American horror theatre: 'A hand slams into my neck and wrenches me through the darkn - TheNewTopical.com - current events, politics, culture, ethics, economics discussion forum

Zichao · #1 (**permalink**) 04-12-11, 11:46 AM

American horror theatre: 'Ahand slams into my neck and wrenches me through the darkness' | Travel | The Observer

Quote:

My wrists are tied, I'm in total darkness and a man very close to my face is shouting: "Get on your knees, bitch!"

I do what he says. It's when he puts a cold, wet hood over my head, tips my head back and pours water into my face that I start hyperventilating. The cloth clings to my mouth and nose and panic sends my heart hammering and my lungs heaving.

"Scream, bitch!" roars the voice. "Scream louder! You're not fucking getting out of here until you scream as loud as I want!"

This, I will tell my friends, is how I spent my Monday night: on my knees, being waterboarded and having paid $60 for the displeasure.

This is Blackout, a sold-out attraction deemed the most terrifying of the United States's estimated 3,000 Haunted Houses, which make up an industry thought to be worth an extraordinary $500m.

This year, for example, New Yorkers could opt for the shlocky – such as Blood Manor with its 37 gallons of fake blood per night; or the artsy, including the Steampunk Haunted House in the hipster-heavy Lower East Side; or, indeed, just the confoundingly expensive: Nightmare, which bills itself as "America's #1 Haunted House" and is now in its seventh year, offering "Super VIP" tickets for an alarming $100. Clearly, the opportunity to feel terror without danger is irresistible for a lot of Americans willing to part with a lot of cash.

The hottest ticket though, thanks to its infamy, is Blackout, which the New York Times deemed "the extreme theatre event of the year". But "theatre" seems too genteel a word and Haunted House – with its suggestions of shonky pop-up ghouls – a misleading term for an experience that's more Abu Ghraib than Scooby Doo. Adult-only visitors must navigate the space alone and in complete darkness, being terrorised and abused in a series of psycho-sexual horror scenarios. Unlike Abu Ghraib, there's a safety word to shout if things get too much and its organisers boast that around 20% of visitors use it each night. So why would someone pay around £50 to experience something so extraordinarily unpleasant?

"Audiences want to know if they can make it all the way through without calling 'Safety'," says Josh Randall, the show's co-creator. "The fear they experience in that time gives them a rush and makes them feel more alive."

There have been similar ventures in Britain before, such as Punchdrunk's 2009 show It Felt Like a Kiss, in which audiences were chased by a masked, chainsaw-wielding actor, but it's in the Halloween-mad States that the phenomenon of the Haunted House has really taken hold. Like any good subculture, it has its mass conventions – Pennsylvania's HauntCon, Ohio's Midwest Haunters Convention – its endless websites and chat-forums and, of course, its droves of horror-happy nerds.

Adam Irlander, 24, is one such nerd. At 6pm on a Monday evening I find a line of men in their 30s, mostly dressed in dark shades of fleece, queuing outside the blacked-out storefront in midtown Manhattan. Adam is at the front of the queue, wearing a T-shirt that bears a phallic, plastic monster erupting from the chest. It wobbles a little when he talks.

"I'm a fanatic," he says. "I go to three or four houses a night."

A night? I screech.

"A night," he confirms flatly. "I drive for up to three or four hours to go to a haunted house. I've been to New York, Delaware, Connecticut…"

This is his second visit to the Blackout Haunted House which, he says, "just doesn't compare. It's one of the best".

I'm scared, I say.

"You should be," he chuckles. His neighbour in the queue trumps him by revealing this is his third visit. Adam and the third-visit-nerd fold their arms with the hard-boiled air of true connoisseurs and begin to trade assessments: "You done Times Scare? The Penitentiary?"

I'm too frightened to listen to a nerd-off. Desperate for a shred of reassurance, I interrupt them and say I'm not keen on the idea of strangers shoving me around. Adam laughs. "Well," he says, walking his fingers through the air, "you better turn right round and walk out of here!"

