Part of the appeal for the scarers and the scare-ees are people's reactions when a screaming banshee or a bloody vampire strips away their defenses and reduces them to their emotional core. The reactions people make to monsters in the dark range from the mundane to the insane.
"I know if I go low at someone and they cuss, they're more likely to say the S-word but if I come high over their head, they're more likely to drop an F-bomb," says Allen Hopps, the creative director for Dark Hour Haunted House. "It's just how you're reacting to different types of stimulus so there's a general consensus if something comes at you low, they drop the 'S' and if something comes at you high, they drop the F-bomb."
Some of the stranger reactions on scare actors' resumes give them something to shoot for around Halloween time.
"I was working in a foyer-type area where I was hiding between a wall and a shelf," says Molly Macabre, Dark Hour's lead makeup artist, who worked as a scare actor at the 13th Street Morgue Haunted House park in Red Oak. "This group passed through and all I did was pop out the upper half of my body with a screech and this lady shot her dentures out of her mouth and ran away. She never came back for them."
Christian Heidelberg, a Dark Hour scare actor who's been going to the house since he was 13, started out his year as a scarer by taking one for the team right between the eyes, or rather, right in the eyes.
Dark Hour creative director Allen Hopps says scare actors are trained to watch guests' reactions and maintain just enough distance to make an effective scare.
Courtesy of Dark Hour Haunted House
Heidelberg says he didn't suffer any permanent damage from the eye poke and understood it was just an accident because "I freaked her out," he says.
Actor Travis Carrick has played Dracula in the Dark Hour house for the last three years. During his first year he gave a couple (and himself) quite a scare after he had a nasty fall.
Carrick's first season in the haunt put him in Dracula's piano room, complete with curtains perfect for hiding and a grand piano that he could pounce on to scare people just as they tried to leave.
"There was this couple and I got them really good with the first scare," Carrick says. "Then as they continued further through the room, I snuck around behind them. I jumped on the piano and they fell down to the ground and jumped back and all that jazz but I took a misstep on the piano and I fell right off the piano and the piano is a solid 4 feet off the ground. So I fell off the piano and I believe I blacked out very momentarily.
"So I got the scare, and then I blacked out for like a blink of a second," Carrick adds. "So I came to and I was on the ground, and I looked over to my left and I saw a pair of shoes on the ground and the first thought I had was 'Whose shoes are those?' I came to the conclusion that I scared one of these people, I think I scared the husband out of his shoes so hard that I knocked myself out. There wasn't any feet in the shoes."
Hopps says there's no way to predict how guests will react to cast members as they pop out of the darkness, but there are methods and steps they train actors to take to protect them and their guests.
"[Hopps] teaches us if you have a curtain pop, you pop out and immediately recoil," Carrick says. "You can still get a good scare at a distance."
Hopps says they also train cast members to watch for sudden changes in their victims' behavior so they know when to back off after a scare and make sure they don't chase after someone using more than than three steps.
"If you're within 3 feet, then you're in swinging range," Hopps says. "If you break that 3-foot barrier, you wanna get in and out really quick so no one has any time to swing on you. The closer you are to someone, the quieter you need to be because the last thing you wanna do is scream in someone's ear and it pisses them off. Fear and anger can't live in the same brain."
