Send For Good Luck

This is our new Scare-A-Friend video for Nightmare: Superstitions. we always do a themed one representing each year. Last year we did a pretend video of a goth kid filing his teeth down as if it were real, but we filmed it for Nightmare: Vampires. This year being Superstitions we did a highly effective scare based around good luck chain letters. I think you will enjoy. send to others and piss them off as well.

Nightmare Fans: check out this really cool Twitter promotion

We are doing some really cool things with our Nightmare Twitter feed this year. I think it will add to the over all fun. It will actually be a part of the experience. Keep reading:

You have to follow Nightmare Haunted House tweets, not just mine. If u follow my Tweets now, please continue to do so for I will be updating two or three times a day as soon as we begin to load in on August 23rd the crazy shit that is happening with the house. Any behind the scenes, anecdotal type of stories are going to come from me, but anything promotional is going to come from the Nightmare tweets.

Follow the Nightmare tweets here. Here is why you wanna do this. Starting with the opening night on September 24th, we will tweet one hour before start time when the box office opens a special promotion that you can only get from this tweet, and it is only good at the box office for one hour. For example, opening night starts at 7 pm. the box office will open at 6 pm. so at 6 pm we will tweet a code that you can use at the box office only between 6-7 pm. these will be for things like merchandise, free drinks at the bar, special back stage tours, going to the front of the line, getting to scare people in the house yourself, and other crazy shit that will be fun, fun FUN! but you must follow Nightmare on Twitter. To make it easier on yourself, you should allow for alerts.

The other sexy thing we will be doing with these tweets is that throughout the night we will tweet things to say that you can shout at the bad guys in the house that will make them die or go away. Or the line scarers who come up to you while you are waiting. we will give you instructions as to how to make them do certain things. It will be fun, fun FUN! So follow this Twitter account. None of these things will happen on any of our other social networks, nor on our website. This is unique to the Nightmare account, and will enhance your experience. Enjoy!

My Theories on Nightmare: Superstitions/ Haunted Houses in General

Every year I go through a very deep process of figuring out what went right and what went wrong with previous years haunted houses. I am constantly trying to conceive of ways to make Nightmare the perfect haunted house. Part of that is to figure out ways to scare people in the way they want to be scared while, for me at least, not being derivative in anyway. Meaning I don't want to just create a haunted house with the same gimmicks that all haunted houses go by, but trying to do them better. That's not good enough for me. I want to create a wholly original event that doesn't behave at all like a traditional haunted house, but scares like one. And hence is scarier because it's so new, original and unexpected. I think in year's past I have succeeded in creating pretty original concepts, but I don't always nail making them absolutely terrifying. At least not to everyone, and that is the goal.

Nightmare: Vampires was one of the most audacious attempts at creating a new kind of haunted house that I've done. In an attempt to replicate the formula of many recent horror films, i tried to create a story that slowly built with a bigger pay-off at the end. So I actually had the first ten-minutes not be scary at all; focusing only on story/ character building. I don't feel this paid off in the way I had hoped, at least with the majority of our audience. Or perhaps it did, just no one realized it. I say that because one of the main complaints I kept on hearing was how short the haunted house was, when in fact in terms of time that it took to walk through, it was the longest we've done. The reason for this, i believe, correlates with another thing i kept on hearing which was how people thought the museum part of the house was an actual museum and that the part where it got scary was the haunted house. When in truth the whole thing was a mock museum and that was the haunted house. There was a story attached to that concept about vampires attacking the very museum that celebrated them. But because the first part was set-up and focused on establishing the museum conceit it seemed like two different events, and if you look at it like that then, yes, the "haunted house" would have been entirely too short.

So how do I resolve this? How do I make it work for our less astute patrons, while maintaining a level of theatricality that i firmly believe if done right will truly make Nightmare sublime? I believe with all my heart that this would make a haunted house truly haunting. A theatrical haunted house with characters, through-line, empathy and wholly original scares and not one that is just about how many clever ways I can hide people, and how many props i can line the walls with. But I now know it has to be both. And if i can perfectly mesh these two kinds of haunted houses, friggin' forget about it. It will blow your mind (or at least torment you in your dreams for weeks to come). So when i went into the design phase of this year's house, i took all of this into consideration. Over the years, this is what i have grown to know about what a haunted house patron wants:

- strong theme
- identifiable storyline, but one that doesn't bog down the scare factor
- creative ways that people jump out and scare you
- creative set pieces and art direction
- something they haven't seen before in a haunted house
- unexpected twists
- good performers
- good masks
- scares right from the beginning that only grow in intensity
- interactivity
- want to be a part of the story
- be physically engaged (but not touched in a violent way)
- be at least 30 minutes
- end with the biggest bang of them all

am i missing anything? I hope not because this is the list i cobbled together when creating Superstitions, attempting to accomplish each. My team and I feel confident that we have accomplished this with this year's House. We are deep in the design phase. Story line and concepts have all been storyboarded, the designers have all weighed in with their designs and now all that's left is to get it up beginning August 23rd when we load-in. I am so eager for you to see Nightmare: Superstitions. If you have been a long time fan of Nightmare this will certainly be your favorite house (I promise), and if this will be your first year, then prepare to visit a haunted house like you have never seen. It will blow your mind!

