If you go to the Legends of Fear website you’ll see a tab labeled ‘Monsters Wanted.’ Not so different from many other haunted attraction sites that reach out for actors. However, most attractions I know of simply ask any interested future actors to contact a phone number or e-mail address expressing their interest. Legends of Fear provides an online job application right there on their website! It asks about what position they’d like to be in, latex allergies, dates they can work, what year of school they’re in if applicable, even what’s their favorite scary movie. This obviously doesn’t mean anything one way or another as to what quality of actors you’ll find at Legends of Fear. But it’s an immediate interactive, fun, and easy way to find more actors, get the right information, and make them feel important even before officially meeting them. Which is why I think we’ve found some of our favorite haunt actors at Legends of Fear, because they are well respected and cared for from the get go.
Starting off strong with their small battalion of free-roaming characters. I can’t call them queue line actors because they are very much everywhere! In the midway, the lines, the attractions, their terror knows no boundaries. One of the first free-roaming actors I bumped into was playing the part of a rather terrifying but extremely helpful scarecrow. At the ticket booth, there were a few groups of guests who turned around to a face full of burlap and let out a few screams. Then they weren’t sure if they should go left or right. The scarecrow lifted up his arms as if he were still hanging in the middle of a field. The groups took it to mean they can choose either left or right’ until they started walking in one direction and he put that arm down. Naturally, they started walking in the other direction and then he switched arms’ it was fun.
A few other free roamers were scouring around. Especially a crazy evil clown character that was chasing people around with an air horn gun and a horned Queen of darkness screaming ‘Off with his head!’ They had a familiar face to the industry that is always a pleasure meeting, Demmonya. She is a sick and twisted girl with her psychotic laugh and a bloody teddy bear who seems to communicate to her somehow. After watching how the two react I’m starting to believe that mangled pile of stuffing might actually be alive!
The characters and the acting at Legends of Fear have always been great. Most of the monsters have had some form of dialogue fitting their particular characters. I don’t know what it was about this year but there was much more dialogue and it was easier to distinguish. The actors both on the wagon ride and on the trail did an incredible job. Their roles are more distinct and easier to understand. It’s easy to tell how much work and story went into everyone’s character this year.
The wagon ride starts with some evil mad scientists interacting with an animatronic. It’s hard enough to exchange lines with another fellow actor, but at least they’re conscious of when you start and stop talking. Exchanging lines with a pre-recorded audio track means there is absolutely no room for mistakes, you need to be on cue and in rhythm just like a singer on stage! A few of the other barn characters had a moment to crack off some twisted jokes as the wagon left their scene. They did a great job scaring the whole wagon while we were in their scene so I appreciate that they took the time to follow us and entertain us a bit more and in a different style as we made our way further down the path.
I was very excited to see some very unique and different characters I’ve never seen before in my years of traveling to haunted attractions. Legends of Fear turned one of their wagon ride sets into what seemed like a badass girl gang grindhouse movie! Very angry and aggressive girls were running around what I’m assuming was a motel or apartment complex scene banging on doors looking for someone in particular. Suddenly a man bursts his door open demanding to know ‘What’s going on out here!?’ Instantly regretting his actions, the girls attack and he reaches to the passengers on the wagon desperately for help. The next thing we know he’s getting his skull bashed around back inside his room. Another character on the complete opposite side of the spectrum was practically a god of some sort. They were clearly a tarot card-based character but not any old tarot card reader. The character must have been about twelve feet tall and waved her arms all over the place like she was casting some kind of elemental spell. Her voice was in complete stereo sound with a faint high-pitched echo behind it. She was warning us all of the curses of the wolves with the moon rising over the sky, it was actually really creepy.
Again right back to the other side of the spectrum we pulled up to the butchers of the Saw Mill City Meat Packing Plant. Just a bunch of crazy dudes cutting up bodies and screaming for more. Clearly driven insane by how much blood and flesh they have to deal with every day. Then the even Crazier chainsaw clowns jumped all over the wagon swinging their saws in the air. It was like being in the middle of an insane Slipknot concert confined to a small living room. I actually liked looking back at those guys as they all stood in the doorway of their chainsaw barn staring us down. With the little light the barn had to offer, it was like looking at a silhouette of haunt soldiers ready to go into battle.
