Montezuma's Revenge

Spookywoods is now in full swing, and I get to enact Montezuma's revenge every weekend for about the next month. Yes, that is right, I am terrorizing people as an Aztec priestess this year. I drink blood, eat hearts, and worship Bird/Snake gods. I mumble incoherent phrases, sometimes in the actual Nahuatl language, and perform arcane rituals that involve blood and various dead things. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

My costume this year involves leather, grass, gold, silver, turquoise, jade, bone, a real deer skull, and loads of pheasant feathers. It took many long hours to create. I took a few pictures of it along the way, and will eventually take time to sit down and write the basic instructions for either part, or all of the costume. I also plan to do the same for the goblin mask I made for my friend who works as a goblin in the grave yard.

My scene consists mainly of pigs and human heads hanging about. This is why I decided to eat a human heart, and tell people how happy the great unnameable god will be to get something besides pig's blood. I originally planned to rip the heart out of a body, but since one was apparently not available, I decided to eat the heart instead. This gets a fairly good reaction, but is merely a "gross out" type of scare. I have also begun throwing water at people during my "ritual", and shaking my gourd rattle at them, while basically speaking in "tongues". This seems to have far more impact on the crowd.

Much more on the costume and props is forthcoming. I may even make my self a body from which to rip the heart out from paper mache. In the meantime, I have included a few images of this years costume and a few of the make up variations I have done so far, and one of the goblin mask as well.

A Haunting We will Go

Exclusive first shot of the new costume I made for this year

Though our season at the haunted house started Friday the 13th of September, the true fun begins this Friday. For the next 6 weeks, we will be open Friday and Saturday, from 7pm, until the last customer comes through. Three of those weeks we will work Thursday through Sunday, and the last week we will work Tuesday through Saturday.

It may not sound like much of a "grueling schedule", but it is the "until" part that gets you. On the 13th, we weren't finished until 3:30 am. The last week or two, we generally call "hell week", because it is the longest and most tiring. This year, it will be even more so, as we will be working 4 nights straight, get one off, then work the next 5 nights straight.

At the end of all this we are all generally very exhausted, but also a bit hyped up due to all the adrenaline you get from scaring people. It really is a rush, and once it is over, even those who complained the loudest about hell week are saddened to see it be done with.

We pride ourselves on being some of the best haunt actors in the business, so we put as much effort into scaring people at the end of a long night as we do at the beginning. It is loads of fun, but it is also lots of hard work. We don't do it because we make lots of money (because, believe me, we do NOT), we do it because we love it. Ask any haunter, they will tell you the same. We may be weirdos, but we are a very devoted bunch of weirdos.

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