms into dark tunnels into cornfields. The scares were cleverly contrived and sometimes multipart, and played on all sorts of fears beyond startlement. The actors were excellent in that while of course they could not touch us, we never felt that boundary -- we always wanted to run away before they could, you know, get us.
We had the best time. And like all perfect experiences it haunts me a little. I want to recapture that delirious communal fear-play.
Last year I tried to find the site again and ended up at a more generic sort of yelling-and-zombie-dummies place, which was fine, but neither hilarious nor terrifying (it does adjoin a very fine corn maze, though.)
This year, LB, S and I went -- at my impulse and urging -- to another haunted house, this one down by the water near the cruise ship terminal. LB bought some mini-doughnuts, and we consulted the ticket-taker.
$15 for one attraction, or $20 for both, she said.
What's the difference, we said.
In one they're all dead, she said, and in the other it's dark.
Might as well do both, we said.
The first attraction was called Dead City, and to my delight it was another fully staged fright sequence. It was not quite so perfect as that first one, but it had all the right parts, and we ran out the other end laughing and screaming at the same time.
The second attraction was the Darkness Maze.
In retrospect, it would have been a good idea to read the warnings painted in large threatening letters along the entry wall. (What did they say? I don't know. I didn't read them.)
To begin with, this was indeed a maze in the dark, or rather the usual sort of long twisty switchbacking corridor that these attractions usually comprise -- first in a deep twilight, and then in complete darkness. The sound, too, was muffled, so that while I was constantly reflexively saying "Guys? Guys?" it was eerily difficult to judge how far away the others were.
After a bit even I got the hang of it, feeling along the wall for an opening, turning the opposite way at an unexpected corner. There was even a little bit of pleasure in finding the knack. But the dark did strange things to my consciousness. I found I was hunched down as though the ceiling were low about my head, though in fact there was no ceiling I could reach.
The packs of teenagers fore and aft of us created another sort of alarm, a social fear of being too slow or too easily confused -- though they were also reassuring in their noisy shrieky there-ness. The past and future could not be quite so undefinable if people were giggling in them.
There was a bit where the floor shifted under your feet, and that was interestingly unsettling, and a ramp you had to find your way up -- all right. Then S. said "There's something soft here," and I thought he meant an actor or creepy bit of setting, but no. There was no door, only a sort of bulging, yielding surface.
"That can't be right," I said.
"But it is," he said, and then I felt him move into the surface. I pushed after.
What it must have been was something like two thick tarps or bouncy-castle-like balloons, inflated by fans to press up against each other, so that you went forward between them.
What it felt like was utter physical horror. And you didn't just shove out through that cloying pressure -- you went forward into it, step after step, so that you had to let go of the empty space behind you and only hope for the empty space ahead that you could neither see nor feel.
I did get out the other side, but aghast.
Next, we had to hunker through a low tunnel, and not a short one. "This is not good at all," I said, and LB laughed hollowly.
Then the opposite -- a tall but very narrow space where the walls brushed your arms.
I would not make a spelunker, no matter how much I like the thought of bright caverns.
Then, oh god, another one of those suffocating channels.
"Put your arms up," I told LB in the dark, patting her coat, "And make a space for yourself." She dove through like a shark. I stepped in myself -- and the pressure was even greater than before. I stopped dead.
"Oh, guys, I don't know, I don't think I can," I heard myself say. I was completely swallowed by the stuff, trapped by the pressure.
It wasn't even that I thought I'd have to be ignominiously removed by the staff. I felt I would die.
"Just come through!" LB and S called, and since they said to I did.
The rest was mere tunnels. The lighting gradually improved, as though the creators knew we'd reached our limit. There were strangely textured things hanging in our way, and I think we were supposed to have had some sparks and blasts of air, but somehow the timing didn't work out, and it was really just a walk in the dark to the exit.
I'm sure much scarier attractions exist, but I'd never been through anything like that, or nothing that wasn't an actual cause for immediate panic.
It was, in its way, a proper horrorshow. No jump scares, no zombies. It used only my own animal fear of confinement and suffocation. I see the art of it; it was, though so simple, very nearly unbearable.
After that there was quite a bit of wandering about in the open air gaping and staring with fixed horror at the stars. Then we went for a pint. We chose a pub mostly remarkable for being largely empty and extremely well-lit.
{rf}
