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Fatal attractions
A guide to horrifying haunts

Photo by Jenn LeBlanc • jkerriga@mscd.edu The checkerboard room at Field of Corpses has characters skulking along the walls to the bright flashes of a strobe light.

Field of Corpses
13251 W 64th Ave
Arvada
(303) 423-3327
Hours: Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays
Dusk to Midnight
Admission: $14

The light is fading in the late October sky, and a night chill is beginning to settle. In this remote field on the fringes of Arvada, a group of 40 to 50 people is huddled around a small wooden shack, trading words of encouragement and sipping hot drinks.

Most are dressed to scare. Thick makeup covers their faces, transforming teenage visages into decaying demons. Ragged cloaks stained with crimson and pitch-black cowls provide cover against the oncoming cold.

As the last vestiges of daylight disappear, the motley crowd of ghouls, goblins and other frightful characters rally to the exhortations of two middle-aged men dressed in everyday duds.

“Stay warm and watch out for the mud,” one of them warns. His tones rise steadily in volume and fervor. “Please stay as clean and warm as possible … Let’s get going! Break!”

The crowd disperses to their assigned spots in Field of Corpses, Colorado’s largest haunted house. The sprawling, open-air labyrinth comprises more than 30 separate rooms and draws on a scare staff of more than 200, many of whom are high school students.

“This is my third year,” said Andy McPherson, 17, one of the many actors hiding in nooks and hollows, waiting for the perfect suspenseful moment to pounce. “I just love scaring people. It makes my day.”

Going on its fourth year, the Field of Corpses is Colorado resident Zachary Meyer’s childhood dream realized. Its grand scope and overwhelming logistics are meant to separate the attraction from its shopping-mall competitors.

“Halloween is my life,” he said in a press release. “Colorado needs a new and different haunting experience, one that stays with you for days after you leave.”

The entire structure of the park is designed to stir the adrenaline. New rooms such as the Crematorium and Steam Room draw on recent scary movies, while standard structures like the Playground and the Old West porch draw on classic pop culture and psychological horror motifs for their screams.

Combined with its naturally unsettling setting of a rustic, removed field, the attraction’s animatronics, high-tech effects and dedicated staff regularly elicit extreme and immediate reactions.

“We’ve had people faint, vomit, pee, poop,” said Jen Linton, one the attraction’s organizers and cast members.

As a longtime friend of Meyer, Linton has seen the park develop over its four-year stint. She’s also witnessed some of its victim’s oddest and morosely humorous reactions.

“We actually had a guy lose his prosthetic leg in (one) area,” she said. “He ran so hard that he lost his leg.”

Field of Corpses’ attention to detail and grandiose scope is likely to affect even the most impassive customer. Every inch of the massive maze contains a concealed spook waiting to attack; every room in the macabre maze holds a hidden scare.

Groups are led through the different rooms by a stone-faced tour guide dressed as a ghoulish spectre. There is no time to recover from an especially effective scare; the guide is always pushing patrons along to the next room and the next fright.

Field of Corpses neatly sidesteps the predictability and claustrophobia of the average shopping-mall experience. Its forum, its staff and its impressive array of frights give the attraction an effect that is hard to laugh off, even for adults.

“People just trip over all the props,” said Sonny Mazotti, 17, who works in the Clown Room. “I snuck up on this one guy, he was 37 or 38, and he almost started crying."
– Adam Goldstein • goldstea@mscd.edu

Photo by Heather A. Longway-Burke • longway@mscd.edu Mambo is the host of Screams Haunted Castle at Elitch Gardens.

Screams
Six Flags Elitch Gardens
2000 Elitch Circle
(303) 595-4386
Hours: Fridays: 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturdays: Noon to 10 p.m.
Admission: Free with $44.99 General Admission

Free doesn’t imply low-budget or low-quality when it comes to Screams, Six Flags Elitch Gardens’ new haunted house. This attraction is free with admission and is surprisingly spooky.

The experience begins with a walk through a dizzying, spinning light tunnel that gets patrons off kilter and more susceptible to a fright. This augments the haunted house’s use of light to evoke fear.

The element of surprise is controlled by the darkness. The less one sees, the more room there is for a spontaneous spook, which the actors inside use to their benefit.

At times the darkness makes it difficult to maneuver, but it allows for seemingly harmless situations to be staggered with a scream. A girl with a black-painted face was able to camouflage herself enough to scare the group twice: first at the room’s entrance, and second when she was able to sneak into the next room unseen.

Flash photography and light-emitting objects are not allowed inside. Jason Merrihew, Elitch’s assistant marketing manager, said this rule was implemented for safety reasons. It is so dark that it takes the workers’ eyes 20 minutes to adjust after being exposed to light.

It was the darkness that turned a stroll through an innocent school bus into a walk of fear.

Taking a cue from horror-flick archetypes, Screams is sprinkled with frightening imagery to enhance its own image.

The school bus is reminiscent of the one in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. One actor is a dead-ringer of Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs. A life-sized clown statue evokes images of Stephen King’s It or Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

The actors in Screams didn’t supply much impromptu banter. There was a moment when one man shouted, “Even workers have to beware for their lives.”

The line wasn’t scary, nor did it make any sense, but by keeping such occasional phrases in tow, Screams exuded that haunted-house feeling without being overly cheesy.

There is nothing that makes this haunted house more memorable than others. Set in Elitch’s near the water park, Screams doesn’t allow for the environmental effect others get from being in a field or forest.

But Screams does work with what it’s got and manages to get a fair amount of screams. Even the final walk of the house has an eerie effect, with patrons passing through what feels like cobwebs in a pitch-black tunnel.

When 15-year-old patron Adam Deherrera was asked what he thought of the haunted house, he said, “It’s a scream. I bet the people will have a blast.”
– Nicholas Dewart • dewart@mscd.edu