But I don't. Inside, two young guys are seated at a desk in front of a huge black curtain. They're dispatching waiver forms, a document which reminds me that I am signing up for the following: "Graphic scenes of simulated extreme horror, adult sexual content, tight spaces, darkness, fog, strobe-light effects, exposure to water, physical contact, and crawling."

Every so often we hear a bellowed, "Get the fuck out of my house!" and a victim is spat out of a tunnel, shaking, panting and bewildered. Some laugh nervously. Most just look plain traumatised. Eventually, Adam and I witness the third-visit-nerd being expelled.

"Dude!" he says, breathless and eyes shining as he shakes his head. "I nearly couldn't hang in there! I nearly bailed!"

And then Adam is beckoned behind the black curtain. He gives me a little wave: "I would wait around for ya, but I got other haunted houses to get to tonight!"

I have never before wanted to cling to a man with a plastic monster protruding from his chest, but at this moment Adam is the only thing between me and whatever lies behind that black curtain. He ducks behind it and I lose the feeling in my legs.

By the time I step inside I'm ready to throw up. I decide to consider every moment that I don't wail "Safety!" a triumph. A torch is shone into my face and a voice snarls: "DON'T. FUCKING. MOVE."

And then the light goes. The darkness seems to get thicker. I stand in complete silence. Am I meant to do something? I can feel presences moving around me, but I could be imagining them. Something feathery inserts itself with sickening slowness into my left ear. Then a huge hand slams into the side of my neck and wrenches me, half-running, half-stumbling, through the darkness. Over the next 25 minutes I lose count of how many walls I am slammed up against, how many bodies press against me and how many mouths pant or suck or roar abuse at my ears. The water-boarding element is terrifying, but so too is crawling through small tunnels with unseen fingers grabbing at your ankles, or waiting alone in the darkness for more rough hands to seize you.

And then there are the plain ridiculous parts. In a Germaine Greer-esque flourish, a lady in a nightie pulls me into her padded cell and orders me to remove and suck her tampon. The gross-out section continues with a naked man in a toilet vile enough to make the one in Trainspotting look like a Glade PlugIn ad. He slams the cubicle door in my face and from behind it come extravagant sounds of bodily expulsion. Then he pulls me inside and demands that I fish a key out of the full toilet bowl.

"Do it!" he screams. I roll up my sleeve with an involuntary whimper. It's a very convincing texture. I gag a little bit.

"Say, 'I love it!'" he shrieks as he presses his paunchy nakedness against my leg. I oblige. "Say it's the best sex you've ever had!"

I mutter obediently. Then he shoves me out of his toilet lair screeching, "That wasn't sex, that was fishing a key out of shit, you sick fuck!"

Finally, I'm being grabbed from behind and someone is running me down a black tunnel, shouting those blessed words: "Get the fuck out of my house!"

My throat hurts from screaming, my vision's scrambled from all the torch glare, I'm weak and shaking and aching, but I'm ridiculously proud I made it through and coursing with relief and elation to be back in the normal, well-lit, world of mid-town Manhattan.

The next day I experience something even stranger than all the depraved weirdness of those 25 minutes. It's the creeping realisation that I really, really want to go back and do it all over again.

Yeah, but did you actually have to reach in there and yank the tampon out? Surely the actress would wind up with friction burns doing that hundreds of times a night? Or is there a dummy vagina involved? (Question you least want to have to ask during a job interview.)

Zichao · #2 (**permalink**) 04-12-11, 12:10 PM

It's worth checking out the comments section too - the puritans are out in force.

Gilles de Rais · #3 (**permalink**) 05-12-11, 01:17 PM

Fear-play goes mainstream...

Zichao · #4 (**permalink**) 05-12-11, 01:36 PM

I don't really know why, but organised make-believe really grates on me - from audience participation to training sims to this sort of thing. I guess maybe it's vague memories of organised fun at school.

On the other hand, unlike the commentators here I don't want it banned for the sake of the children. I'm never likely to pay $60 just to mooch sulkily through a dark theatre thinking "I'm 25 years-old and you're a down on his luck actor. This is beneath both of us." That doesn't mean that no one else should be allowed to.

