Dozer the Evil Clown, aviator goggles resting on his bloodied forehead, has led a difficult life. We’re talking shop, and he’s telling me about his hardscrabble existence as an evil entertainer. On this cold October evening, the line to get into the Dungeon of Doom haunted house, on the concrete midway of the Lake County Fairgrounds in Grayslake, has grown into a 90-minute snake of sullen teenagers smoking and shifting weight and texting. Normally, Dozer would be hazing this line, warming up patrons for the horrors that await inside. But Dozer, whose real name is Martin Nelson, was called over by Krawl, whose real name is John Seaman. Krawl resembles some primate biker from the island of Dr. Moreau, his rag-doll costume studded with spikes, his nose pugged. Kasper the Unfriendly wanders over, too.
Any hecklers? I ask.
“Do we get hecklers?” Dozer says, and the whole motley crew — indeed, squint and they resemble Motley Crue, circa 1984 — bursts into a snarling cackle. They huddle around, flashing sinister smiles, relishing the opportunity to spill trade secrets. “If you’re talking, ‘Do we get stupid people who mess with you?’ Then yes,” says Krawl. “Two or three times a week, at least. People don’t realize how often.”
“Two, three times a night,” corrects Kasper the Unfriendly. “And that’s everything from taunts to complete physical altercations. I mean, total throw-downs, where you roll around on the ground. Some legitimately try to defend themselves, which is understandable — they’re surprised. That’s instinctual. But some — it’s like they’re not aware of the concept of entertainment.”
Dozer nods, his homicidal face turning serious: “Man, let me tell you, in this job I have been punched in the face and pushed and knocked down and bitten and hit with purses and stabbed with umbrellas and stabbed with pens and shoved and kissed and hugged and grabbed and screamed at and sworn at. And I’ve been grinded on by women — that happens to you guys, too, right?”
Everyone nods.
Kasper snarls.
This Halloween, if you plan to visit a haunted house, while you’re standing in line, fretful and jumpy, consider a dark seasonal nuisance: the haunted house heckler. He spars with ghouls. He loudly exclaims his absence of fright. He critiques stage blood. He nitpicks the zombies. He brawls. He is often intoxicated, operators say. But just as often he is (and he tends to be a he) an unadulterated killjoy, all trick and no treat. He is the nightclub heckler with a twist — he is inches from the target of his heckle.
“Every frickin’ night we see them, every frickin’ year,” says Ken Spriggs, who runs the Dream Reapers Haunted House in Melrose Park.
“It’s like a war out there between the customers and our monsters,” says Ben Armstrong, who runs a huge haunted house in Atlanta and consults for others around the country.
A serious problem?
More like something to consider, a byproduct of an industry once associated with charities and rubber masks, and now earning $1 billion annually and associated with big-ticket thrills — an industry, incidentally, that supersized in the ’90s, after the International Association of Haunted Attractions was founded during a meeting of haunted house owners at a Schaumburg Holiday Inn. (In fact, the industry has grown so quickly that there is a competing group, the Haunted House Association.)
With those newfound economics have come a haunted house culture that rarely merely jumps out of a bush and yells “Boo!” anymore. (At The Eleventh Hour in Elk Grove, actors are told they’ll be fired for shouting anything as lame as “Boo!”) No, haunted house actors now growl and writhe and startle, and, at times, so do the reactions. The stories are legend. Ghouls speak of patrons, freaked out of their minds, who lift vampires off the ground, throwing them into cardboard walls — pure fight-or-flight response. They speak of drunken couples who take drunken swings at their heads. They talk of teenagers who sneak off to urinate on automatronic skeletons (unaware of the security cameras), and of a general lack of respect for the spooky entertainer.
On a recent evening, for instance, at The Fear haunted house outside Navy Pier, Killer the Welcomer, also known as the genial Bryan Brown, hunched and growling and covered in “Braveheart”-ish war paint, tries wrangling the line of customers. A middle-aged woman stands at the head of the line, staring straight ahead, trying not to explode with laughter. Killer gets in her face.
“Not scared,” she says.
“Not asking,” he says.
“Fine.”
“Stop laughing.”
Killer spots a young couple entering the line, trying to step around the maze of airline terminal-like lanes, a network of chains and poles. “No cutting!” he shouts. “Why?” the guy half of the couple yells back. “Because I said so,” Killer says. “That’s why!”
