On Haunted Houses of Horror…
My mom and sister were talking about Haunted Houses yesterday, and I couldn’t help but remember the one and only time I was scared absolutely shitless—- When I was five or six or so, the (then-existent) Denver Jaycees put on a Haunted House next to Rock Springs Elementary School. Now, my sister’s biggest memory of that place is when my dad happened to lean on a prop coffin, unknowingly trapping a ghost or whatnot that was to jump out and spook us. I, however, vividly recall the final room of the tour, in which order: all the lights went out; a strobe light started flickering; a masked man barged out of a closet, yielding a chainless chain saw that was revving at full throttle. I have never been so fast, as that night’s dash through the exit door and into the cool Autumn air surely broke the Sound Barrier.
These days, the final room in my “Ideal Haunted House” would be small and empty, with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly simultaneously projecting on the walls. I’m not quite sure what that says about me, though…
