"I laugh in the face of danger! Then I hide until it goes away."
-Xander Harris, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I've been in a fire fight! Well, I've been in a fire. Okay, I was fired... from a fry cook opportunity."
-Hoban Washburne, Firefly
"I dismembered a guy with a trowel. What have you been up to?"
-Marty, Cabin in the Woods
I've never been great at handling scary stuff. I can deal with gore and psychological thrillers - in fact, those are the best, but I cannot handle suspense peppered with sudden bursts of horror - Paranormal Activity and shit like that. It took me a while to recover from watching "Insidious."
Like a classic idiot, I chose to confront this fear by going to "Erebus," the record holder for world's largest haunted house from '05-'09. My very first haunted house (haunted anything, actually) and I decided to go all or nothing. One year I heard that they gave you a free t-shirt if you could make it all the way through the four-story haunted house without leaving out one of the emergency exits.
My friend Ella is one of the only people who can get me to do stuff like this, so we went together. She's curvy, Latina, has shorter hair than I do, and people often mistake us for a pair of lesbians. More on her later. Fast forward to the two of us, having just turned in our tickets and been directed to a large open hallway.
We stood at the entryway, only able to see red fog ahead of us. I immediately resorted to my opossum-like instinct to freeze and curl up like a dead body. I would have paid twenty more dollars not to have to go in there. Why? Why did I think this was a good idea? Fight-or-flight kicked in and it's only because of Ella that I didn't instantly "Nope" the fuck out of there.
"No. No. No. No."
"Grace, come on. Just walk forward."
"NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo."
Our compromise was that we would stay there, glued to the wall and clutching each other, and wait for the next group to enter so that we could casually follow them.
What happened instead was, a dad and his two pubescent sons appeared and Ella and I immediately latched onto them like two very high-pitched and profane barnacles. I'm talking head crabs from Half-Life here, I don't think I was at any point not clinging to a handful of a 14-year-old boy's shirt.
As we entered the first floor of the house, I was doing my best to be quiet. It was agonizing. The silence was slowly killing me, every scare was a tiny heart attack. We were about two minutes into it when my Harris Defense Mechanism kicked in - I started talking and did not shut up until we got to the gift shop half an hour later.
For example,
The gimmick this year was that we were traveling through time; we were put in these "time machines" that seemed to double as an elevator-phobic's worst nightmare, and it went pitch black as the door was closing. I totally knew an actor had slipped in with us, I knew it. (Like how I predict the entire plots of movies... see "Albatross Soup.")
"There's a dude in here. I know it. There's a dude. He's right over by the door. Hello? Hello? I know you're there - FUCK! SHIT! - I know there's a dude over there. He's going to scare us. He's - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH SON OF A BITCH!" (I was right, of course.) "Okay, Hi. Thank you for scaring us. Nice to meet you. Have a nice day."
We scurried past an elaborate, gory operating room with a disemboweled nurse reaching towards us as we passed. "That's not very sanitary. This is how people get MRSA. Maybe you should mop before the next surgery."
To a mutant waving it's tentacles through a barred window at us, "I'm sorry they did this to you."
To my surprise and delight, some of the actors responded to my babbling. This crazy dinosaur noise came out of some guy who was on a scaffolding above us and I said, "How did he even make that noise?"
As we passed under him he hissed, "With my mouth."
Talking to and at everything that scared me, like the invaluable character in every Joss Whedon creation, was clearing my head and making the experience bearable. It began with Xander Harris, an essential member of the Scoobies despite his lack of obvious merit. The legacy was passed on to the beloved Wash, keeping the crew of Serenity grounded with his quips and nervous chatter. And then of course, Fran Kranz - who's basically every Whedonite-who-is-too-young-for-Nathan-Fillion's wet dream - graced the screen as Topher and then Marty, a champion for Xander Harris-es everywhere.
About a quarter of the way through Erebus, the employees began doing the classic haunted-house bit where they single out the most scared-looking person in the group and separate them from everyone else or make them go in the front of the group, et cetera. I naturally assumed it would be me, but to my surprise, I WAS WINNING AT THE HAUNTED HOUSE. Ella's silence and purposeful avoidance of eye contact must have been more notable than me vocalizing everything I thought, because time and time again, it was her. My stream of chatter must have come across as amused or deadpan, even though it occasionally crescendo-ed into hysterical screaming.
Also at one point one of the actors grabbed my ass, probably by accident because I'm pretty sure they aren't supposed to touch guests unless we touch them first.
Now I wish we had bought the picture taken of the five of us peeing our pants that they had on display in the gift shop. This would've been the perfect place to post it. Instead I flipped through the photos that were on the Erebus Facebook page and picked my favorite one.
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| "Aw, Honey, let's keep him." |
The scariest part of the ordeal, of course, was driving through downtown Pontiac.