Gilles de Rais · #5 (**permalink**) 05-12-11, 02:03 PM

Well, to be fair, you can find people doing it for free and it's all individualised. What interest me here is how popular it's turning out to be...

Zichao · #6 (**permalink**) 05-12-11, 02:18 PM

I don't think I'd do it for free either. Now if they paid me $60...

I remember when I was little, at night me and a bunch of friends used to dare each other to creep down to the end of a huge, scary garden belonging to one of us. That was genuinely scary because some creature from M. R. James (which are obviously real when you're eight years-old) could actually have popped up and dragged us down to the depths. If, beforehand, we'd fixed on one of us to play the ghost and jump out from behind the shrubbery it wouldn't have been scary at all.

I suppose life's just inherently less scary when you're grown up, and you have to try to make do with cheaper thrills.

Gilles de Rais · #7 (**permalink**) 05-12-11, 02:51 PM

Originally Posted by Zichao

I don't think I'd do it for free either. Now if they paid me $60...

Well, you have to be into it, I guess. Just like everything else...

Quote:

I suppose life's just inherently less scary when you're grown up, and you have to try to make do with cheaper thrills.

I tried to find a video of an acquaintance of mine who got himself water-boarded by his then girlfriend and a friend... I cannot find it - it seems to have been removed/disappeared.

The point he made about it is that your body reacts as if the threat was real i.e. the sensation of drowning is real enough for your body which doesn't care about your rationalisation that "well, they're friends and they're not actually trying to kill me"...

In essence, this is the base of all "fear-play" - the body doesn't buy into the intellectual knowledge that you're safe...

Here is the post from another friend of mine from an experience she had:

In retrospect I've been scared for days. Not enough to be actively aware of it, just enough for that slow-burning undercurrent of dread. Ever since he told me that his partner was away, and followed that piece of news with “Just so you know, I've always held back when she was with us.”

I'm very aware of that fact. The last time, when they waterboarded me, part of me felt safer knowing she was there. A calming presence. Because, unlike him, she's a Dom but not a sadist. Now the safety gloves are off, the one thing that kept me safe is gone, and I'm very aware of the changed dynamics as soon as I walk through the door.

The truth is I'm completely unprepared for what will happen in the next few hours. I came in expecting violence. I didn't come here expecting to die.

“When I come back into the room, you'll be naked.”

At this point it's still a game. A challenge. Like the time they covered me in cling film and told me they'd punch me for every second it stayed on my body.

He walks back into the room with an armful of toys. Nothing atypical there; whips, floggers, baseball bat... Business as usual.

He grabs a piece of hose, grey, thick plastic that looks like something he just ripped off the back of a washing machine. With no warning the hits start falling. And fuck me but they hurt. There is no grace to this, this is not the warm glow of a flogger, the majestic swoop of a cane, or even the primal connection of fists. This is simple, ugly violence.

“You call yourself a pain slut?” He taunts, his voice laden with disappointment as I whimper and flinch with every hit.

My body is still reeling when he tells me to lie down on the floor and starts placing a net of 28 clothes pegs from my collarbone to my knees, over my breasts and cunt. He makes me count each one. And I know that when he rips them off in one fell swoop the pain will be nearly blinding, but this is still familiar territory. I like pegs. Their pain is comforting somehow, and I'm so very desperate not to disappoint him.

As he places them he starts questioning me. His voice detached, distant somehow even though he's only at arm’s length.

“What you're doing, do you think it's normal? Do you think it's sane?”

He grabs his phone and takes a photo of my peg covered body. “Of course, I guess I'll have to delete these. They'll be evidence.”

I know he's trying to scare me, and I'll be dammed if I'm going to fall for it. I'm a rational, logical, thinking human being... He rips the net off and I scream.

“Do you still think you're sane?” He asks as he sits on my hips and pins me to the floor while I try to breathe through the pain. Suddenly there's a very sharp knife pressed to my throat. The world stops and my entire focus goes on not swallowing, not moving, not even breathing. As he moves the knife over and around me he starts talking. Still in that detached, clinical voice “You come here, to my house. You ask me to hurt you...”

