Halloween is one of the most popular American holidays. It's the excuse to dress up as whatever you want (for most American teenage girls, this inexplicably winds up as Bunny Girls, Wenches, Hookers or Naughty Nurses) and wallow in all the horror, gore, cheap scares and wicked thrills your favourite Hollywood horror flicks can provide.
Around New Jersey, many local farms organise 'Haunted Attractions' for brave punters to visit. These involve hayrides (the curiously American tradition of bumping around in the back of a tractor trailer) through 'haunted woods' - where you encounter gory set-pieces and horrifying monsters jump out at you from the shadows.There are also 'corn mazes,' which are winding paths cut through the eight feet tall corn fields, leading to spooky scenes of graphic ghoulishness.
Field of Terror, in East Windsor, promised both, so braving the darkness and my inadequate navigation, we set off in Shahkira's truck and signed up for the spookfest.
It was a lot of fun. This sort of thing just doesn't seem to exist in England and that's a real pity. Halloween is such a deliciously indulgent occasion and these haunted attractions are a wonderful expression of it!
At Fields of Terror, you first queued. You queued in Disneyesque fashion. We arrived at 8pm and didn't board the Hayride until 9:30pm. But by then we were all riled up and looking forward to the adventure. Random attacks by famous faces (like Halloween's Michael Myers) kept our adrenaline pumping.
There was even a boiled-encrusted mutant, begging likely types to 'pet' his disgusting radioactive baby. His name, judging by the cries of the other cast members, was Pet My Baby.On the hayride, about thirty of us clambered into the back of an old tractor trailer piled with hay bales. Then we trundled off into the woods...
Through the darkness we travelled for about five minutes, until we rounded a corner and came across a broken down caravan slewed across the road, flanked by rusty patio furniture and rickety outhouses. Scrawled in red across the caravan were the words: "Trailer Park from Hell!"
Just as we'd taken in this scene, the outhouse door burst open and a redneck in a singlet came rushing out at us, wielding an exhaust-spewing chainsaw.
Cue screams and panic from the trailer.
Dodging the whirring chainsaw, the tractor hauled us to apparent safety, back into the dark and dingy woods.
Next we passed through a rickety gateway, constructed from scrap wood and poles. A pig's head peered sightlessly down at us from the tallest pole, reminding me inexplicably of having to read Lord of the Flies when I was in primary school.As we took this all in, more screams erupted. Jumping out of the bushes were a couple of furry werewolves, who leapt onto the sides of the trailers and immediately started harassing the nearest pretty girls (Tina found herself being snuffled by a particularly amorous lycanthrope.)
From the trees, spotlights lit up a rock, swinging down at us, about to crush the trailer. Just a few feet before it hit, however, a secondary rope pulled the rock away and spared us from obliteration (or, at the very least, a long walk back to the car park.)
Off we rumbled, back into the darkness.
We then passed what looked like an abandoned shack, right in the middle of the woods. Spotlights lit up a pretty teenage girl, strapped to a chair while a masked madman closed in on her with a whirring drill and rusty blades. She begged for rescue while we trundled past, until the rumbling diesel engine drowned out her pleas.Then, rounding the corner, our tractor left the woods and we passed beneath a sign, welcoming us to Man Slaughter Village (Population: All Dead)
We trundled through an eerie graveyard, peering expectantly at the crosses sticking out of the ground. The open graves and coffins failed to spew forth any scary bad guys, which lulled us into a false sense of security.
False, because the tractor then took us through a scrapyard, filled with rusty old cars and an abandoned fire truck, it's lights blinking mournfully into the darkness. From the shadows, a fireman came staggering towards us, pleading for help - only to be axed to the ground by a madman chasing him.
Leaving him to his fate, we wheeled off around the corner and back to the apparent safety of the car park.
Once we'd unloaded, leaving the trailer ready for another load of unsuspecting victims, we queued up to enter the five acre corn maze.
