What We Like, Redux: The Blackout Experiments/Haunters: The Art Of The Scare

I’m going to do something a little different this week - some of is due to circumstance (the film I’d intended to write about was such a bust that I ended up dozing off in the middle of it, which is a sign to me that maybe I shouldn’t write about it), but also something that’s been percolating away for the last couple of months. Back in September, I watched a film called Extremity, about an unstable young woman going through an extreme haunt (also known as “immersive horror experiences”) and all of the terrible ways it goes wrong. The film itself was a pretty mixed bag, it started strong and then fell flat on its face with a ridiculous third-act twist, but it got me thinking about real-life immersive horror experiences again.

It's intuitive to think of extreme haunts as your traditional haunted-house attraction turned up to 12, but I don’t think that really captures what’s going on. A lot of them are closer to immersive theater or performance art than that, and make demands of the participants that aren’t anything remotely close to what you get at your traditional haunted house or haunted corn maze or haunted hayride or…you get the idea. And so, in following my curiosity, I watched a couple of documentaries - The Blackout Experiments is about Blackout, one of (if not the) first immersive horror experiences, and Haunters: The Art Of The Scare is mostly about the history of fairly traditional haunted house attractions, but also centrally features McKamey Manor, one of the most notorious extreme haunts. And I came away from these two films thinking about how well they also outline some of the different ways in which people approach horror films. I haven't thought about stuff like this in awhile, so it seems like a good time to revisit it.

The Blackout Experiments

This documentary follows the experiences of three people as they go through Blackout for the first time, and then follow them as they continue to go back, over and over again, charting their emotional journey and relationship with the event. It’s run by two people with theater backgrounds - founder Josh Randall is an alumnus of the Tisch School for the Performing Arts - and began with the idea that it was getting harder and harder to really, genuinely scare people in a haunted house setting, so Randall and collaborator Kristjan Thor started thinking about the conventions of the haunted house. One of the things they observed was that it’s standard practice that the actors in these attractions not physically interact with the guests. And so they wondered…what would be possible if the performers were allowed to touch the guests? And what if it were built less around stock-standard ghouls and witches and ax murderers, and more around deep, real fears? 

The result is something best described as confrontational. It’s minimalist, run out of an office space marked only by three dots on the door to indicate what’s there. Guests have to sign a waiver and submit clean bills of health (physical and mental) to qualify for attendance. Until fairly recently, it was an experience designed to be gone through alone, though they’ve started doing group events. You’re asked about your background and your fears as part of the application process, and so to some degree the experience is personalized, intended for you specifically to go through alone. You arrive outside their building at the intended time, the door opens, and hands snatch you and drag you inside. You’re shoved against the wall, and so it begins.

In many ways it’s the antithesis of the typical haunted house, in that there’s little to no décor, and not a lot of props, just very dark rooms filled with the omnipresent performers, who do indeed touch the participants, shout at them, bark orders and restrain them as needed. Participants witness (and take part in) tableaux that are less your standard monster-movie stuff than situations that put them on one side or another of a power dynamic played out in ugly, immediate fashion. In fact, the whole thing has strong element of psychodrama and kink to it. There’s a safe word that immediately and irreversibly ends the experience, and you get the sense that a lot of the ordering around and holding people in place or pushing them up against the wall is as much about their safety and managing the experience as it is about creating an atmosphere and the safety of the performers. It gets very heavy - there are elements of breath play, mock executions, even waterboarding. This is not for someone looking for spooky fun, but nor does it seems to be gratuitous brutality for the sake of shock. Most of the film is seen through the eyes of Russell Eaton, who eventually attends multiple Blackout events, and we sort of follow his journey from his first visit to what is presumably his last one, a bespoke event staged specifically for him, in his own house. 

His isn’t the only story featured - there’s another young man who taps out after a few with the sense that maybe they pushed a button he wasn’t ready to have pushed, and someone whose attendance starts reminding his partner - an addiction counselor - of addictive behavior. But Russell’s is the most fully realized. He introduces himself as someone who had a troubled childhood and who is comfortable with darker experiences. They might not be okay for everyone, he says, but he thinks they’re okay for him. He seems a little self-conscious. But Blackout seems to do something for him, there’s something cathartic or revelatory for him about being confronted with his deepest fears and insecurities and coming out the other side. So he keeps coming back. He’s eventually invited to join a “Blackout Survivors” group - people who’ve had repeated experiences going through it, where they share their feelings and insights, talk about what it’s done for them. It’s something like a support group, but you don’t get the sense that any of them are suffering. They’re enjoying community, enjoying being able to talk to other people about something that only they  could understand. His relationship to the experience goes up and down - there’s an especially intense part to one experience that feels to him like a breach of trust, but he comes back, and it’s interesting to see where it ends up, and for Russell at least, it seems transformative.

The creators seem to be pretty thoughtful about what they’re doing - they try out any new elements on each other first to see what would make them most effective, and as they’re discussing what they’re putting together for Russell as his custom experience, they discuss his specific fears and consider whether or not specific elements might be going too far. They seem to be aiming for something, trying to evoke a very specific experience that pushes limits in a safe way. And I think that’s why I came away from watching this even more curious about experiencing Blackout. The idea of pushing beyond your limits, confronting your deepest and darkest fears and anxieties and vulnerabilities in a way that is fundamentally safe seems compelling to me. Harrowing, but in a way that has the potential for growth.