“Haunted houses have become such productions that the customer has become the star of a live show,” says Larry Kirchner, president of the St. Louis-based Haunted House Association. “And we’ve given the customer tons of free rein on that stage. So unfortunately, because it’s a dark environment and people think they can get away with more, some of our customers get a little carried away.”
“Let’s put it this way,” says Spriggs of Dream Reapers, “and this is very, very important for you to understand: Never ever hold a canned goods drive at a haunted house. You will be hit with one of those things. I was once hit with a can of corn.”
There are two kinds of haunted house hecklers. The first kind is verbal. He is the most common, though the least problematic. “They are always tough guys — guys who will not be scared — and they usually say, ‘That’s not scary’ or ‘This sucks’ or ‘Your makeup sucks,'” says James Zace, who (as the demon Clock Face) works the front doors of Eleventh Hour. “The best way to deal with it is to defuse it immediately — to take little verbal chops at them, cut them down, come right back at them, keep it fun.” More than one ghoul interviewed for this story said the best way to shut them up, especially the belligerent teenage boys, is to pull them out of the line and loudly announce to the rest of the group that this guy will be going through by himself.
Ironically, asked about their heckling, self-proclaimed hecklers said they assumed a little back-and-forth was welcomed, even expected. “I’m a heckler, oh definitely. I blow kisses at the monsters,” says Michele Casalco of Downers Grove, leaving The Fear. “I don’t scare easy. But it’s fun. My feeling is that if they were scarier I probably wouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Her friend, Alan Pierce, agrees: “They get in my face, so I get in their face. They growl, I growl back, even harder. But you know, I think they enjoy it. I catch them cracking up at times. It’s an interactive thing. We’re supposed to do it, to some extent.”
The second kind of heckler, of course, is the physical heckler — though telling the difference between malevolent and benevolent spirits can be tough. “If you’ve ever scared someone and caught them off guard,” says Kirchner, “you know people throw their hands up suddenly, or even whack you without thinking about what they’re doing.” Armstrong’s worst moment as a haunted entertainer came the night he was dressed as a werewolf. He spotted fresh kill in the parking lot, a woman dressed in a fairy costume, wings, the whole bit. He crept alongside her car. He steadied himself, then he pounced. “She beat the stew out of me. She started pummeling. She looked harmless but she was drunk and rambunctious, and I guess I misjudged.”
Indeed, so prevalent is the haunted house heckler that security cameras are now common in haunted houses. The most paranoid deploy metal detectors. And then some haunted houses simply bring in improvisational troupes to school its ghouls on snappy comebacks. Bob Turner, a haunted house operator in northwest Ohio, teaches acting techniques (and verbal sparring) at the industry’s annual convention, as does haunted house consultant Armstrong. Peter Koklamamis, who owns Dungeon of Doom, has his actors sign off on a 13-page book of advice. Among the tips: “Listen to the person, identify the person, then eat those words and spit them back at them. In most cases, we’ve heard it before anyway.”
Jerk the Jester has.
Back on the Lake County Fairgrounds midway, Jerk has wandered over to our little summit on hecklers. His chin juts a mile from his face, a shriveled cucumber beneath an obscene mask of a grin. “It’s hard to offend me,” he says. “But if it gets physical, bets are off. The guy on stilts” — he points to a wobbly Dr. Jekyll towering above the crowd — “he was body checked the other night.” As the story goes, according to Koklamamis, a man’s wife was chosen for the teleporter phone booth trick. But when the man exited the house he couldn’t find his wife and panicked. Koklamamis said he asked the man if he had been in a fight with her. The man said he hadn’t. The man ran to his car. Then he returned, even more panicked. That’s when the man allegedly punched the stilted monster, knocking him to the ground. The police promptly did their thing.
Jerk sighs.
Dungeon of Doom, one of the busiest in the region, typically has a couple of security officers standing by, and a handful of cadets, just in case. But within the house itself, a ghoul fends for himself. Jerk watches a crowd exit the fairgrounds. “Can I get a picture, ugly?” a woman yells.
“Do I look like a cute giant mouse to you?” he replies, weary.
A small boy calls over.
“Aren’t you the same guy who works at Six Flags? In the summer? You’re the same guy! I know it.”
Jerk comes back fast.
“Aren’t you the same guy on the Internet who wears a pink thong all the time? I know it.”
The kid smiles tightly. Jerk the Jester turns away and grins, but then he has no choice.
———-
cborrelli@tribune.com
See related story, “The Halloween guy’s top 5,” Play section, Page 1
