Modern theater often involves some degree of interaction between actors and the audience. But paying money to be chased by a blood-soaked lunatic? New York’s Halloween season this year features “Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House” in which the public wanders from room to room, perusing gory sights. Set up in a theater in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, “Killers” is less a traditional haunted house than a walk down the grimmest byways of American criminal history. Actors lurking in dark corners of the installation play a Who’s Who of mass murderers. “Milwaukee Cannibal” Jeffrey Dahmer’s there. Ed Gein, who robbed graves and made himself a “woman suit,” inspiring the movies “Psycho” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” inhabits another room. Nearby, there’s psychopathic clown John Wayne Gacy. Though haunted houses have long been a staple of Halloween-crazed America, high-budget productions like “Killers” each year push the gore and fright factor to new limits. For throngs of scare-seekers, each paying between $20 and $60 (15 and 45 euros), the fun starts in the lobby with a display of real-life serial killer artifacts. These include primitive paintings and poems by the likes of Charles Manson, police documents, and the autopsy photos of Dahmer after he was killed in prison.
“It’s on loan from someone who wants to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons,” the show’s spokesman Daniel DeMello said.
Ushers dressed as FBI agents order the crowd into line, before letting small groups enter through the black curtains of the horror house. Those who want to be touched by the actors have fake blood daubed on their foreheads.
Once inside, the loudest sound one hears is screaming — the noise could be from an actor, like the woman watching her leg being amputated by a psychotic doctor, or it could, just as easily, be one of the paying guests.
Chainsaws, a bloodstained corridor, Ted Bundy getting the electric chair, a 16th century Hungarian countess preparing a bath of young girls’ blood — even for those not particularly frightened, the staged scenes of depravity deliver a cumulatively creepy effect.