Nightmare: Superstitions presents Friday the 13th!

If you ask someone what's so bad about Friday the 13th, the answer may be "because its, like, you know, Friday the 13th" or maybe "Because its bad luck". Sure. thanks. But why is it bad luck? "well because 13 is bad luck." why is 13 bad luck? "'Cause". Bingo. This is a pretty enigmatic bad luck day. Believe it or not Jason Vorhees is not the reason this superstition exists. Nor is it because it is incredibly rare, like a blue moon. It happens as rarely as any other number/day combo on the calendar. So where does it come from?

Well, a simple, unglamorous answer is 13 is considered an unlucky number on its own because 12, in numerology, is considered a complete number (months of the year, signs in the zodiac, numbers on a clock, number of apostles, tribes of Israel, etc. etc) and 13 unsettles that. and Friday is considered no bueno because in certain parts of the world, especially christian cultures, it is the day Jesus was crucified. So it is a particularly bad day when you combine the two.

But that's not so sexy. In my research there are dozens of theories as to why this is bad luck; Wikipedia can help you out here. However, for Nightmare Superstitions I am dedicating one section to Friday the 13th, and I am basing it on one of the oldest and more popular theories - The Knights Templar. As you may know this was a group of militant monks who collected and protected Christian antiquities, most notably, according to legend, the Holy Grail (i say it like i believe any of it. but it does lend itself to a creepy story). The tale is that the Knights had achieved great power and influence as Christianity spread during the Crusades. King Phillip of France, for his part, wanted to squash that influence and perhaps reap the benefits of raiding their coffers by arresting the Knights for a number of crimes. He did a sweep of the country, arresting anyone associated with the organization. And when did this happen? Well Friday the 13th, October 1307 of course! (by the way, the best year for the Haunted House industry is a year where Friday the 13th falls in October so you can capitalize on two creepy events in one month instead of just Halloween. Not a bad luck day for haunters at all).

Nightmare: Superstitions is going to bring back the monks in a bazaar sacrifice that you will have to experience to believe. Just one of 13 superstitions explored in our most twisted Haunted House yet - Nightmare: Superstitions.

My real, but not so comprehensive, review of NMOES

Although not everyone knew it was a fake review that i wrote for NMOES last week (despite the fact that it was clearly noted at the end of the review), i wanted to chime in after i really saw this movie. However, i don't feel like writing anything extensive because the fake review was one for the ages.

So basically, the movie was not nearly as bad as ALL of the reviews said. In fact, it isn't much better or worse than the original. Critics have nostalgia on their minds because most of them were teens when the movie came out so they feel like it was better. But truth be told, it was kind of just the same. which isn't to say it was scary at all. I realized that if u make the movie in the way that they ended up making this movie - which is to say as a slasher flick just like the original, then it really doesn't matter who plays Freddy. The movie wastes the talents of Jackie Earle Haley. Freddy, in at least how they decided to tell this story, says one-liners, lurks, pounces and then kills. With all due respect to Robert Englund, pretty much anyone can do this. I was hoping they were going to make a more complex character than either the original or this remake did.

But this remake was made in the same vain as the original, and that is what i consider to be the flaw of the film. But it is indeed well made, and no less scary than the original imho. so there.

First to Review: Nightmare on Elm Street remake

I'm Continuing my reviews of horror movies that no one else has reviewed yet because of my elite access to these films. There hasn't been a major horror movie release since my last review of The Crazies, so here's the latest:

Nightmare On Elm Street*

It is with great pleasure that I am able to give the most highly anticipated horror movie in recent memory, the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, an enthusiastic and ebullient review. The wait is over, and it is worth it! Gone are the Henny Youngman one-liners, here is a truly disturbing and dark horror story that is genuinely twisted and crowd pleasing!

The story is more of a re-imagining of the original, much in the same way as the Rob Zombie Halloween franchise. It does, however, hold completely true to the mythology of the original series if not the story being told. That story begins some 15 years earlier when Fred Krueger was a janitor at a local elementary school. He was generally regarded as very very creepy, and odd, but not necessarily evil in anyway (although the students were in fact quite cruel to him, as is evidenced in the scene where someone hangs a blow up doll in the cafeteria with a sign that says "Even this doll wouldn't f*** Freddy Krueger). His father, however, was a despised local politician and Krueger becomes the victim of a smear campaign designed to embarrass his father. Because his locker is decorated with pictures of Dakota Fanning and Natalie Portman from The Professional, and because he is generally creepy with bad skin and a unintelligible lisp (a choice made no doubt by the brilliant actor Jackie Earle Haley) they concoct a child molestation charge against him, exaggerating an event where he helped a girl reach the water fountain. Having done nothing wrong, and generally a decent fellow, he becomes a tragic character when a few of the parents take it to another level unintended by the original conspirators, and set his janitorial closet on fire with him in it.

