Read the rules
One word: Disturbing
A few more words: “Kneel on the X!” yelled someone from behind. I dropped to my knees, my wrists bound and tightened against my back. A burlap sack was slipped over my head. I was nearly blind in the darkness, wearing a pair of ear mufflers. For a while, a good healthy while, all I could hear was my breath.
One of the ear muffs was pulled back and into my ears someone yelled, “Scream!”
I can’t scream.
“Bark like a dog!”
“Arf! Arf!”
I was dragged to the other side of a dark room. My head, covered by the burlap sack, fell back into my assailant. One shoe on, one shoe off, taken away from me back in one of the previous rooms. I was left in a corner, seemingly abandoned as flashes of light trailed through the darkness before me. All I could do was wait. Lay. Breathe with my bound wrists pressing into my back.
This wasn’t a nightmare. This wasn’t a twisted fantasy or a story I made up. This is Vortex Theater‘s haunted house attraction simply called Haunted House. But when I reviewed it last year, the experience had left me feeling a bit silly — a half-assed attempt on a good idea, however the attraction was different this year. It was horror taken to another level of art. It was virtual horror. Real. A patchwork of hyper sex, violence, and sense deprivation while guided into the vortex (if you will) of fear, which never relents upon entrance through each of the rooms.
All of the things you may have heard are true. You walk in alone. You sign a waver. They tell you nothing. This experience is for a different kind of haunted house fanatic. Think of the original Last House on the Left – a film that couldn’t be made today. Imagine entering a home occupied by the victims of depraved killers and their assailants. You are passed, pushed, pulled into several rooms, each one darker and more sinister than the next. Do not look for Halloween decorations or traditional horror film collages. You are in their world and they will let you see what they want you to see.
This was different from the other haunted attractions that I have reviewed because in the end, I was left feeling disturbed by Vortex Theater’s attraction; excited that someone had decided to go the extreme to give their particular audience exactly what they want — safe horror in something like a horror fantasy camp.
Continues through October 31, 2010, 115 W. 27th Street, New York, NY, nychalloweenhauntedhouse.com, No one under 18 will be admitted, $15-30
