AMERICAN THEATRE: Inside the Merle Reskin Space at Steppenwolf, Rough House Puppet Arts has set up camp for House of the Exquisite Corpse V: Blood & Puppets, a multi-room, immersive puppet haunted house (through Nov. 1).
It’s the fifth official Halloween season for House of the Exquisite Corpse, born from an idea of a decade ago, when Rough House co-founder and artistic director emeritus Mike Oleon brought up the possibility of doing a puppet haunted house. The first year Rough House gave it a try was 2018, under the name Harrow House.
2 comments:
I really love working on haunted houses, something I got to do in high school and discovered I loved. I really like the first part of this article that discusses House of the Exquisite Corpse V: Blood & Puppets which seems like an incredibly cool experience to be a guest at or to be a creative on the team. I think puppetry is super interesting and the use of puppets in horror is especially cool. I love the concept of a haunted house that is voyeuristic like they describe. Not only did it solve the problems associated with COVID restrictions I can also see it being a great experience for the guests while solving problems for the actors. When working at my high school haunted house we would sometimes have issues with guests that interacted inappropriately with actors, sometimes physically or verbally and this is a really good solution to that. I also like that the experience is not all the time since you are in a black room and the sounds are being played through headphones so that guests could take a break at any time without having to leave the house.
I have always admired the hard work and detail people put into horror events. While I’m personally not really interested in creating scary or horror-like experiences, I still think it’s pretty cool to read about. I don’t go to scary events often, in fact I’m pretty sure I’ve only been to one. It was set on a farm and they really made it feel like a farm you could find in a horror movie. There were a lot of scare actors but the sets you had to traverse around were really well designed and were all pretty unique matched the environment it was in. One of them in particular was a tractor ride and you were approached by actors jumping all over the sides. At the end we drove through a barn that had a ton of scary props and it was lit up out of nowhere showing clowns and circus music was playing, which I was definitely surprised by with how the ride was going so far.
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