Playground Perverts, Gravediggers, Rats: It’s a ‘Nightmare’

Timothy Haskell is a horror snob. He has no patience for fangs and fake blood, no taste for ghosts and mummies jumping out of closets. “I’m not a fan of monster-type stuff. I’m more into creative thinking,” the goateed creator of “Nightmare,” a Lower East Side haunted house, said. “Usually at haunted houses it’s wall, wall, wall, hallway, hallway, hallway, and then a bogeyman jumps out at you. They’re not creative.”“Haunted,” which is open in a theater space on the Lower East Side until Halloween, is more unsettling than it is scary. The 13 rooms (how could they resist?) have been painstakingly designed, complete with ambient sound and spot-on props. The room belonging to the about-to-be-abducted teenage girl is glutted with knickknacks like a softball practice schedule, Skittles, and a Destiny’s Child poster.The other afternoon found Mr. Haskell nervously pacing around the theater, stepping over bundles of rope and rubber rats the size of submarine sandwiches.About a week after the show had opened, he decided the playground room wasn’t quite working, so he devised an addition: a playground pervert who gets taken away by the devil. “I thought the room needed a little something more,” Mr. Haskell said. “I tried to think of things people are really afraid of.”Actors Jonas Dixon and Nate Steinwachs, who were both about to debut as the devil in the pervert playground room (they would be working different shifts), had come by to learn their part. Neither seemed particularly nervous.”All they see is our arms,” Mr. Dixon said. “I guess we both have long arms,” added Mr. Steinwachs, who is also in the cast of a production called “Sick in the Head.” He plays a serial killer.Mr. Haskell, 31, usually works as a theater director (“Road House” was his big hit) but has spent the past three months collaborating with 70 other people from the New York theater world to create “Nightmare.” The show requires a cast of 16 actors; a troupe of 48 rotates among three shifts a night. Tickets are $15.The fear was conjured up by a team of six designers. They came up with 15 ideas, which were then narrowed down. One idea that almost made the cut was an Abu Ghraib torture room. Another idea that came close was a room with a wall of pegs that would move toward the onlookers, who would have no option but to get on all fours and crawl out of the room. Mr.Haskell loved the idea but had to rule it out because of feasibility issues; people who were physically unable to crawl would be stuck.A rat room, a dark room, and a gory nursery survived the eliminations. So did an ice room, where visitors walk over a layer of ice and see faces moving beneath the frozen surface. Originally it was designed as the Abominable Snowman room, with creatures hanging upside down from tree branches, but the designers decided it would be “cooler” if it featured people trapped under ice. “The New Jersey and Long Island types don’t like it so much,” Mr. Haskell said. “People who want Mike Meyers masks jumping out at them are often disappointed.” Of all the creepy rooms, the “buried alive” one, with a 5-foot-high glass ceiling that gravediggers pile with dirt, is the one most people run out of. “You see grown-ups screaming,” Mr. Haskell said.The show plays at half-hour intervals between 6 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., and slightly less creepy versions occur every half-hour on weekend afternoons starting at 2 p.m. Last year, when “Nightmare”first came to New York, it sold out by the end of October; this year, it already had a sold-out weekend, with about 1,500 people passing through.The show’s Web site asks people what frightens them most. Mr. Haskell has received about 500 answers. He said the most popular are being kidnapped, being impaled, drowning, dolls, darkness, rats, and clowns. Coincidentally, many of the rooms center on these themes, like the clown cornfield and the room with rat cages and fake rats scattered across the floor.“We didn’t want it to be boogie, uggie, uggie, uggie,” one of the show’s designers, Bill Coelius, said. He came up with the fan room, wherin a man stands under a bare lightbulb and slowly raises his hand to a fan.The idea came from a two-minute play he wrote for his acting troupe the Neofuturists, who put on 30 plays in 60 minutes.“We wanted to make it psychologically scary, stuff you think about long after you leave,” he went on. “We live in one of the most terrifying cities, and people are still paying to get scared. I love it.”So, I’m taking off to write a book, and this is my last regular column. It’s been a tremendous ride – what other job takes you from political clubs in Brooklyn basements to tea readers’ apartments in Athens to picklethemed street festivals? I will miss the paper and hearing from you. I hope we meet again.

Playground Perverts, Gravediggers, Rats: It’s a ‘Nightmare’

Playground Perverts, Gravediggers, Rats: It’s a ‘Nightmare’

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