Q: What
exactly was it that got you hooked on Halloween?
A: I couldn’t answer that question for
the life of me (hope we’re not off to a bad start!). My parents tell me I was
three years old, it was Halloween, the neighborhood kids were out
trick-or-treating and I was absolutely taken with it – this is all I know. It
all started there - from that point, Halloween, horror, and things that go bump
in the night have been a lifelong obsession for me.
Q: How
did you get started in Home Haunting?
A: It was around January 2009 – I was
eleven years old and perusing magic-trick videos on Youtube. One of the
suggestions was titled ‘How to Make a Halloween Corpse’. I pulled an old
plastic skull out of the attic and set to work. I wanted to build a body for my
nasty head, and it didn’t take long for me to find my way to SpookyBlue’s site.
Scrolling down through the endless tutorial list, it dawned on me that this was
the hobby I’d be waiting for my entire life. I vividly recall one day when I, six
years old, decided to turn my room into a torture chamber. I made stuffed
dummies and posed them around the room and hung cardboard limbs from paperclip
chains. That same year I wound up spending Wednesday afternoons with a
psychologist – but that’s another story altogether. The point is, it was really
quite a relevatory moment. I can say pretty confidently that it was one of the
best things that’s ever happened to me.
Q: Your
first haunt was wonderful, and really spooky in an old-school way, really
harkening back to traditional Halloween imagery. The following year, titled The Second Great Plague, was more
overtly grotesque and creepy. Finally, 2012’s Geisterbahn was a jaw-dropping effort that really took things to a
whole new level. Which of these haunts is ultimately your favorite? Which was
the hardest to construct?
A: The hardest to construct was
absolutely Geisterbahn (German for Ghost Train. No real relevance - I just
liked the word.). I found out early last year that I wouldn’t be able to do my
haunt in the shop window from 2013 onwards, and decided to go off with a bang.
I pretty much dedicated all my time, money and energy to making it as good as
it could be and became absolutely obsessed with getting every detail perfect,
from water damage on the giant wall panels to seatbelts on the cart.
It’s hard to say what my overall favorite
is. I really like the way 2011’s haunt turned out, but Geisterbahn is my blood,
sweat and tears. I’ll have to give that one a few more years to provide a
balanced answer.
Q:
Every April, you construct a haunt called “The Backs”. Care to tell us all more
about it?
A: ‘The Backs’ was born in winter 2010.
I was bored on a gloomy afternoon and took it upon myself to create a miniature
haunt in the back garden using nothing but things from the shed and the ground
around me. I made ‘blair witch totems’ and hung them from the tree, crude
zombie hands from rotting gloves and spent hours ‘planting’ tiny dead shrubbery
around the edges of the trail.
The next year I expanded the trail and
decided to make it an annual tradition. I set up ‘The Backs’ every year on the
30th of April – precisely halfway between one Halloween and the
next. Since April here is in Autumn (and October in Spring!), I decided to
embrace the season and stick to the stripped-back, rustic theme. It feels
almost like a second, private, Halloween. I’m not going to be able to do my
window display on Halloween for the next few years – so I’ll be focusing a lot
more on expanding ‘The Backs’ instead.
Q: Any
future haunt concepts you care to share with us?
A: I’d really love to do a proper yard
haunt. The garden in front of my house is cramped and awkward and not at all
fit for a haunt. My ultimate haunt would probably involve a creepy, abandoned
house. These places already have a reputation among neighborhood kids. On
Halloween, I’d set up dozens of gruesome props – rotting corpses of
trick-or-treaters tied to posts, posed on furniture, hanging from the house.
Cracked masks and rotting pumpkins over their heads. Crude decorations and jack
o’lanterns everywhere. And signs reading CANDY
THIS WAY that point to the open door of the house. It’d look like the work
of an exceptionally disturbed (and creative) serial killer. I guess that’s what
I’ve tried to achieve, albeit on a smaller scale, with The Backs.
Q: You
have a real passion for Ghost Trains (known in the US as Dark Rides). How did
this interest come about? What is it about them you find so interesting?