This line moved pretty quickly. Soon we were passing through a ghoulish gateway and making our winding way through eight feet tall stalks of corn.
It was dark and disorientating. Soon we'd lost all sense of direction, only being vaguely aware of the sound of a generator popping in one direction and somebody screaming in the other.
To enter the maze proper, we had to pass through 'The Big Squeeze.' An enormous black orifice, it squeezed us tightly and we had to force our way blindly through, until it spat us out back in the middle of the cornfield, totally turned around from where we'd originally thought we were.
There was nothing to do but trudge onwards. Not so easy when the stalks of corn would suddenly rustle and out would leap an axe wielding bad guy. Tina, being small and busty and cute and 'screamy', was a natural target for these attackers. One of them - a small pig-faced monster - revealed her mistake."You're mine now!" He hissed. "You made eye contact!"
Struggling through the maze, we eventually made it to an abandoned school-bus, where Freddy Krueger welcomed us on board with his fistful of knives...
"Just an inch or two off the back," Tina quipped.
Through the blood soaked bus we went, until we found ourselves in a wrecked children's playground, set upon by fiendish looking (and slightly disinterested) killer clowns.
The maze seemed to go on forever, interspersed by wonderful conceptual set-pieces. For example, we stumbled across a bizarre collection of gigantic painted eggs.
"What the hell is this?" Tina demanded. "Did they just leave these over from this year's Easter Egg Hunt?"
But no! Out of the bushes leapt a ravenous, blood soaked Easter Bunny, obviously driven psychopathic by the fiendish children scoffing his eggs earlier that year.I can't remember everything that we experienced in the maze - only that it was a lot of fun and pretty creepy. When we finally got to the end, though, we discovered the real American 'horror' mentality. This is why they always die in the horror movies!
We arrived in a clearing miles from the car park. A single guy, out of costume and character, told us to wait for a tractor and trailer to cart us back to our cars.
So we waited. And waited.
Eventually, a bunch of the crowd started to get irritated.
"Screw this!" Somebody yelled. "We'll walk back!"
"No!" The guide yelled. "Don't take the path back! The tractor doesn't have lights. He could run you over!"
"SCREW YOU!" the leader of the rebels spat back. "We ain't waiting!"
So off he and about thirty of his followers trudged, into the darkness towards the sound of the humming generators.
I stood there, stunned.
In England, nobody would even have thought of questioning the guide's authority. We'd have neatly arranged ourselves into a line and waited. That's the indomitable spirit that forged (and lost) the British Empire.
What stunned me more, however, was the number of people following the loud-mouthed cretin.
The teenage girls and giggly boys had screamed and squirmed their way through a spooky maze making appropriate 'terrified' responses at all the fake dangers... But when faced with a REAL danger - like a speeding tractor crushing them beneath it's wheels - they all teamed up and set off blithely like the 'screaming Americans' we arrogant Europeans always make fun of in the disaster movies.
If this was a disaster movie (or even just a horror movie) they'd all have got horribly mangled by a rogue combine harvester or something - and the audience would have laughed.
But this wasn't a horror movie. It was real life. They were facing real danger, heading off into the darkness. We should have yelled at them to stop and turn back...
But by the time the rebellion had assembled itself, there were only a few of us left standing waiting for the tractor... So we decided to join them like good little horror movie victims.
The End.
Epilogue:
We made it back safe and sound (needless to say.) On our journey back, we were even passed by the speeding demon tractor - which had stopped on it's journey to pick up the first lot of rebellious Americans stoically trudging back towards the car park.
Thinking they were going to be carted the rest of the way in hayride luxury, they clambered on board the tractor and rumbled past us, peering down at us pedestrians with a look of smug superiority.
Except they were heading AWAY from the car park.
Into the darkness.
Towards the sound of all the screaming.
Watching them go, I idly wondered if the Field of Terror had a terrifying fate planned for these dissident customers...
Field of Terror is in East Windsor, NJ - and is still open until 11pm next weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment