Roman Haunts
Three pitches for haunted houses inspired by different scenes and scenarios from the history of Rome.
Halloween is over. Supermarkets are marking down the prices on their candy and all the stock for Spirit Halloween is getting shipped back to their headquarters, lying dormant until those retail spaces become available again. There’s still a bit of magic in the air if you know where to feel for it, and I’ve tapped into those currents to bring you one last touch of holiday cheer.
Based on the title one may assume this is just a handful of “bro, what if?” pitches, but longtime readers will trust that I’ve done a little more due diligence than that. Leonard Pickel’s hauntrepreneurs.com hosts a series of manuals on everything one could possibly want to get started on getting into the business. Naturally I have neither the location nor the funding to actually start any of these ideas up myself, but if someone down the road put a small sack of money in front of me and asked to take over the art direction of their operation, I’m confident I could make them a tidy profit, competitive with (if not better than) any other business in the area.
Colosseum
“You’ve always dreamed of being able to travel back in time to see the Colosseum in its heyday and, luckily for you, that charismatic mad scientist was offering to send you back totally free of charge for 10 minutes. Unfortunately, it seems as though you’ve been transported to the hypogeum, and that centurion seems to be eyeing you down rather strangely. Can you make it through this madhouse, or will you be thrown to the lions?”
Hypogeum, for those not in the know, is the word used to describe the area below the Colosseum where animals and gladiators would lie in wait before they did battle. The major behind the scenes pitch here for operators is that all the animal animatronics from the old world that have been collecting dust are fair game. Strictly speaking, it’s unlikely that any insufferable nerd who would point out the habitat of the alligator would be too scared of it to distinguish the characteristics of a real crocodile, either. Costumes and motivations for actors here are rather straightforward as well; some gladiators will jeer you about looking weak and hoping they face you next, others will scream and wait at their lost limbs. The list of names of the different kinds of gladiators are pretty easy to pull from, and the Romans were so into pageantry that visitors will differentiate between the Thraex, Murmillo, Secutor, Retiarius, etc. without it feeling same-y.1 Cap it off with what appears to be a hand-cranked elevator up to the light of the actual arena (potential bottleneck, only do if infrastructure is already there) and you’ve got a winning exhibit.
Descent to Avernus: The Katabasis
“While on a tour of an ancient Roman necropolis, you twist your ankle and fall against a bricked-up passageway. Your curiosity got the better of you, and you broke off from the rest of the group to see what treasures you could uncover. The path down is incredibly easy to take. Returning back to the world of light, however, is a tricky task indeed.”2
In my head I have this pictured as a three-part katabasis, each with their own religious theming. The necropolis would be Christian but occult, the catacombs would be Mithraist, and the underworld would be pagan with a few other elements mixed in. Technically, the two first burial practices are anachronistic and ought to be flipped, but it makes for a more compelling scare to work from something familiar to something totally foreign to the modern imagination. It would be interesting to begin things cheaply to set expectations low, then ramp up the set pieces as the path wound onward. For example, intentionally cheap animatronic skeleton hands could wave slowly on the passageway of the necropolis, then actors in lion’s heads and bull’s heads could attack and be attacked by Mithraists, and to enter the gates of hell, everyone needs to pass into a massive, decorative mouth of Orcus. The necropolis would be the shortest leg of the journey because its intent is to set the mood rather than actually scare, while the catacombs probably ought to be the longest and have the most actors. Mithraism has no extant religious texts, so set designers can play with a lot of artistic license in what they want to depict. Recycling elements from bulls, ravens, snakes, dogs, and lion-headed men connect to different instances of iconography, and feasting was believed to be a major religious ceremony. Having a giant animatronic devil torso chewing on the heads of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius as the climax would come from Dante of course, but the image is worth the inaccuracy. A skeletal Charon offering to ferry you out at the end would sell the whole experience.
Caligula
“A plague has run amok in the eternal city; one that not even modern advancements in medicine could cure. Hedonism has rotted the villas and mansions of Rome from the inside out, and for one night only, they’ve risen from their graves to show the wages of sin on their bodies. Come and see the debauchery of the damned on full display.”
I watched the Ultimate Cut of Caligula recently (more on that at a later date) and to be frank, half of the work in design is already done. The real trick here would be to make something PG-13 and not X-rated smut. Even advertising the comparison between the movie and the attraction may be enough to get some booted out of some counties. A more generic story in a more generic (but still palatial) villa might make sense to get over this hump. A lot of critics read a subtext of STDs into 2014’s It Follows, which shows that there is a potential market for disease panic in horror that doesn’t follow either the mindless zombie or the hivemind tropes if done tastefully.3 The madness of the Romans in the Caligula attraction could even be seen as independent from the various open sores and crusted lesions on their faces and arms. Besides that, there’s plenty of scenarios directly inspired by the film to pull from; forcing a legionary to drink wine until he’s bloated and suffocating, Nerva’s suicide in the bath, and the dinner scene where he has all the partygoers killed all spring to mind immediately. Tiberius’ palace in the opening scenes is effectively a human menagerie, which means the more realistic the freakshow/mutant inhabitants, the better the mood will be set. Two-faced prophets, three-breasted witches (in a brassiere, of course), and twelve-fingered skeletons can pop out and scare patrons to their hearts’ content.
Something similar has been done at Halloween Horror Nights XXIX but with a bigger budget than I’d envisioned and more of an emphasis on the supernatural rather than grisly realism. I think my setup blurb shows enough distinguishing features to avoid anyone calling it a ripoff.
Verg. Aen. 6.126-129
That is to say, not at the expense of anyone suffering from such maladies, but using body horror imagery that one may associate with the typical Roman venereal disease, as was done with Peter O’Toole in the film. There are organizations to consult on such matters.