A little more about The Experiment

The Experiment that we did during Fairy Tales was a fun little lark that did scare the bejeesus out of a select few people from the audience every night, but I know that more people wanted to be the guinea pig, and weren't given the opportunity. We are remounting the event as "Nightmare (Before Christmas) The Experiment" because we know this has the potential to be both wildly entertaining and terrifying at the same time. As well as funny, to be honest. we all enjoy watching someone freak out about something from the comforts of our seats.

So we have taken the experiments we did during Fairy Tales and fleshed them out a ton. There were only 4 of them, but they are now much more elaborate. For instance, we brought a live rat out in October. And that's all we did with it. Well, we are still going to use the rat, but this time someone has a choice to make based on an elaborate contraption they will be put in. Either have a rat jump on them or keep it from doing so by doing something very disgusting. Very Saw movies i know, but one of the many fun little bits we have lined up for you. Are you tough enough?

we also now have 10 experiments instead of 4. We are concentrating on fears that all human beings are programmed to respond to and feel for the sake of human preservation. Natural selection if you will. So we will be conducting experiments on pain, cruelty, dread (fight or flight), humiliation, powerlessness, underachievement, heart-break, the dark, repulsion, and being followed/ watched. Not in that order, and no way i am telling you anymore what each one involves. You will have to be intrepid enough to find out.

Want an adrenaline rush this holiday season? dare to weather The Experiment. You will be glad you did. It will jump start you for a marathon session of shopping for bullshit no one needs that they will discard within the week. These memories, however, will last forever!

Tickets for The Experiment on sale now!

Tickets are now on sale for Nightmare (Before Christmas): The Experiment. Very limited seating. get your tickets here

Nightmare (Before Christmas): The Experiment

For many, our second attraction, The Experiment, to this year's haunted house was their favorite part. One complaint is that only a few people were able to get experimented on and everyone else had to act as a voyeur. Well, we have fixed that. We are remounting it as Nightmare (Before Christmas): The Experiment. Everyone who wants to be experimented on should get messed with at least a little. We will have 10 experiments as opposed to 4, and even the 4 have been greatly expanded. The show will be 50 minutes long, and it will be fun, exciting, terrifying, unsettling, and may break you and your gf/bf up. We are incredibly eager to show you what we have in store for you. It will be like being in the scariest room in any haunted house and being tormented in it for 50 minutes. And it will be Christmas themed! More details about the happenings in the show soon, but tickets will be on sale 11/18 on our website at www.nightmarenewyork.com. You're gonna love it. I promise.

This Year Was Tough, but Amzing at the Same Time

I ain't gonna lie. Nightmare Fairy Tales was a tough year. We went out on a limb a little with Fairy Tales, but truly thought it was the best way to reenact fairy tales in a scary, haunted house kind of way. I also wanted to create a haunted house that people would think was fun, entertaining, and quite frankly, beautiful. Critics agreed, and loved what we were up to, but many traditionalist felt otherwise. I do know, however, that a large part of our audience LOVED it, so it is so hard to get a beat on these things. i heard from many regulars that this was amongst their favorites of our houses. But what saddened and disheartened me the most was seeing people who claimed they had gone for several years saying they liked this one the least and will now never be coming back. What? you must not come every year because if you did you would know that we change it from top to bottom and we have had off years some years when the next year was the most terrifying thing we have ever done. That's what happens when you create a new show. It's like any other show. If i just rehashed the things that i know worked i would just take the most successful house we have ever done and keep doing it. It would save me a ton of money, I'll tell you that. A fact that i thought was truly appreciated by our core contingency. For people to tell me things like this is very sad indeed. And for them to rail against us online and elsewhere is confounding. You know that hurts our business don't you? would you like for Nightmare to be no more? I don't think you do. Love it or not, Nightmare has become an institution for Halloween in this city, and us taking a theme and giving you a new show every year is something people have come to look forward to. Be careful of how powerful your voice can be. And lovers? MAKE YOUR VOICE MORE KNOWN! :-)

But what made me truly enraged were people who had never been to Nightmare before and don't understand our ethos and just would say the most vitriolic things wherever they could completely without context. That hurt us. To be honest, how vocal detractors were truly hurt business and has made me rethink the future of the whole enterprise. I understand that a mistake i made might have been not being more clear about how this house was different than others both in the world and from our own; the level of theatricality and the highly stylized nature of the settings. Personally, this house suited my own tastes and proclivities, but i understand when you make a populist event you need to either be clear about how it is either not a populist event, or make it one. So i could have been more clear in the marketing i suppose, but it was not intentional. My process was the same as any year, trying to create New York's Most Horrifying Haunted House, and was hoping i had. Again, it is hard to know when you take some of the risks I took this year how they are going to translate once audiences start walking through. I learned a ton. There are many things that i will not be doing again. There will be a Nightmare next year, I hope, but your support is obviously the most important part.

And I am doing Killers next year not in response to people wanting things to be more terrifying, but because I have always wanted to, and the subject lends itself to the theatricality i hope to employ every year, as well as its innate fear factor. It is a naturally very scary subject. If anything is fool proof in this world, it's that i can make a house about Serial Killers terrifying. I will definitely be bringing the horror back. Don't you worry. For people who didn't think this year was scary enough, don't worry. I will do nothing but figure out countless ways to torment you relentlessly this coming year. You want it, You'll get it. It will be my pleasure.

