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Further Reflections on the Haunt

I take back my original criticism of “The Slaughterhouse” as being weak sauce. Of all the mazes, it's the one that still spooks me over a week later. Why?

It was the first maze that Knott’s Halloween Haunt has done that had a living (well, animatronic) victim.

Almost all of the characters in the mazes can be broken down into two groups: living monsters and dead victims. There are corpses galore and gore aplenty, but you don't see anybody in the process of being murdered. It all happened in the past. Even “Quarantine” showed only the consequences of insanity, not the insanity itself.

“The Slaughterhouse” was different. For the first time in my memory, they had a victim screaming for help as he was barbequed alive. It changed the maze-goers from simple crime-scene voyeurs to callous, indifferent accessories to mayhem. We visitors went from horror-movie patrons to pedestrians who ignore the bleeding man on the curb.

I’m sure it was intentional, possibly an experiment to test the limits of what the public will find acceptable. The big question: will that thrashing victim be a prop next year, or will too many people be as disturbed by it as I was?