A simple man with a learning disability, Freddy rocks himself to sleep as the fire envelopes him while singing that creepy children's song that later becomes the recognizable "one-two Freddy's coming for you" theme. But what isn't answered, and I was kind of hoping would be, is why dreams? What was so special about this murder and this person that makes him come back into people's dreams? There was no voodoo curse that makes it so, nor any other legend for that matter. Just that he sings himself to sleep before he burns to death. But I will give the creators a pass because the movie nails it on pretty much everything else.

We then skip ahead 15 years, and the town seems to be a brighter place. In the earlier scenes everything had a gray hue, but now its sunny... ergo, things are better! and we hone in on 6 kids in an English class. These are going to be our protagonists, and yep you guessed it, they are the children of the conspirators who originally made the child molestation case against Krueger. They are your average teenagers in movies like this. There is the wise-ass Chance who is throwing a baseball at the head of the teacher as a prank when he is introduced to us; his stupid blonde girlfriend Claire; Harold, the black guy and his sassy girlfriend Tameeka; and then our heroine Nancy. That makes 5. The 6th character throws a curve ball into the whole traditional teenage slasher flick thing. It is an Inuit woman of about 30 who wears traditional dress and speaks poor English. But she plays Nancy's best friend and live-in exchange student. Her name is Chatook (and to let the obvious cat out of the bag, a dream catcher does play into this). We are introduced to their clan and their doings, some mild tomfoolery, and some general set-up that gets us to know our main characters before we start killing them. But refreshingly the dialogue is witty, the edits are long, and the filming style is interesting (with long shots, first person POV, and other unusual risks not associated with these kind of films).

But then the fun begins. Nancy walks by Freddy Krueger's old house. We don't know its his house, we never saw it in the beginning, but it is the most decrepit house on the block. One can assume that Nancy takes this trip everyday, but this day is different. There is an old man that appears out of nowhere by the mail box as she walks by. She gets startled, and he looks at her with his cataract eyes and says, "He's coming for you", and she says "who is?" and he says "the sins of our fathers...(pause) he's coming for you" and begins to cackle. She then says, "I'm sorry, who is?" and he says, "I'm sorry, what?" and she says "No seriously, you said something to me and i want you to clarify or next time don't say shit to me" and he says, "Sorry Miss" and then he begins to masturbate which does disturb her and this makes her run home.

That night it begins. The first dream just comes across as a scary dream. a really scary dream; perhaps the scariest in the movie. In it she hears a baby crying. The cries are from the other room, so she goes to check it out and when she goes in the hallway it gets long by like a mile. On her way to the cries, which start to sound more like pigs screaming, she passes different room with all sorts of disturbing imagery. And this is what makes this horror movie unlike few in Hollywood. It doesn't just settle on how many startles per minute it can muster, but tries to leave you haunted well beyond your viewing. It cares about mood, ambiance, imagery, tone, etc. She passes one room and there's a giant grasshopper playing the banjo, another room is snowing and two snow men are having homosexual sex, another has LT, Lawrence Taylor, benching 200 pounds of veal, and finally she comes to the room at the end of the hall where the cries are coming from. She goes to the crib and the baby has Freddy Krueger's badly burned face and she looks at him and he says "taco" and then she wakes up screaming.

well, i can't give away every gory detail by describing each nightmare, but everyone is murdered in horrific fashion. And not all with Freddy's patented knife glove. In fact he only wears that for the climactic nightmare, otherwise he mostly kills his victims with a Snub Nose revolver. Otherwise, the story mostly follows the original where Nancy keeps on having these dreams, and they get worse and worse, and her friends meanwhile keep getting hurt or murdered and no one believes any one's story. The thing about this Freddy Krueger as played by Jackie Earle Haley, light years better than Robert Englund (i know that's blasphemy among horror fans, but this guy truly rocks it. Just a better actor, flat and simple) is that he comes off as a real person. Sure, he lives in your dreams, but it amazingly feels like something that could happen. When i was a kid and i saw the original I had trouble sleeping. It truly messed me up. But obviously as I've grown older, scary stuff like that doesn't really phase me anymore and I appreciate it almost entirely on an entertainment level. But this one made me sleep with the bathroom light on. It got me.

Clearly, i recommend The Nightmare On Elm Street remake. It does something that other horror movies aren't doing - it takes its time. A lot of audiences may be turned off by the 3.5 hour run time, but by the time you get to the end you realize how necessary that was to create this horror masterpiece. Every character is completely explored; there is no collateral damage. Every person killed by Freddy we get to know. We spend enough time with each of them that we come to care about it when they get murdered. The film allows the story to be told without the pressure of making a clean, formulaic horror movie. This is a popcorn flick, no doubt, but it does so on its own terms. And word of warning, there is tons of nudity in this flick, done tastefully and artfully. It is all necessary, but if you ever wondered if Freddy's penis also got burned, you will get the answer. And the sex scene between him and Nancy is truly disturbing.

Ok, that's it, i don't want to give anymore away! I am giving too much away already, being the first to opine about this movie that doesn't even open up until Friday, April 30th. Hopefully, this review encourages you to go and see it. And you do need to see it!

* Important note about this review - I HAVE NOT ACTUALLY SEEN THIS MOVIE. SORRY

Silly video of my trip to the Haunt Show

Hey, the title says it all!