His phone rings. He looks at it. “It's your safecall. He's asking if you've arrived. I could tell him you never did and he would never know. Silly girl.”

It's fine, it's fine. It's just a mindfuck. It's not real. It can't be real, right?

In one sudden movement he shifts on top of me and is now pressing into my chest, knife into my arm. His tone is still conversational, not like he's actually trying to scare me but like he's imparting fascinating information.

“You know the mistake most people make when cutting off someone's arm? They start at the front. That's just messy. If you start cutting at the back, now that's much easier. You dislocate the joint you see. Works wonders on elbows and knees too.”

I start crying. I have a new mantra: 'It's a game.' Keep breathing. 'It's a game.' Stop sobbing. 'It's a game.'
This is your friend. He's not actually going to hurt you. You trust him. Right? It's only your third play session together. And he's new to the scene. And what do you actually know about him. But you trust him. Right? Right?

“Do you know any nursery rhymes?”

My train of thought is brought abruptly short.

“I.. I guess I know some songs...”

“Sing me one.”

Through a tear-soaked voice I try to piece enough of my brain together to remember a song, any song. I'm not quite sure what's going on, but I know one thing in the pit of my stomach and it's that keeping him happy and doing what he says is definitely in my best interest. Because hopefully if I'm a good girl and do as I'm told he might hurt me, and break me a bit, but it'll all work out fine somehow, and he'll stop having that dead distant look in his eyes and he'll be my friend again and not this near stranger staring at me like I'm not really there.

I start singing. “Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques...”

He pulls out a permanent marker. Uncaps it.

“Dormez-vous, dormez-vous…”

He starts drawing dotted lines around my breast. I stop breathing. My brain goes into overdrive, flashing images of surgery, of slaughterhouses, of horror movies... incision lines on skin, butcher's marks, knives slicing into flesh, blood and bones...

I try to keep singing. Don't anger him. It'll all be OK. Don't anger him. Do as he says.

The pen keeps digging into my skin and in my mind I can already feel the weight of the knife as it tears my flesh. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. What the fuck have I done? What was I thinking? I can't handle this. This isn't fucking play. Who jokes about cutting their friends into piece? I don't want to play anymore.

I realise I've stopped singing. Instead I'm sobbing as quietly as I can. Trying not to move. Don't anger him. Please don't anger him.

He's talking again. And this time he's not detached, there is heat and anger in his voice, violence in his eyes.

“You come here. You ask me to hurt you. And you think you're safe? You think you're sane!? But it's OK sweetheart.” He leans in and whispers, like we're children sharing secrets at recess “I'm not sane either.” And he laughs the most horrible insane laugh I've ever heard on a real human being.

Oh my God. He's insane. He's actually insane. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. And then I remember all the discussions about mental health that seem to be flying around at the moment. How everyone on the scene is on some form of medication, or counselling. And I don't actually know anyone who's ever played with him before. How could I have been so stupid? What the fuck have I done?

He gets off me and starts whistling, a spring in his step as he walks around me. A cold shiver of dread runs down my spine as I recognised one of Edith Piaf's beloved classic. This is wrong, so very wrong, so gut-wrenchingly wrong.

He walks over to the music player and suddenly the familiar opening notes of 'La vie en rose' fill the room. He sits next to me and strokes the tears away from my cheek, it's like he's looking straight through me. “You remind me of my first girlfriend.”

Oh God.

He claps his hands cheerfully. “Right, let's get started shall we!”

I can't move. I can't stop trembling. I desperately wish I could do or say something, anything. Instead I just lie there shaking and sobbing as he crosses my arms over my chest and gaffer tapes them together. He's using real tape, not bondage tape. We're really not playing anymore. He shakes out a large black bin bag, lifts my head and shoves my upper body inside. I can feel him taping the bag to my waist. I am literally frozen in horror.

