Every Halloween season, the theater department runs Brookdale Haunted Theater, a creatively constructed maze with horrifying sights and scare actors that work together to terrify innocent visitors. Scare actors are traditionally current Brookdale students, but anyone, including non-students, can audition.
Each year, there is a theme. This year’s was “Out of Time,” so each room within the theater was made to look like it came from a different era, featuring such scenes as a 1950s diner infested with roaches and the undead, a Victorian vampire’s den with splashes of blood on the walls, a cult village from the 1970s, and more.
This year, I auditioned and was selected to be a scare actor. I played the Grim Reaper for seven of the nine nights that tours came through. I am a current Brookdale student enrolled in classes four days a week, but I am not an active member of theater club. In fact, this is the first time I’ve done anything with theater ever. Did I even do well at the audition? Oh, absolutely not.
But thankfully, I was brought on to The Haunted Theater just the same. And, oh my god, was it so much fun. Did it steal most of the weekends of October from me? Well, yeah. Did I have to stand in a small dark room for hours waiting for signals? I did. Did I and other scare actors and crew members have to deal with visitors who weren’t so innocent? Ask any of us, and we won’t shut up about how annoying some tours were.
But let’s go back to the beginning. There were four group audition sessions held at the end of September. I made sure to be there for the first one because all four were held over just two days, and I knew that I would miss all of them if I didn’t make the effort to go to the first one.
During the first group audition, there were an impressive 24 people there. I recognized someone there who I honestly stuck by the entire audition, and we would go on to be placed in the same room during Haunted Theater.
But did I think that I was going to pass the auditions while I was there? Absolutely not. As a part of the audition, we were told to play the role of a waitress. Another auditioner and I began to play out a story. I played the waitress bringing him his eggs, and he played the angry customer who smashed the imaginary plate on the ground in frustration because those eggs were clearly cooked over-easy rather than scrambled. I then rushed to get his imaginary meal from the imaginary kitchen, and he proceeded to get even angrier and get into an imaginary fistfight with the imaginary cook.
After that audition, the organizers reminded all of us that we were applying to the role of SCARE actors. Based off the laughs of the couple of us involved with the spontaneous comedy skit, what we had just done was not worthy of a horror performance.
It was for that reason and others that I didn’t believe I had made it into The Haunted Theater. But a few days later, I found out that not only did I make it in, but I got a role that I could’ve never dreamed of getting, The Grim Reaper.
OK, well, that was really the only role I would’ve ever gotten. I was undeniably the tallest cast member of Haunted Theater, and I had failed a test in the audition where I had to keep a straight face as judges walked up to each person auditioning. So, obviously, I got the one role that needed a tall scare actor and one that required a mask. Nonetheless, I was the Grim Reaper on Halloween once and have always loved the concept of an eerie inevitable force like the Grim Reaper whose presence will meet every soul at their dark end.
In the two weeks before opening day (Oct. 11), the members of the Theater Department worked quickly and efficiently to prepare everything for the scare actors. Aliza Liranzo was in charge of costume direction and creation. There were roughly 70 scare actors, and she stayed at Brookdale past midnight several times before opening day to get the costumes just right.
When the other person playing as the Grim Reaper and I, and the three gravediggers, had to meet her to get our costumes, she worked with just us for an hour. She made sure to go over masks, pick the right hats, correctly fit black pants and jackets, and choose the right props. She also collaborated with the makeup artists on the best makeup for the gravediggers. We received all this time and attention even though our costumes were among the simpler ensembles.
It would be horrendous of me to not also mention the hard work that other members of Brookdale’s theater department put into the performance. Sherri Vanderspiegel is the director and manager of Haunted Theater, and Gina Ziegler was instrumental in auditions and helped scare actors understand their roles. And all the technicians who were there to rescue scare actors when we made dumb mistakes like breaking something or could use some help with a terrible tour.
