REVEALING A DARK SIDE

Chris Eastridge's demented butcher alter ego is revealed.

Around Halloween, Penny Blandford's dark side catches up to her.

Fiends are walking among us. Thinly veiled monsters who look normal enough on the outside but harbor dark sadistic sides to their characters.

When the chill winds of October blow and the moon drips with an eerie light, these dark sides are revealed -- usually in the guise of Freddy Krueger, Vlad Dracula or even O.J. Simpson. And they volunteer to work at locally sponsored haunted houses.

"These haunted houses give us the opportunity to really be creative and really not do the norm," said Penny Blanford, who will spend the majority of her evenings between now and Halloween wearing the misshapen, partially-decayed skull of "The Gatekeeper" at the A.C. Brase Arena's Haunted Hall of Horrors. "Sometimes when people have a mask on they can let their guard down and be creative in the presentation."

That presentation usually means jumping out of dark corners, waving hands that are altered by excessively long nails or gloves, and screaming.

"It relieves stress," Chris Eastridge, who also performs in the Hall of Horrors, said. "I love to see the kids scared."

"It gives me a chance to see how high I can make people jump," Steve Parker, the gorilla in a cage at the Black Forest Haunted Ghost Town, said. "It kind of relieves tension and puts it on somebody else."

But there is more to actually scaring people than just yelling boo.

"It's a chain reaction," Blandford said. "The first few rooms, if you get those characters to really play it up, it just gets passed on. If one person plays it up then passes it on to the next person, it's like a big production."

Parker, who was near the end of the Haunted Ghost Town, said he could hear a group approaching and change his technique for the best surprise.

"I've got my own ideas on how to do it," he said. "You can listen to them and tell when you've got a crowd that's going to spook good. It gets you fired up."

The individual characters have to conform to their surroundings, work as part of an overall team. But they also have to make their surroundings fit them personally.

"You have to create your own scene a lot of the time to make it work," Eastridge, who plays a deranged butcher in the Haunted Hall, said. "A lot of times it doesn't work the first time and you've got to get your little niche, so to speak."

"I work on designing most of the areas and what I think is good and I know I can do it different when Chris gets down and gets in his scene," Blandford said. "He'll change it and move the props around so it can be more him."

And while the patrons of these haunted houses are not at risk of physical injury, the illusion is enough to get the desired effect.

"The mind plays funny games on people and they're scared of the unknown," Blandford said. "There were a couple ladies that went through, they went down Chainsaw Alley. One lady was just begging. She dropped her purse and she dropped a jacket she was holding and she just ran out the back yelling, `Please, please just let me out.'

"We were laughing about that because of course we would never hurt anyone."

That rule doesn't always apply to those behind the masks though. One of the Haunted Hall's actors was hit by a surprised patron one year. Blandford had her lip split two years ago when she pushed a creepy scene a little too far for one person.

"I couldn't touch anybody because I was behind a cage," she said. "But you'd be surprise how you can push people verbally. I sang, `Row, Row, Row Your Boat,' continuously not in a harassing way, but some people just don't like that. For the rest of that night I sat with an ice pack on my lip. It makes you stand back from the gate a little bit."

Scaring people comes so easily to Parker, who Haunted Ghost Town organizer Greg Macke called the ham in the gorilla suit, he didn't even have to apply to work at the haunted house.

"They asked me," he said. "I guess I'm just a natural."