I'm hyperventilating and the bag automatically sticks to my face and mouth. Survival instincts kick in long enough for me to realise I have to calm down and modulate my breathing or I'm going to run out of air. At this point, I need to survive the bag if I have any hope of making it out of this alive. I'm barely breathing now. Sucking air in short, shallow gasps.

I hear him walk out of the room. I’m still frozen on the floor, fighting all out panic with every fibre of my being. Somehow clinging to this ridiculous idea that it’ll all be fine, that he’ll snap out of it. He’s going to walk back into this room and he’ll be himself. He has to be.

The door opens. I feel him move next to me. I hear the clink of a nail on metal. My entire body freezes. This isn’t good. This really isn’t good.

The roar of an electric jigsaw fills the room.

I’m going to die. I am actually going to die.

Except it looks like I won’t get to die easy. He turns the chainsaw on again and I feel the blunt tip prodding me into the stomach with every rotation. I have never fought so hard to stop moving. All I can think about is that even a millimetre of added incline would bring the saw slicing clean through my flesh.

The noise dies off only to be replaced by his voice. And he’s having an entire conversation with me, except I’m not actually saying a word. Inside the bag I am sobbing uncontrollably. The cold edge of the saw keeps running over my flesh and every single time my body jerks, waiting for the noise to start again and for the metal to start tearing me apart.

“You’re not going to move.” I shake my head through the bag. I’m still clinging desperately to this hope that if I do exactly what he says I might still make it out alive. He’s obviously crazy. You don’t make crazy people angry.

He tears the bag off me, and somehow seeing his face makes it even worse. I do as promised and keep completely still except for the terror-induced tremors which rake my body.

“Now I’m going to make you pretty!” He coos excitedly.

He delicately places my sunglasses onto my nose and tenderly puts red platform shoes on my feet. He then grabs a brush from my bag and starts brushing my hair. At this point I am long past fear, I am filled with horror. It’s like being stuck in a horrifying nightmare from which I can’t wake up. That feeling you get as a child when the night terrors strike you and you’re utterly unable to move, this is what I’m feeling right now. My heart is pounding in my ears, the room is spinning, I feel lightheaded and nauseous. How is this happening to me? What went wrong? How did I fuck up this badly?

“What am I doing?” He asks.

My brain is too slow. There must be an answer that will save me. There has to be. I just have to think of it… “Making me pretty?” I reply with a quavering voice.

He springs up and towers over me, and I think I’m about to throw up. “Don't tell me what you think I want to hear! Tell me what you think! Do you want me to get angry?!”

Oh God, this is a nightmare. Please get me out of here. Please.

He takes his shirt off. Slowly he pulls on a white apron and large butcher’s gloves. He’s holding a handsaw this time as he stands over me.

“Now, because I’m nice you get a choice. I can either rape you now, or after.”

At this point I’m heaving huge uncontrollable sobs. This just seems to anger him more. “Why are you crying?! Stop crying! Look at me! Stop crying!”

This is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Lying there, trying to will my body into stillness. Locking my eyes into his cold dead gaze. I am literally staring my death into the face. This is it then. Every part of me is screaming in terror and yet I am still inescapably pinned to the floor.

And suddenly he bends down, pushes my chin back as far as it will go, and I feel the cold bite of metal over my throat. I’m dead…

… or maybe not. Maybe I just lost my mind for a while. I slowly start registering sensations. First, I’m aware of my heartbeat, because it’s pounding so hard I can practically taste it on my tongue. Second, I’m having trouble breathing. Not because there’s a tear in my throat, or a bag over my head, but because I’m hyperventilating. Third, my face is drenched in tears and snot. Fourth, I’m shaking uncontrollably and I appear to be curled into foetal position on the floor…

A hand reaches for me, I flinch so hard I’m surprised I don’t dislocate my shoulder.

I can hear someone calling my name through what feels like a heavy weight of fog. “You’re safe” the voice tells me. Except I can’t quite believe it. Everything feels wrong. I don’t know which way is up, and which way is down. What’s real and what’s not. I can’t trust my own brain, my own senses. I should be dead, but I’m not, and my brain is too broken to wrap itself around that.