A: I’d just like to put it out before I
say any more – I have never been on a ghost train. My favorite book when I was
little was ‘Come For A Ride On The Ghost Train’, in which the reader is
literally taken for a ride on a Ghost Train. That was really all it took for
me. There’s something about Ghost Trains that I find so fascinating – many
things, actually. The gaudy neon signs, the tacky props, the flashing green
lights and looping sound effects… not knowing what’s going to be around the
next bend in the track. Perhaps my idea of a Ghost Train is vastly different
from the real thing – completely fabricated and untainted.
Q: Apparently,
you have a fondness for RL Stine’s Goosebumps
books, and have created a Tumblr account showing your own pseudo-Goosebumps covers. Care to tell us more?
A: The Goosebumps books were a real inspiration
for me as a crazy, horror-loving five-year-old. They were my proper introduction
to horror, and I’d say I’m not the only person that feels this way. Goosebumps
was already on its way out when I started reading them, so every book was a
torn, stained, ancient tome, some of them with ghosts and monsters doodled onto
the pages. I’m a huge nostalgia geek and am aiming to collect the whole series.
When we finally got a copy of Adobe Photoshop I decided to turn my favorite
horror movies into Goosebumps books. They turned out much better than I had
expected (the key to their authenticity is a very carefully constructed
template and the font ‘Futura’). I figured this is the sort of stuff the
internet loves, and set up a Tumblr blog to showcase them
(ifitwerestine.tumblr.com). And I was right – the blog has really taken off. I
get requests from other users and each post has around 100-300 notes. It’s been
pretty awesome.
Q: You’ve
recently taken to directing short films, including a wonderful piece called
“Skeletons”, and a tribute to The Evil
Dead called “The Woods Themselves”. What was it like to be directing? Do
you have any ambitions to join the film industry?
A: Making Skeletons was a blast. It was
long and sometimes pretty frustrating but so rewarding. I’d say one of the best
things about it was recording the music. I was terrified because I’d never done
anything even remote musical but it turned out to be a lot of fun. The entire
score is piano – sometimes reversed, sometimes slowed down, almost always
drenched in reverb. ‘The Woods Themselves’ was quite different. I think it took
about a week from start to finish, prop-making included, whereas Skeletons was
the culmination of months of work. I’d love to get into the film industry –
even just doing stupid jobs around the set. I had the awesome experience of
acting in a proper short film when I was 10, and was completely fascinated by
the whole thing.
Q: You
seem to be a big fan of horror films. What would you say are some of your
favorite horror flicks?
A:
Huge fan. Always have been. And I’m constantly ranking and re-ranking my favorites
– picking them apart to figure out which is better. At the moment my favorite
would have to be The Shining. It’s
such a consistently incredible film. I particularly love retro horror movies -
that is, modern horror in the style of old horror (The House of the Devil, Beyond
The Black Rainbow and Berberian Sound
Studio) - and the recent slew of awesome French horror movies (especially Martyrs and Livide). So much of whether I like a movie of not is determined by
its ‘look and feel’. For me, music,
visuals, colors and cinematography are so much more important than plot,
characters or actual scariness. I’m easy to please in that regard – give me a
foggy graveyard or a surreal dream sequence and I couldn’t be happier.
Q: What
is your favorite Halloween memory?
A: That’s a tough one seeing as most of
my Halloween-related memories didn’t take place on Halloween at all (which has
always been a somewhat anti-climactic affair over here). I’ve got one that
stands out from 2009. It was Halloween and also the day of my ex-primary-school’s
fair. Not long after arriving with my friends, I spotted an attraction that
hadn’t been there before – The Haunted
Shed. At this point I was already into prop-making and perfectly familiar
with haunts of every size, though I’d never actually seen one in the flesh. The
makers (some fantastically enthusiastic parents) were applying the final
touches before opening, and I kept sneaking glances into the converted PE shed.
I was the first customer, and can report that it was all I had hoped for. Mutilated
dolls nailed to walls of black plastic sheeting, sound-effect laden organ
music, blacklights and fog machines... I went in for a second round immediately
and then spent the rest of the day working in there myself, scaring the life
out of unsuspecting students and concerned parents. In short, it was amazing.