Announcing 2012's theme: Nightmare is Killer

For those of you who want the terrorizing back, the blood, the gore, the trauma... well next year we are doing this for you. Nightmare is Killer will be about Serial Killers. Despite numerous pleas to do so in the past (perhaps the most requested theme), I'm finally going to do it. Serial Killers. So, like every year, I am opening it up to you to tell me your favorite ones (ick, you have a favorite?) But there are some ground rules. First, i have mixed feelings about the theme because real people have lost real lives from these monsters, so no killer who is alive nor whose victim's families are still alive*. i know that cuts back on some of your favorites, but i don't want to glorify these people any more than they already have been while real people can still be hurt by it. Second, no child killers or pedophiles*. I have a kid, just can't do it. Third, let's cut down on the violence against women*. I know I will have to include a few. Some iconic ones include Jack the Ripper after all, but i want there to be an even distribution of killers. Fourth, let's find as many women sociopaths as there are men. So if you suggest a man, try and also suggest a woman. They kill people too! So have at it.

* Update as of 1/3/2012: so i have gotten tons of comments saying that my parameters are too limiting, and that i am wussing out by having any restrictions at all. And your right! I feel the same way, I was just trying to be sensitive to what i thought the large part of our audience felt. It seems like I am being told otherwise, so have at it. I would still like to have an even distribution of men and women, and I can't think of any child killers that anyone really wants to see reenacted, but I know i need to consider the Gacys, Dahmers and Bundys of the world, which my first tenet - no one whose victims families are alive - violates. I will certainly not be celebrating these awful people or glorifying them. they are horrific individuals who were scary as shit. If chosen, in no way will they be romanticized. They will be presented as the monsters they were.

New stuff in da house

So Nightmare is a completely fluid art installation. We are not graced with any preview period before people start chiming in everywhere about how they feel about it. We do previews with small groups of people before we open, but nothing prepares us for what people think about it until we get a real crowd. You see, I used to think New Yorkers were too critical for me to just do the same house every year. They needed a new show to keep them coming back. So when i create a wholly new haunted house, it is an original piece every year. Without having been tested and trialed. The more I do this, though, it seems like i should just do what other haunted houses do and basically do the same thing every year with a few minor tweaks. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I should just take the best moments in all of the houses i have created and just make one house that i do basically the same every year, right? One that takes no chances and I know works because i have already done it. I say this because if i ever read another comment that doesn't appreciate the fact that we rebuild this thing every year so that you have a completely new and different experience, then i am going to punch someone in the face. I build an entirely new haunted house EVERY YEAR with new props, new set pieces, new costumes, EVERY YEAR! I do not recycle much of anything at all, save a few set pieces. Does it matter?

That said, every single day we are adding something new. sometimes it is something small, sometimes it is something that doesn't work and we get rid of it, but never does my team and I stop working on it. This past weekend we added several very successful scares. The Billy Goat in Billy Goats Gruff has a new friend and a new routine, as well as a new costume. He is pretty terrifying right now. There are more wolves and bears than before, and the final descent out of the forest has been more fleshed out to look like a forest and is now teeming with more animal attackers. why did it take me so long to do this stuff? Because our haunted house is a living, breathing organism. we need to see what happens and let it grow. We added things because we learned that we needed to add these things. We are never satisfied. Come Halloween, hell, come November 5th, the house will be a different creature from day one. We obviously hope for the better. Clearly it is our intention to nail it from day one, but when you create an entirely new experience every year, you can't know if you have until you do it.

My big question is, should I just do a house that i know works from year's past, or should i continue to do a different house every year? please chime in.

The Fairy Tales

Some of you love it. Some of you hate it. Some of you think it is not scary at all, while others are terrified. Some of you think it is cheap and everything is flat because we couldn't afford realistic props and set pieces and that we bought our masks from Ricky's while others see the artistry and understand we made a style choice and that many great artists painted the whole thing from top to bottom like it was there own twisted canvas and that our masks were actually hand sculpted and then set in plastic after each unique mask was crafted around the actors face. Some if you see this.

When you make a haunted house the way i do some people are gonna love it some are not. I don't make them with the sole idea of how can I scare them at every turn. I can make that house easy. In fact I have in the Bronx with Nightmare Z-Day. It's a complete scarefest with zombies everywhere. No question Fairy Tales has greater artistic aspirations. For better or worse. I get it. I do love it personally, but to appease our bloodthirsty audience we have added a bevy of new scares this week and will continue to do so through Halloween.

But one thing that I want everyone to "get" are the fairy tales that are portrayed. I don't believe they have actually been enunciated anywhere. Until now. Here are the Fairy Tales you will encounter the moment you walk through the door (in way or another. Some are just referenced or are installations in the lobby or are just represented by one of it's characters floating around):

The Little Match Girl
Little Miss Muffet
Rapunzel
Hansel and Gretel
Snow White
Little Red Riding Hood
The Boy Who Left Home to Learn About Fear
Billy Goats Gruff
Blue Beard
Red Shoes
Pinocchio
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
Rumpstilsken
Goldilocks

There you have it. I actually got one email that said "how's this about Fairy Tales? I didn't see a single fairy tale?" um, okay, gonna be hard to appease that one. Pretty hard to escape realizing that, but just in case, now you know what they are.