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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Make-Up Supervisor Beth Gorley is here to make your nightmares reality
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Vincent Venuti finishing a creepy doll look on Nicky Lindell, the actress who'd scare me three hours later in that nightmarish doll factory
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Joe Letteri isn't clowning around. (I'm so sorry.)
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Brittany Layton and Grez Frazier are expert stilt walkers; the thought of walking around that high off the ground is sort of more terrifying to me than the Cornstalkers maze itself (and it's pretty scary).
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Gettin' wiggy with it
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Starbucks, the unofficial nightmare fuel of King's Dominion
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Plaster molds galore
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Cassy Napior waits in the backlot, ready to play "a victim/little girl; multiple personalities."
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
The second course of Executive Chef Paul Maloney's VIP Haunt meal: charred man-flesh with creamy bone marrow (charred filet with asparagus, glazed carrots, charred shallots and tomato, and red wine sauce and mashed potatoes).
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Executive Chef Paul Maloney dishing up some innards
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Photo by Stephanie Breijo
Course three: warm brain pudding with beating heart sauce (pumpkin cinnamon-roll bread pudding with caramel sauce, ice cream, fresh strawberries and whipped cream)
When you see Wesley Frederick at Joe's Inn, he'll probably be in the kitchen, cooking, and without those inch-long nails protruding from his face. When you see him at Kings Dominion in October, well, that's a different story.
He's just one of the theme park's 300 actors hired each year for Haunt, the massive Halloween park takeover that includes everything from live shows to horrifying mazes, and even a scary-carnival-themed buffet. It's the most wonderful time of the year for those who like to be scared, and especially for those who love to scare them. Three-hundred employees, many of them seasonal, and an additional 70 to 200 volunteers — often of the military or VCU type – sit in makeup and don unique costumes to jump out from the fog, terrifyingly tower above you on stilts or wait in the corners or trap doors of one of this year's nine mazes. (That is, unless you pay for a no-scare light-up necklace, which signifies the actors should not attempt to frighten you because, in essence, you are a scaredy cat. Sorry, the truth hurts.)
Just to the right of the park's entrance, past the entry gates, is a large, hidden back lot where the park's offices sit in nondescript buildings. It's typically humdrum, I hear, but today, the area is swarming with vampires and broken dolls sipping from Starbucks cups and chatting about the weekend ahead. It's surreal.
Inside one of the buildings, a man wheels a large shopping cart full of props. A frightened black cat with an arched back stares, frozen in a hiss. Just behind him is the entrance to the costume shop and make-up, and next to that is an even larger wardrobe room, which has taken over the park's normal uniform area. Prison uniforms hang, tattered. What looks to be a doctor's coat is spattered in fake blood. There are creatures everywhere.
"This is my first year as a clown," Frederick says, seated in a makeup chair. For the previous two years he was a zombie, and the year before that, a monster. It's not rare for an actor's character to change every year here; while the costumes get washed and stored until the following year, the prosthetics are all thrown away and the makeup team must begin again from scratch next year. They keep the molds, so they have the availability to make some masks and prosthetics again for the next Haunt, but for the most part, each year they’ll develop an almost entirely new crop of demons, ghouls, vampires, zombies and monsters.
It's why Beth Gorley, Haunt's makeup supervisor, arrives in August to begin creating the season's looks. It's her sixth year working Haunt at the park, and it's this park that started her on the path to becoming the special effects makeup artist she is today.
“When I was younger and came to Kings Dominion, they had the Klingons and I always thought the prosthetics looked so cool and I didn’t know how they could possibly do that," she says. "Then when I was 25, I went to [Tom Savini’s Special Make-Up Effects Program] in Pennsylvania and got a degree in it, and came back to Richmond and got a job here!”
Makeup starts around 5 p.m. every night, each Friday through Sunday from the end of September to the end of October, and Gorley and the team's 19 other artists have only 10 to 15 minutes to complete each actor's makeup before the scaring begins promptly at 7 p.m. The makeup room is buzzing, with colorful creams, brushes and pods of fake blood littered all around the counter space. “WHO HAS THE HOT GLUE GUN?” an artist yells to my right.
Near him, another is airbrushing blue onto a scary doll. Cotton, latex and paint feel like they're everywhere, and so do the terrifying masks drooping over Styrofoam mannequin heads, waiting to be plastered onto their rightful owners.
“It’s very simplistic materials, but the talent level is so advanced, it can be pushed further. Like this," Gorley says, "this is sculpted entirely with latex.”
She holds up a horrifying prosthetic with what looks like pockets of eggs erupting from flesh.
“This is Spider Lady from our Fairy Tales [scare zone].”
“That’s disgusting,” my friend says. This brings a wide smile to her face.
“We have a lot of talented people.”
October is one of the park's longest seasons, and detailed planning for the fall event actually begins as early as June, when the shows and new mazes and scare zones take form, and wardrobe enters the scene. It's Meghan O’Beirne's first year here, and her role as costume shop supervisor keeps her posted up at a podium next to a large rack of wigs.
“Gloves? Black gloves?" she asks. "OK, hold on one second.” She goes to a small wall of drawers, retrieves them, and hands them to a ghoul in need of some afterlife accessories. Not long after, a woman in a scary clown getup walks by and asks if O'Beirne has seen someone named Skittles. She hasn't, but maybe they went down that hall.
She's part manager, part seamstress, part creative director. She and her wardrobe team dress roughly 500 people throughout the season, and O'Beirne herself is responsible for making a number of the costumes, including that of The Overlord, the master of ceremonies who kicks off each night of Haunt at the front of the park. She oversees the costumes for all nine mazes, the six scare zones and the four live performances (and that's not even including the park's kid-friendly Halloween-themed shows during the day). For the newest maze, the haunted-prison-themed Lockdown, she ordered dozens of prison uniforms, tea-dyed them, and distressed them herself. Many costumes are made from scratch, and when some are ordered, they're almost always customized and tweaked in-house.
Back on the other side of the lot's wall, the public is slowly streaming in for a good scaring. In a private room above the crowd, Executive Chef Paul Maloney is about to serve his annual prix-fixe VIP meal. The Saturday-night dinner is an additional $35, and this year, it's alien autopsy themed. That is, the aliens are doing autopsies on the humans. Towering extraterrestrials sit in corners and even on tables, covered in blood. One stands beside a mannequin with an enormous chestburster exiting her body, and it's from her cavernous chest that Maloney serves up the evening's dessert: warm brain pudding with beating heart sauce (or, for the layman earthling, pumpkin cinnamon-roll bread pudding with caramel sauce, ice cream, fresh strawberries and whipped cream).
He likes to have fun with it. In fact, he's so into it that he elaborately decorated the room himself. It took a week and a half.
"The roller coaster ride, Flight of Fear — that used to be the alien-themed maze, Outbreak," he says. "It didn’t do so well and of course guests have their favorites that they go on social media and rave about, and it just wasn’t one of the popular ones, so they decided to change it and now it’s called Lockdown. No aliens were going to be used, so I snatched the aliens and put them here.”
He's made good use of the space. Nearly every corner is filled with an alien of the not-so-E.T. type, or a human oozing goo or losing their innards. There's even an alien behind the bar. Maloney also planned the cocktails at Haunt's new vampire bar, for those who need some liquid courage before entering a scare zone, and the Cleaver Brothers Sideshow Buffet in the carnival section.
"I went bigger and badder for this year! I wanted more gore, more guest interaction and better theming," he'd told me before my trip to the park. He wasn't lying, and long lines aside, this year's Haunt didn't disappoint. Maybe next year, I'll come back as a ghoul.
