Horror Show
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Halloween is nearly upon us, and New Yorker Timothy Haskell has found an artful way in inspire terror in Gotham dwellers. Mr. Haskell describes his haunted house, which opens to the public this weekend, as “the David Lynch haunted house, not the Wes Craven haunted house.” Psychological trickery and creepy surprises prompt visitors’ screams rather than cliched ghosts or vampires.
Mr. Haskell and his producing partner, Travis Stewart, chose 10 New York artists (whittled from nearly 100 submissions) to each create a room in a 9,000-square-foot section of the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side.
The tour begins with a bit of voodoo. Viewers should beware the whiny man in their midst, who is punished with a swift jab to a stuffed doll’s torso for his derisive comments on the room’s decor. Husband-and-wife team Victor and Kim Catano created the scene together. But when watching Mrs. Catano stir a large soup pot featuring Mr. Catano as the main ingredient, one has to wonder who took charge in the planning.
The next encounter is with Maura Kelley as the figure in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” The image comes to life as she babbles about having been trapped in the painting since 1893, the year Munch painted it. (A “Scream” canvas was stolen in August from Oslo’s Munch Museum, but unfortunately for art historians, Ms. Kelley won’t disclose where she lives.)
Ms. Kelley’s is not the only intellectual allusion embedded in the high-brow haunted house. Another attraction features two “scientists” explaining the dilemma of Schroedinger’s Cat. The original quantum theory paradox proposed that a cat, placed in a box with a radioactive atom, could hover between life and death until the presence of an observer collapsed the system and killed the cat. In the spooky version, an animatronic cat is smeared with “blood” (and licorice) and the two actors in the room are equally gruesomely made up. They extrapolate the paradox to human life, and suffice to say there’s more to the room than meets the already disgusted eye. Those who care to linger might appreciate a blackboard marked with a formula in which “alpha = death.”
The room that will likely produce the most shrieks – as opposed to the shivers or appreciative laughter that other scenes provoke – was created by the Kass and Schaeffer Horror Division. The audience files onto a wooden bench and watches as a seated man slowly reaches his hand toward a huge unprotected fan. Another man turns a dimmer switch and the lights flicker. A second later, the lights cut out and the audience is faced with the horrifying sensation of – well, it would spoil the fun to reveal the disgusting details.
It’s not all blood and guts. The radio theater group 31 Down collaborated on a sound sensory room outfitted to look like a private eye’s office. A bumpy floor covering produces screams, rattles, and wails in response to where the room’s investigators tread. The word “KILL” is scrawled on a subway map over the Delancey Street F-train stop, which is the closest to the cultural center. Another room provides gore-by-implication when the audience watches the shadow of a strangling behind a mesh screen.
If all these attractions fail to strike fear in viewers’ hearts, there’s always the gothic setting itself, a rambling former school building that’s the perfect backdrop for a good scare.
Through Sunday, October 31,Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m.-midnight, Sunday, October 31, 7 p.m.-1 a.m., tours start every five minutes, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, 107 Suffolk St., between Rivington and Delancey streets, 212-946-2098, $20 general, $15 for children ages 16 and under (not recommended), $5 to take tour again when finished, no reservations.