The real surprise came with the newest addition to the Legends of Fear ensemble. For their 25th season, they brought out the Pirates! These are some of my favorite types of characters. The Captain of the ship even spoke with that west european country twang accent. And speaking so loud the way a sailor would so everyone can hear. Along with his first mate and even a drunken pirate, who almost regurgitated all over me when he leaned over the side of the wagon, boarded our ‘vessel’ and seized it just like the real pirates! One of them started demanding gold and silver from us too! They even got into a full-on sword fight!
I began my descent into ‘The Hollow” trail after my wagon ride and I was excited to see again the new addition to the trail from last year, The Burnt Broomstick, a witch’s all in one store or a wicked and evil apothecary (if anyone still uses that word). The witches that seem to run this establishment are very much your stereotypical type of witches but they are excellent. They all have their own version of their witch cackle and little evil giggles. And again, much like almost every other actor and character on the property, they have dialogue. ‘You’re not getting out of here alive! No one ever does’ the one working the counter told me. Another one came through a window screaming ‘She’s right you know!’ All of them laugh into the night the whole time. In fact, all the witches at Legends of Fear are very passionate about their particular roles. Depending on what you might consider a witch, I’d say Legends of Fear has at least three, maybe five different types of witches in the whole attraction. Not three to five witches, types of witches. Later on in the trail, they always have a sacrificial woodland type witch, or at least I think of them as a type of witch, with a very tribal and paganistic style.
Even the dollhouse girls are very different and it’s unsettling every year, because I don’t know which one to look out for most. One doll was singing her own little made up lullaby and the other one was so wound up she couldn’t control herself at all. She would constantly be sputtering off these impromptu lines about wanting to play with us and keep us forever. The crazy thing was how fast she would talk with lines like ‘I want to keep you forever and ever and ever and ever yes yes yes yes I do I do I do I do I do I do!’ in the span of about three seconds and then right into the next line. I couldn’t keep up with it, she was insane.
Then they had the Clowns and Carnival Freaks! I walked around one of the carnival game booths and didn’t realize there was an actor crawling towards me. It looked like they were doing a crab walk because the mask they were wearing was looking right at me. And then they stood up and I realized the mask was nothing but a dirty little lie because the actor’s creepy grin was now the one staring right at me. Another carnival employee character was saying I could use my teeth as tokens for any of the games! Inside the funhouse, all the clowns have their very own door with their names on them. Pickles, Sparkles, Bubblez, as long as it ends with a ‘les or z’. I got to see the clown Bubblez pop out and also cattle prod me a few times, all good fun. She led me into the rest of the funhouse where she apparently got attacked by an upside-down bookcase (yes you read that right). Another actress was twitching and turning like a human-sized windup doll and giving these little chirp sounds. And then an Alice in Wonderland character was happy I came for her mad tea party and warning me to not fall down the rabbit hole! The point is that no matter where I went in that crazy funhouse there was always something weird and new and unique around every corner thanks to the actors and actresses.
I also really liked all the characters in the asylum set this year. A pair of doctors who very well might be crazy patients themselves are stationed outside to allow groups to go into the asylum one at a time. They begin this journey into the asylum with a little bit of light-hearted humor. ‘Just wait here for a minute, we don’t want to overwhelm the nurse too much, she gets grumpy and her hands get shaky,’ one of them tells me as I’m the next in line to enter. Then a nurse with a syringe was laughing and waving the needle around her face like it was a fun thing to do. A patient was confined to a bed and all she could do was bounce around singing little bunny foo foo. Everyone was a little different in their types of character and it really kept me guessing which world I was about to walk into. But when I bumped into Dr. Folter, that was a world I was not ready for. I remember this character from some of Legends of Fear’s advertisements but I had no idea what it was like to be trapped in the same room with him. I turned a corner and found myself in a very dark and grizzly-looking surgical room. Quickly I was approached by man, nay, an entity because there wasn’t enough space between me and him to allow any light; therefore he was just a shape for the majority of our brief encounter. ‘This! Is a House of DEATH!’ He screamed into my face as I offended him. ‘Blood and bile dripping from your blistered limbs’ he continued ‘I will tear out your bowels and Bury your entrails!’ No one has ever threatened my bowels before! He continued to be in my face screaming a number of different ways he was going to torture me for so long I started to think to myself maybe this guy actually doesn’t like me too much. Just a complete psychotic doctor who followed me all the way to the end of his scene just to turn and charge down the group that was coming up behind me. Now that I think about it I didn’t see them for the rest of the night…
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