My Horror Job

My Horror Job

The Curse of the Bayou was my seasonal job in Lockport for Halloween. I never have been an actor before, but I thought it would be a fun event to join and it would be a dramatic adventure. Roland Barthes has a similar feeling of adventure when he takes photographs, and I feel like I can relate when I took these pictures. Roland describes his pictures like this: "The principle of adventure allows me to make photography exist." I feel like I can relate to Roland when he says this, because when I joined the curse of the bayou I was really looking for adventure and when I took those pictures it was a lot easier because I felt a sense of adventure. The curse of the bayou is a halloween haunted trail event that is run by Aundrea Vaughn every weekend in October. There are two shows, the Curse of the Bayou, and the Hayride of Horror. The Hayride of Horror is a hayride that is on a long trail and actors run up to the hayride and try to scare the passengers. The actors have 12 spots on the hayride of horror, such as the witch priestess, zombies, black eyed children, axe men, burning of a witch, and more. The Curse of the Bayou is where the passengers get off the hayride and they have to walk through the curse of the bayou trail. Once they get on the trail they will start at the maze, and then go into the wooded area where they will meet the ghost women. Next they will go through the corn maze and try to find the exit of the trail. I worked in the maze of the Curse of the Bayou, and I played the part of a maze crawler and I had to scare the people that try to come near the exit.

This is the entrance of the Hayride of Horror, where people go to buy tickets and get food and try not to get scared by the monsters walking all around them. During the event there are 20 monsters that go around the entrances scaring customers. In the hayride of horror there are 100 actors that come on this stage where we also practice before the event takes place, and we work on movement and what we are supposed to say or what sound could scare people the most with. We also go here to play Improve games, last week we came here and we got into 4 big circles and we played improve games. Also our costumes and masks, and props are in the backroom of the stage. So we come here to get our costumes and we get dressed and ready for our show. We would all come here to eat before the event started and when 7 o'clock comes around we all run from this area into our spots and scaring people as we go by.

This is where the trail for the Hayride of Horror. On this trail, there are 12 main attractions that the hayride drives through. It starts out with going through the little cabins where black eyes kids and the smaller kids come out with fake knives and axes and run up to the hayride and scream and try to scare the passengers. Once they leave they go further down the trail where they will run into the freak show, which is a bunch of circus freaks that play circus music as the hayride passes there spot. then they will go into more of the trail where will see the witch priestess and the burning of a witch, and the graveyard where there will be zombies to chase the hayride. The hayride ends at the curse of the Bayou where the passengers get off the hayride and have to walk through another trail. The Hayride of Horror is the bigger show of the two and this is the layout of the hayride trail. When I first started we went through each spot where actors have to be, and we saw each prop for some of the spots. For example, the freak shows have to be behind this tall white structure that was painted to look like the entrance to a circus event. The only other sports that have props, that were made, for show are the zombies in the graveyard and the burning witch.

This spot is where the graveyard is located on the Hayride of Horror. This is where the hayride enters this closed off part of the trail and there is a pile of mud with graves on it and then there is this prop. In the mud there are zombie that rise up and start digging out of the small holes they are put in. Once they are out they chase the hayride until they leave the closed off part of the trail and leave the graveyard. In this particular prop the zombie queen comes out with her disciples and they say there lines while the hayride stops. She instructs the zombies in the mud pile to rise up and the zombies then start to get up from the mud pile and chase the hayride. I went through this spot when I went on the hayride last year and there are lots of lights and a smoke machine for all of the zombies. We entered the trail by going into a fenced off area and we stopped in front of this structure, where the queen zombie told the zombies to rise up and thats when the zombies chased us.

Getting toward the end of the Hayride of Horror this is where the passengers are let off and they have to walk through this creepy structure that leads to the curse of the bayou. In this structure there is an opening at the top of this and when the passengers walk through they get scared by the person who screams from the top of the structure. The top is like an attic that has a latter and there is an actor who sits there with the top open. Once they see the passengers get off the hayride they keep their head in until they walk past, and then once they get past the hole at the top the actor hangs upside down and screams. I went through this last year as well and I did not expect to see that and it really was scary. Because I didn't know we had to walk so once we got off I was on edge already and going through this I didn't expect to see anyone because no one was in front of me. But once we passed the hole everyone got freaked out when the actor screamed and we ran to the curse if the bayou. The Curse of the Bayou is where the passengers have to walk the new trail and try to find the exit and get chased by monsters and jump scares while going through it.

Once the passengers leave the hayride and they go through the tunnel they will end up here. This is the spot for the Curse of the Bayou, and in this part there are 3 spots that the passengers will go through. First off is the maze, the maze is the small black structure that has maze crawlers that scare the passengers while they try to find the exit. The second spot is the monster pumpkin patch. Which is a lot of monsters that scare you while you go through the pumpkin patch. The third spot is the corn maze. This is where scarecrows and alive pumpkins chase you till you can find the exit of the event. I work in the first black maze, where I am a maze crawler. A maze crawler is a black monster of the night that crawls through this maze and once we know that there are people going through we make sounds that let them know someone else is in there. Once we see them we have to chase them on all fours and chase them until another maze crawler sees them and tries to scare them.

To conclude, this is the Hayride of Horror and the curse of the bayou. A scary haunted trail event that is run every year to scare and attract horror fans from all over northwest Illinois. I am happy I get to be apart of the Curse of the Bayou and be apart of this. I really appreciate good horror and I always loved these kinds of events and I am glad I was able to do this for the first time. It is a very fun event that Lockport puts on and I definitely recommend this haunted trail to any horror Halloween fans.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. The Noonday Press, 1988.