Standing at the front gate of Eastern State Penitentiary, I imagined the horrors I’d experience behind the walls of this abandoned prison. The night breeze brought a coolness to the adventure that was about to unfold. This fall, Eastern State opened five haunted houses with different themes. Some are good, like the one titled “Nightmares,” and the most disappointing, titled “Delirium.”
As the name suggests, “Delirium” features thousands of neon colors painted in the room to make the visitors lose their sense of direction. Painted buckets and walls are used to create a one-way lane, but I almost walked directly into a wall because I thought it was an open space. Is the paint on the ground there so that if people throw up, it won’t look obvious?
When I walked around, I missed some of the performers because they were fully camouflaged against the wall. What’s the point of hiding if you’re not going to jump out and scare people? Are you expecting visitors to have their eyes wide open in total dizziness and look around, searching for jump scares?
Also, the lighting is as bright as if someone is holding a flashlight right in front of me. If you love lights so much, fix your boring light show.
“Nightmares,” in comparison, is way better. Not because it gets the more stereotypical setting of a haunted house, darkness (yet you can still see), but because the themes are clear and it creates suspension. The costumes are great, too.
The performers wearing stilts were the most impressive. I have no idea how much effort they put into training to run in them with heavy costumes without tripping over, and their performance of flowy and ghostly figures is what I expected for a haunted house.
The swamp section is filled with milky fog that fills up to my waist, making me almost afraid to take any step forward. I kept looking around, worrying if there would be anything jumping out of the dark, misty corner. This haunted house is in one of the wings of the penitentiary. Walking along the dark, empty hallway and seeing those cell blocks gave me the experience of being like a trapped prisoner. Hundreds of years ago, was the real horror of the prison creating the scares I experienced today?
