Christopher Klinge
Wisconsin Scaryland: Bloody hell.
Without live actors, haunted houses would be little more than oversized Halloween displays. They bring them to life, so to speak. Which is why the horror-lovers among us are grateful that the ever-increasing number of haunts in the area feature guys like Ryan Olstad, the gent who plays The Butcher. He’s a cleaver-wielding creepazoid you meet about halfway through Wisconsin Scaryland. You’ll remember him for the spider-like way he ducks under tables and sticks to you like menacing glue.
“I try to avoid actually touching people,” says Olstad. “If I’m up on someone real fast, that’s usually enough to scare them. The best part is, they can’t see me...until I want them to see me.”
Conversely, you’d have to have had your eyes gouged out to miss Psycho the Clown, one of the characters who spooks the entry queue at Screamin’ Acres. Psycho — a heavy-metal harlequin in leather — is actually Sid Soltis, a 41-year-old former bouncer and karaoke host. Soltis loves to let Psycho “out of the box,” as he puts it, but confesses he’s thoughtful about whom and how he spooks. “It’s about reading your audience, about that first reaction,” he says. “It all rolls from there.”
Soltis preps Psycho’s playful/menacing mood by rocking out to either AC/DC or Pantera. “Putting on the paint is what flips the switch,” he says.
Since your scare-time is limited, we previewed four of the most scream-inducing local options. Here’s what to expect.
Christopher Klinge
Scaryland’s cleaver-wielding creepazoid: Ryan Olstad as “The Butcher.”
Screamin’ Acres
3865 Hwy. 138, Stoughton
Jake Eugster and Nathan McGree, the purveyors of Stoughton’s legendary Screamin’ Acres — rarely stop thinking about how to improve it. As McGree jokingly puts it, “We put in 365 days for 38 hours of scares.” New this year is a lengthy wooden crawlspace that’ll have you twisting and ducking a lot more than just spider webs. But the Acres hardly needed augmenting — the eye-popping, head-tripping 3D-effects section where you won’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s illusion until it’s way too late could stand as an individual haunt on its own.
Screamin’ Acres is all about the high-impact set pieces. Festivities start off with an actor-packed slaughterhouse and go from there. Spooky stretches through fields of 10-foot-tall corn are just as unnerving, as you wait for something to jump out and grab you. (And it will.) After spending a horrifying hour treading the Acres, I’m sure of two things: Ghouls on stilts can move frighteningly fast, and I’m never looking at teddy bears the same way again.
Haunted Barn
755 Hwy. 51, Stoughton
Kris and Larry Twining pulled the plug on their long-running Haunted Barn two years ago because it got too big, says Kris Twining. “We were doing so much, we weren’t doing anything well.” But the itch to scare the bejesus out of people doesn’t die easily: The Barn’s back with a vengeance this year — a focused and very scary vengeance. The outdoor elements have been ditched in favor of focusing on the barn itself, a tightly packed experience featuring 35 surprisingly aggressive actors who aren’t afraid to get their scarred, crazed and gory faces right up in your grill. The Barn gets extra credit for its indoor garden section, where the scares are truly unexpected, and also for the basketball-style scoreboard at the barn entrance, ready to tally up the quitters and wetters who bail out before the end. The count was seven on opening night alone — god knows how high it is now.
Christopher Klinge
Ferris Wolf plays Skip the Clown at Wisconsin Scaryland.
Wisconsin Scaryland
5305 Hwy. M, Westport
Two years and an impressive pile of cash have been invested in Guy Kitchell’s Wisconsin Scaryland, and it shows like the crusted bloodstains on the walls. If there’s a genre that Kitchell and crew haven’t managed to pack into the former Westport convenience store, I don’t know what it is: It’s an asylum, a prison, a nuclear waste dump, a carnival and more. Among the complicated handmade props is the Hellevator, the claustrophobic and rickety lift box that gets your Scaryland experience off to an uneasy start. Elsewhere, there’s a creepy miniature carousel that proves a brilliant misdirect, and a truly inspired use of strips of white cloth and a strobe light. The experience goes on so long you may begin to literally feel like you’ll never escape — and of course, once you do, you find out you haven’t. Kitchell says managing the flow is one of the biggest challenges: “We don’t like when groups catch up with each other, but sometimes a group is so scared, they walk incredibly slowly,” he says. The 50 infrared cameras watching everything help, and allow walkie-talkie communication to deploy one of the 60 actors to scare things along.
Schuster’s Haunted Forest
1326 Hwy. 12/18, Deerfield
Dread descends as you jostle in the dark in the back of Don Schuster’s hayride truck, speeding through the quietly menacing rows of corn toward Schuster’s Haunted Forest. Zombies, last year’s theme, have given way to Camp Schuster, which means a certain hockey-mask-wearing maniac is holding court in the woods — and a lot worse. Forty-five actors lurk among the trees and dilapidated shacks in Schuster’s forest, but in some ways, it’s the quiet and eerie tableaux (a group of deserted pup tents with lanterns glowing beside them; the skull-laden altar and the clever signage) that disturb more than the jump scares. Schuster’s guiding philosophy: “You want to scare the hell of them at the beginning and at the end — that’s Haunting 101.” Between the strobed hallway and The Vortex, mission accomplished.