Finally, Oct. 11 came around. Most scare actors were told to report by 4 p.m. We were all given food shortly after arriving, with an array of sandwiches and sweet or savory snacks to eat. By around 5 p.m. we were told to get into costume. Shortly after that, all scare actors who needed makeup were sent to the makeup room. One by one, they came back to our costume/meeting room fully ready to terrify visitors. By 6:15 p.m., we were told to head to places.
Very few scare actors had been shown around the maze before this point. So what transpired was a hilarious scene of roughly 50 people dressed in Halloween outfits rummaging through rooms they were completely out of place in. There were bloody hospital patients in a post-apocalyptic bunker. Clowns with twisted smiles and dark black eyes roamed the diner, and the Grim Reaper was lost in a hotel hallway.
But once we all got in place and tours began, it went wonderfully. For nearly four hours, we scared the crap out of maybe hundreds of tours. My room was specially designed so visitors believed a statue on a bench was a scare actor in disguise. When really, I was hiding in a pop-out room covered by faux vines and the dark, and I would jump out at visitors as they kept their eyes on the statue.
My role as the Grim Reaper was to leave visitors with a sense of doom and the inevitability of their demise. I wasn’t necessarily meant to jump scare tours – although sometimes I took those opportunities. Instead, my job was to guide people to the next room. I can’t remember how many surprised thank you’s I got from visitors who had spent half of Haunted Theater being screamed at by every scare actor thus far.
Every scare actor got a sheet that explained which days they would be scheduled for, what time (Scaredy Cat tours started earlier, and if you volunteered for those you might have had to come in around 12 to 2 p.m.), and the basic rundown of your role. For my role, it was emphasized that I had to remind visitors about their grave end. So, I used a few lines throughout my time acting, including but not limited to:
“You’ll never make it to the end – A bottomless pit will be your best friend”
“With the long passage of time – You will all be mine”
“With every swing of my scythe – Another loses their life”
By the end of The Haunted Theater, I stuck to one phrase: “Just beyond these gates lies your dreadful fates.” I would tell tours this as I was pointing to the wooden gates in my room, the cemetery. The gates led to the next room in The Haunted Theater, the Graveyard, which had both the gravediggers and scare actors that played statues that would jump scare visitors as they passed.
Often times, between tours, I would walk past these gates to the graveyard to hangout with the scare actors there. Was this against the rules? Explicitly, yes. Could I be rejected at the next year’s performance? Possibly. I have no defense other than the rules were meant to be broken.
At the end of all the tours each night, scare actors would be brought into the auditorium to go over everything from the night: problems with costumes, tours of annoying teenagers or even intoxicated adults, and the awards. There were prizes for those deemed to have been the scariest throughout the night, prizes for those who were in the best rooms of the night, and prizes for those who had the most accurate house count.
House count is something that cast members and technicians did before the start of tours. On a sheet of paper, everyone wrote down their name, followed by how many people they believed would go through the theater that night. For the last night, we also got to put down our guesses for how many people went through Haunted Theater for all days it was open. The first night had roughly 370 guests, and by the end of all the nights, 5,310 people made it through the haunted maze.
The last night of Haunted Theater was Oct. 27, and after our performance, most scare actors and technicians stayed behind to deconstruct some of the sets. The last event in The Haunted Theater was the cast party that was held on Oct. 30. There, all cast members got a free Haunted Theater T-Shirt, enjoyed free food, and danced in the same audition room we first gathered in just a month earlier.
Haunted Theater was something I hadn’t ever participate in. I had never gone through it in my time at Brookdale and hadn’t even stepped into the PAC building before. But I don’t regret it at all. I got to dress up for most of October – the best holiday season, no one can say otherwise – scaring people who paid to get terrified.
I met a whole bunch of new friends who I also got to be with on Halloween, enjoyed free food with them before the start of the tours, and then got to come up with creative ways to scare people with them. I will always remember Haunted Theater, and I will 100 percent return to auditions next year. I also encourage everyone else to – whether or not you’re a student – join The Haunted Theater.