Haunters: The Art Of The Scare

Conversely, this film is mostly about the more commercial end of the haunted house industry - and this film really did illustrate for me how much of an industry it really is, complete with people who are professional “scare actors,” for whom this is full-on seasonal employment. Sometimes it’s commercial in the sense of mass appeal, the varying degrees of homegrown events put on by enthusiasts at a financial loss (and in the case of one featured creator, some strain on his marriage). These are hobbyists with a genuine love and enthusiasm for coming up with ideas, improving on what they’ve already done, looking forward to October every year and putting things together in their garage for the community to enjoy. And then sometimes it’s commercial in the sense of big budgets and licensed IPs for the sake of making a profit, as in the case of Universal Studios’ annual event, an extension to an existing amusement park.

Either way, it’s the rollercoaster type of scare - actors in makeup and costume leaping out at people, relying on startles and pushing traditional buttons with mostly the traditional types of monsters and archetypes. You’ve got your ghosts, your witches, your zombies, your werewolves, your masked axe murderers, and the participants move through these mazes where things pop out or they walk through rooms (safely separated from the performers by railings or partitions) where you see moments you’d expect from any number of horror movies play out. The participants shriek and scream and then giggle and clutch each other. It’s a thrill ride, like any other thrill ride, something that spikes your adrenaline for a little bit, but that you probably won’t take home with you.

And then you’ve got Russ McKamey, who runs McKamey Manor. He established it first in San Diego, and then after running afoul of a number of zoning and licensing issues, now runs it at locations in rural Tennessee and Alabama. McKamey Manor is billed less as an immersive horror experience and more as an endurance test, one where a $20,000 prize ostensibly awaits someone who can go the full ten hours, which nobody has. What glimpses we get remind me a lot of extreme underground horror films, the kind that forsake plot and character development for set pieces of extreme violence and degradation for its own sake. There’s lots of verbal abuse and people being drowned or force-fed things, being caged or locked in boxes, muzzled and blindfolded with duct tape. Honestly it looks like an attempt to reimagine the haunted house as something closer to a snuff film. Participants have to sign a waiver acknowledging the possibility of everything from having their heads and eyebrows shaved to dentistry without anesthesia to possible bodily injury and death. Participants wear humiliating adult-sized onesies for the whole experience, and everything is recorded with highlights going up on McKamey Manor’s website and social platforms. The other, more commercial haunted house operators look down on things like Blackout and McKamey Manor, not seeing the “fun” in it - to their minds, people are paying to be tortured and think it’s sick. And honestly, when it comes to McKamey Manor, I kind of agree. It seems less like people are being scared than it is that they’re being brutalized, that it’s more about how much they can take than how they’re engaging with it. But their perspective also assumes that the purpose of a haunted house is the easy jump-scares, the horror equivalent of empty calories. And I’m not sure I’m on board with that either.

And just as the creators of Blackout have backgrounds in theater, Russ McKamey is, first and foremost, a showman. He makes his living in a variety of ways, including as a wedding singer and DJ. He loves to perform, and McKamey Manor is all theater. He doesn’t do it for the money - admission is one bag of dog food, which he donates to an animal rescue charity - and he operates year-round, with an ever-growing waiting list. The creators of Blackout don’t do too many interviews, and participated minimally in the documentary because they want to preserve a sense of mystery about the experience, but McKamey puts himself front and center throughout the whole thing. He loves the spotlight and he knows how to play to it. But unlike Randall and Thor, McKamey plays fast and loose where Blackout doesn’t - he only started allowing safe words very recently, and moved the operation someplace where they told him in effect “if they signed a waiver, you’re covered.” He’s received a number of complaints, including cases where performers ignored safe words and ended up injuring participants. More troubling to me is that he uses former participants as performers, largely untrained, many of whom are assisting in potentially dangerous things because, as they cheerfully state, they want to put other people through what they went through. Part of being willing to push people to their limits is acknowledging the existence of those limits and knowing what is and isn’t safe, and all of the obvious theater aside, it really does seem like McKamey is playing with fire in a way that Randall and Thor aren’t.

And so, in these two documentaries, I see examples of ways in which people engage with horror film. The big-budget commercial attractions are a lot like big-budget, mass-appeal horror films. They’re engineered to the nth degree and rely on familiar jump-scares for the purpose of entertainment and profit. Plenty of people like that stuff - that’s why the budgets are able to be big. But they don’t really do much for me. It’s not fun to me to be startled and not much else. McKamey Manor, on the other hand, is a lot like underground horror. It’s low-budget brutality without context or larger meaning, a barrage of graphic brutality for people numbed to anything else. That’s not really my deal at all either. I have no problem with graphic violence in horror, but it’s a tool, not the point. Blackout, on the other hand eschews bombast, spectacle, and the obvious, unsettling by going directly to the source of our fears and insecurities and doing just what it needs to in order to pluck that nerve. And that is absolutely my thing, which might explain why I’m generally bored by the first type and disgusted by the second, but fascinated by the third. People come to horror to be entertained, to be subjected to ever-increasing stimulation (and to develop a perverse machismo about what they can endure), and to be moved to something, however uncomfortable, that might change how they see the world.

The Blackout Experiments
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Haunters: The Art Of The Scare
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi