Nightmare: Vampires Haunted House, New York City

October 8th, 2009

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Nightmare: Vampires Haunted House is a different Haunted House with a strong emphasis on the actors. I really enjoyed the show because of both its design and acting and was very glad I made the trip into the city to see it.

After sitting on the runway for three hours in Salt Lake City and then the flight back to Newark, I was tempted to take it easy, but forged ahead and ventured into the streets of NYC to see how they haunt in New York.

My first stop was Nightmare: Vampires Haunted House. Nightmare changes their theme each year  – last year they did ghosts and this year is…you guessed it Vampires. When I got there I had the chance to visit with one of the people responsible, John (sorry but I can’t spell his last name so I won’t try). He is a super nice guy who walked me around behind the scenes a bit first so I could see makeup and costuming areas. We decided we would check out the rest of the Haunt after I went through so as not to spoil the surprise.

At the start of the Haunt, you are led into the Museum of Vampire Antiquities where it looks and feels like you are in a modern art museum. The tour guide provides the group with some general details about the museum and then leads us into the next room where we see exhibits of Vampire legends from around the world. The Guide deftly explains each legend to us and encourages us to interact with the exhibits by pushing on the red button on some of them which causes some motion or a recording to play. But, we are rudely interrupted by a Vampire creature that appears suddenly and quickly leaves but kidnaps out guide before he does and we are left to wander through the rest on our own.

The Haunt had some great rooms and effects. There were some vampire girls with billowing cloth that looked like they were flying. There was a terrific magic sequence where one actor stabbed the other through the neck and then that vampire ripped the other’s insides out. One of the things that made it a great scene was that the actors were speaking to each other in an unknown language. I later learned that it was complete gibberish, but they performed very effectively and didn’t seem to repeat the same phrases. John explained that the actors here are almost all professional actors and that speaking gibberish is often an exercise used in acting classes so they were very good at it.

Another scene had a stripper who was forced to dance for the master so that he would let us continue. There was also a scene inspired by Joshua Hoffine (our featured artist in issue #51) that was very bloody (and through complete coincidence, you can the artwork in issue #52 in our Truly… section).

The Haunt was very good. What made it different was the quality of the acting and the edge that it had – these were very good performers who put on a top notch show and the some of the scenes were a little riskier than most haunts will take. If you don’t like a more theatrical show, you probably wouldn’t like it as much since it relies on that more than startling.

John, thank you so much for your time and hospitality and for a great Haunt – have a great season!

p.s. John don’t forget to email me!