An Extra Day of Halloween

Recently, Eva has spent a big portion of every weekend at the Halloween Haunt attraction, which takes place at the local amusement park every October. One of the friends she made at the park got her a volunteer gig at a different haunted attraction called Deadtime Dreams, so last night she and her friend Michelle got to put on costumes and scary make-up and lurk inside a haunted maze over in East San Jose. You'd think that, being only 13 years old, they would have been the youngest monsters, but there were also a couple of tiny little girls in scary clown make-up, the youngest of whom was probably only 5 or so. They were very cute, going for the creepy-cute vibe, which to my mind is much more effective than the jump-scares the teenagers tried out on us.

Going to pick up Eva and Michelle, Jeanine and I got there early enough to go through both of the haunted mazes. They were relatively well done, but pretty typical of what one might expect. I almost felt bad for not jumping. Jeanine never jumps either. In fact, I can't understand why anybody would jump. You go into this type of thing with the expectation that actors will try to make you jump and the knowledge that none of them will actually touch you. Plus, they're mostly teenagers, who usually lack any real subtlety, so their attempts at scaring the paying public are predictably clumsy. This particular attraction had a kind of Rocky Horror Picture Show meets the Renaissance Faire vibe anyway, and I could well imagine many of the actors attending those events.

After walking through the mazes, we found a little side room that was showing Bride of Frankenstein, with fake skeletons in most of the seats. That was kind of neat, although it was kind of hard to hear the dialogue with all of the haunted calliope music and chainsaw noises bleeding in from outside. It put me in the mood to watch the old classics.

Later, as it grew colder, we talked briefly with the man in charge (or so I assume). He asked us what we thought of the mazes, and we basically told him what he wanted to hear. He mentioned that they'd had some "code yellow" incidents, and even a "code brown" (slang we use at work too), which surprised me. I find it hard to imagine that people would get scared enough to poop or pee themselves. Some people must be pretty jumpy and/or seriously incontinent. Later, Eva mentioned that there had even been a puking incident. Wow.

Around 11:00, while we waited for the girls to emerge from the attraction, it was cold enough for us to see our breath. Autumn is definitely in the air. Above us, I could see Cassiopiea, Orion, and part of Cygnus. Light pollution swallowed the rest.