The Scare Artists

When I was twelve, I went to a seedy rerun theatre screening Mark of the Devil, a 1970 horror flick so disgusting they gave you a vomit bag with the one-dollar ticket. Mesmerized by clanking and groaning and blood, I saw it four times in a week. Outside, life was a misery of insecurity and zits, of fighting at home and failing at school; the misery in the movie was a hundred squirts of adrenaline delivering a near-orgasmic buzz and release.

And now I’m sitting in a dark corner in Tacoma where you would not want to be alone, listening to a man who scavenges ancient, sinister medical devices and hauls them to abandoned locations to make people scream (or worse). “That’s an ob-gyn table from the 1930s,” says Ben Isitt, a forty-three-year-old prop master who has scared millions witless in movies like Army of Darkness and Jurassic Park.

He’s installing the table, rusty stirrups and all, in Black Lake Asylum, the haunted house of Isitt’s imagination: a 1939 medical research facility where gruesome experiments were performed on live patients, who torched the facility and murdered the staff. From October 10 through Halloween night at Freighthouse Square, horribly mutated and mutilated patients shriek and scrabble at their own intestines and pull visitors into their unending nightmare

“It’s like a horror movie, only taking it one step further to where you’re in it,” says Isitt, who owns a fabrication and design studio in Puyallup. His TV dad appearance — eager grin, golf shirt, spruce haircut — belies a mind that spends weeks carving a “quilt” of fleshy mouths mid-howl, a five-headed cadaver floating in a phone-booth-size vat of ooze, and a tombstone that reads, Dentist Larson Filling His Last Cavity.

“That’s actually my dentist,” says Isitt, stepping over a burnt torso into a kitchen where he envisions “an insane Chef Ramsay” dunking a head rigged with a fountain of blood gurgling out of its mouth into a pot of stew.

“But that’s not where the scare comes from,” says Isitt. “Maybe you walk into a room and there’s an actor doing something; that’s your focal point, but the scare?” He smiles. “The scare is coming from someplace else, someplace you are not looking.”

Orchestrating the scare is Robin Clark, whose day job is trauma room nurse at Group Health. We meet at the Freighthouse Square food court, itself a somewhat scary place. Most of the 110,000-square-foot building is empty save for the odd Cash 4 Gold and trinket shop, fast food, and someone advertising her services as an “intuitive consultant.”

“We’re in tough economic times,” says Clark. Black Lake Asylum will have “actors from the community, props from the community.” Some proceeds will, via My Sister’s Pantry, feed the community, and visitors pay thirteen dollars, less if they bring a can of food or show a military ID. “Your average haunted house is about twenty, twenty-five dollars,” adds Clark.

People are scared these days, but not Clark. “You can walk up to me with a firearm and put it in my face, you’re not going to scare me.” He used to work in military intelligence, and he spent fifteen Halloweens making houses haunted. If Isitt is the mild next-door neighbor, Clark is the intense guy down the street. The guy who keeps a Nosferatu figure in his living room year round (his kids, Clark says, “are used to it”) and two forty-five-foot storage units full of Halloween props.

“The last haunted house I did,” he says, “I had 123 people urinate, three people defecate and one person throw up. And the person that comes through and gets so scared they actually wet themselves will actually come through again!”

We like to be brought to the precipice of our fears and thrown over, but not to experience the actual splat. Especially in tough times, people want to be taken away from their troubles.

“One of the guys at the little fish-and-chips place here, he said he came through [last year] three times,” says Clark. “And the girl in the cupcake factory down the hill. She came through two times.”

Both men are obsessed with getting the details right. The five-hundred-dollar coffin they bought on craigslist; the need for “chicken doors” (where truly terrified attendees can escape); the inevitability that a few attendees will tangle with the actors, throwing everything into chaos, not knowing what’s real and what’s not — these are a few of the things on their minds. To choreograph what Isitt calls “the hard-core scare” requires tapping into our most prosaic fears: Clark cites rats, bankruptcy, broken bones and the slightly more esoteric “being an artist.” They must first, they say, drill down into everyone’s bedrock fear: the unknown.

“To create that illusion, that’s the thing; to where they’re not sure,” says Isitt, leaning forward. “They have a seed of doubt, where they’re looking down a hallway, and they see a figure that’s doing something that’s not quite right, and they know they’ve got to head that way to get past him.” He laughs. “That whole creepy thing, and the right lighting, yeah!”

“There’s a control, but no control,” says Clark. In a delightful paradox, our most visceral reaction to Black Lake Asylum may not come from the horror at all, but from
the beauty.

“Why do people go to museums? Why do people go see Van Gogh?” Clark asks. “Ben’s artwork, it’s unique. You’re not going to get that anyplace else.”