Q: What
do you do when you’re not working on something Haunt or Halloween related?
A: I watch an awful lot of horror movies. I’ve been writing short
reviews of every film I’ve watch since this time last year – I’m filling up a
converted Goosebumps book (appropriately titled ‘You Can’t Scare Me!’). I listen to a lot of music too, mostly from
Iceland. I find it hard to believe there’s so much incredible music coming from
a country with the same population as the city of Wellington - Sigur Rós, Jónsi,
Sin Fang, Pascal Pinon, Of Monsters And Men, Sóley… but I may be getting off
topic now. This year’s been kinda weird because I’ve been completely unable to
find the time or energy to do nearly any form of prop-making. But I can’t
figure out what I’ve been doing instead. Probably sitting in my room, listening
intently to ‘Valtari’, putting off homework and wallowing in teenage angst… or
something along those lines.
Q: I
know that you have said you won’t be doing an October haunt for the next few
years; what do you think you’ll be doing to fill up that time and how do you
think you’ll mark the day?
A: Not really sure at this point. As
I’ve said earlier, I’ll definitely be doing ‘The Backs’ in April each year, and what I post on Halloween may vary from
year to year. To be honest, as of writing this interview (late August), I’ve
only just figured out what I’m doing
this year. And to clarify – it’s not going to be anything big. At all. But it
felt wrong not to mark the day with and offering for the blog. It might even be
posted by the time you’re reading this.
Q: What
is it like to be a Haunter at such a young age? Are people surprised when they
learn how old you are?
A: I guess so. I think it’s pretty much
common knowledge for people who read and comment on my blog, so it’s more the
folks on Hauntforum that are taken aback. I’d say a better question would be ‘are
people surprised when they walk into your bedroom for the first time?’. I’ve
become pretty secretive about my hobby over the past couple of years. Anyone
who knows me knows that I’m a huge horror fan and love all things spooky, but I
tend to keep the whole paper-mache-corpses thing to myself. It’s only when new
friends set foot in my bedroom that they truly realize what they’ve gotten
themselves into.
Q: Every
haunter has their influences, ranging from other haunters, to horror films and
video games, sometimes even their own dreams. What are the things that inspire
you the most?
A: I’m a huge fan of the work of
Pumpkinrot and Stephen Gammell (who illustrated the ‘Scary Stories to Tell in
the Dark’ series). They’re almost one and the same to me – their works both
share a very creepy organic element that I really love, and an almost
melancholy feel. I’ve definitely stolen ideas from movies too, and not even
good ones. More than anything, I like to draw on things that I loved from my
childhood – Goosebumps, ghost trains, zombies… I feel like I’m constantly
creating stuff that I’d wanted to as a crazy six-year-old but didn’t have the
knowledge or skill to at the time. 2012’s Geisterbahn haunt seemed to have been
swimming around in my head for ten years, so it was pretty cool to have that
vision finally realized.
Q: I
understand that there’s not much of a Halloween culture in New Zealand. Do you
have plans of one day coming to the United States for Halloween?
A: No real plans, but I’d absolutely love to. Halloween in New Zealand is a
bit sad - I think a lot of people here see it as an unnecessarily commercial
and distasteful occasion, or as an American ‘invasion’. There’ve even been
petitions to ban Halloween (and Guy
Fawkes Day, which is also celebrated over here), as it’s not ‘culturally
relevant’. I’d like to come over one day and get the full Halloween experience;
burning leaves, picking pumpkins, eating actual
candy corn... I’d probably stay for Christmas too.
Q: Finally,
any advice to any aspiring Haunters or Artists who may read this interview?
A: Just go for it, really. Try new
things. Sign up to one of the forums - it’s full of amazing experts and
absolute beginners and generally awesome people. Set up a blog too - it’s lots of fun and a great way to show your
work to the world. And don’t be afraid to slow down for a while if you think
you’ve worn yourself out.
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