************
Some Thoughts and Aftermath:

This was difficult to write, but at the same time cathartic. And yes, to answer the question you’re probably wondering, I truly believed it. He asked me to pinpoint the moment when I stopped thinking it was play, I couldn’t. This wasn’t a case of all or nothing. This was a carefully orchestrated descent into madness. If he had just stood over me with a jigsaw telling me that I could choose between being raped before or after he cut my body into bag-sized pieces I would have laughed in his face. And yet, tiny step by tiny step, with carefully calibrated triggers he pushed me to a place where that very idea didn’t seem ludicrous, but in fact seemed like the only possibility. It was masterful. It was genius. It was utterly terrifying.

Why didn’t I safeword? Because the notion honestly did not at any point enter my brain. While it was ‘play’ I was safe and I had no need for it, and once I actually believed that it wasn’t play then a safeword was completely useless. Similarly at no point did I actually ask him to stop, to slow down, to let me go. In retrospect part of the beauty of the way he’d set the scene and implanted the triggers was that I had systematically had all my choices removed from me and therefore the very notion of choice escaped me. I did not beg because, deep inside, I knew it to be pointless.

Take a second to consider the fact, if you will, that I was never actually restrained. He left me alone in a room with nothing but a bin bag over my head and some gaffer tape on my arms which I could have easily torn off, at a point where I was convinced he was going to kill me, and I. Did. Not. Move. (and I admit I’ve been deeply uncomfortable with that piece of knowledge about myself ever since he pointed it out.) This was total and utter submission and control, solely through fear.

And finally a word on aftercare: The scene itself lasted exactly an hour. After that there was the initial post-scene madness where I apparently spent a solid 15 minutes sobbing on the floor, completely out of my mind and flinching away from any noise or touch. Once the adrenaline drop hit me I literally spent ages simply sitting shaking on the bathroom floor attempting to stop myself from throwing up through sheer will-power.

But perhaps the hardest part was watching him go through the worst case of Dom-Drop I’ve witnessed. He went to dark places, and I could tell that it scared him how easily this had come to him. He looked physically ill for hours afterwards. I could tell he needed reassurance, hugs, and touch, and I was utterly incapable of giving them to him. While my mind saw a friend in dire need of comfort, my body spent the rest of the night flinching and screaming at me to get as far away from him as possible. To say that this was difficult would be an understatement of British proportions.

Zichao · #8 (**permalink**) 05-12-11, 04:29 PM

I did actually come close to drowning once. I was messing about on the river with my sister and I - being an idiot - managed to overturn my boat and get one foot stuck in it. My thoughts in the order they occurred:

1. This is retarded.
2. Moreover, if you die here your last thought will have been "this is retarded".

I can see why people say that drowning is a relatively peaceful death. If mild irritation is the only sentiment it produces, then it does seem like one of the better options. Perhaps waterboarding is different, but I can well imagine my principal reaction being "if this goes wrong, you'll go down in history as the jackass who managed to die during a fake waterboarding session".

But I wouldn't be doing it anyway, because I just can't manage to suspend disbelief. Wish I could - I'd probably have a far more exciting life.

Gilles de Rais · #9 (**permalink**) 05-12-11, 04:42 PM

I don't know. I came close to drowning too once. I was windsurfing and I fell into the water backward.

That was fine. I was young but I had been raised near the ocean. Tumbling within water is what I do best. So I moved back toward the surface... only to be blocked by... something. I can't remember whether I immediately realise it was the sail itself, which had, obviously, fallen behind me, over me...

Without having taken a big gulp of air on the way down (falling had been unexpected), I quickly started to panic. I was at sea so there was no way to go to the bottom... And I couldn't get leverage to push the sail up.

So I was drowning and I became extremely agitated... until, in my trashing, I caught the edge of the sail, slammed it away from me and broke the surface to finally get air...

I don't remember thinking deep thoughts about death. I was just panicked enough that I was going to die for real.

Zichao · #10 (**permalink**) 05-12-11, 04:51 PM

I dare say that, like so many things, it probably takes different people differently.