It’s a warm October evening, and I am standing by a pink-painted car next to a deserted parking lot off a highway in Newnan, Atlanta. Bathed in the friendly glow of the setting sun, it feels as though nothing bad could happen here. But inside the low brick building with its bright pink portico, dreadful things occur once the sun goes down. In an hour or so, screams will echo across the lot and the revving of chainsaws will tear through the evening air.
A car pulls up in a spray of gravel and two extremely excited women tumble out and run towards me. “Can we sit on it?” they ask expectantly, indicating the lurid pink vehicle. Mother and daughter Jomine and DeJanay have driven from Detroit to be at the Haunted Pink Trap House, a Halloween collaboration between well-established local scare attraction 13 Stories and Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz.
“We love 2 Chainz!” … Jomine and DeJanay pose outside the Haunted Pink Trap House in Newnan
Like most US cities at this time of year, Atlanta boasts a number of walkthrough haunted houses, or scare attractions. Halloween has grown in popularity and is now big business. In 2017, National Retail Federation statistics revealed that US consumers spent an estimated $9.1bn on Halloween. Much of that is costumes, candy and decorations, but with an estimated 23% of Halloween celebrants visiting a haunted house, scare attractions are a multimillion dollar industry. Atlanta has one of the biggest, most lauded and longest-running haunts in the US: Netherworld. As a former creator of UK haunted houses, this has long been on my bucket list of attractions to visit, but I’m also intrigued by the more extreme and urban Haunted Pink Trap House – as are trap fans like Jomine and DeJanay, who finish taking selfies and pile back into the car to head to the nearby Trap Museum.
It may only be masks or latex, toilet tissue and paint, but the makeup artists at the Haunted Pink Trap House create some horrifying effects
Meanwhile, the scare actors are arriving, and getting into gory costume and makeup. Hideous combinations of latex, toilet tissue, airbrush paint and syrupy blood are liberally applied to the performers, while out on the show floor lights and animatronics are checked, chainsaws (real, with chains removed) are filled with gas, DJs set up for the evening and the house prepares to open. It’s a young and very enthusiastic crowd of performers, ranging from those who are veterans of the business, like owner Allyn Glover, who has been creating haunted houses for 34 years, to the youngest, who is 11 and will play a zombie. Glover, who himself started performing in haunts when he was 13, jokes that he thinks the younger actors are particularly good at scaring customers, because “nobody expects a scare to come from down there.”
The jokey, good-humored family vibe sits slightly oddly with the premise of the Haunted Pink Trap House. Trap is a type of hip-hop that has its roots in Atlanta’s poorest neighbourhoods; it nods to drug deals and urban despair – so certainly horrifying, but not your typical Halloween fare. The Haunted Pink Trap House takes its inspiration from the rundown pink house featured in the artwork from 2 Chainz’s 2017 album Pretty Girls Like Trap Music, and the haunt follows on from a previous installation originally intended to promote the album. The first Pink Trap House was an actual house in an Atlanta neighborhood, painted and themed to host an art gallery and listening party for 2 Chainz fans. It was subsequently home to a church, an HIV testing clinic and a Christmas family attraction.
Owner Allyn Glover serves as a police officer police – his colleagues provide security over the Halloween period
But the Haunted Pink Trap House is an even more intriguing proposition. For a start “no hip hop artist has ever partnered or put together a haunted house,” points out David Leeks of 2 Chainz’s management company, Street Execs. The attraction begins as a standard actors-and-animatronics haunted-house walkthrough, but morphs into a terrifying taste of the trap lifestyle, complete with police shootouts, rabid dogs, drug paraphernalia and menacing gang “monsters”. A second section of the haunt offers the opportunity to use real-weight replica weapons to shoot imaginary bullets (with real recoil) at what owner Allyn Glover has referred to as “zombie crackheads”, while a third section involves visitors being blindfolded, accused of being police informants, then having to escape through a maze of grabbing hands, slimy objects and walls that give small but fairly unpleasant electric shocks when touched.
The realistic-looking replica weapons for the zombie kill section. Guests are scanned for real weapons before entry
My main misgiving comes as we survey the rules for the zombie kill section. A courteous reminder to guests not to take their own guns into the attraction made me suddenly aware that Atlanta scare attractions face an issue I’ve never been confronted with: real-life weapons. “The team’s kind of young,” says my now quite worried-looking photographer. “There’s um, well, there’s a huge margin for error.” I am reassured that all guests are checked over with metal-detector wands before being allowed into the haunt.
Security aside, it is hard not to feel somewhat uneasy about the premise of the haunt. Scare attractions are usually an excuse for unashamedly lurid but stock tropes, used to shock and amuse. The idea of making poverty, addiction and all-too-real violence the focus of this particular style of entertainment seems crass at best, dehumanising at worst. But Glover, who is also a serving officer with East Point police department, says that the intention is not to glorify the trap lifestyle. “We’re trying to bring attention to what others have had to deal with in the past – and [say] maybe that’s not the life you want.”
Leeks goes further: “A haunted house touches on all phobias – if you’re scared of snakes, you’re scared of dogs, you’re scared of insects, you’re scared of being in close quarters, and various things like that. But every phobia has a solution, too. The haunted house is solutions-oriented: even though you may be scared, there’s still a way out,” he explains. “A trap should be a phobia too, because no one wants to be in an impoverished community, living check to check. We want people to go around and say hey, this may be 40 minutes of entertainment for you, but people actually live there … and we need to find a solution.”
A glowing pacifier guarantees guests a slightly easier time inside the haunted house, but Britney and friends are still overwhelmed at points during the Haunted Pink Trap House
When I visit, despite the heavy police presence common to all US haunts, the atmosphere is distinctly community-oriented. Outside, while teenagers shriek and run away from costumed scare actors stalking the queue, a fundraising stall sells homemade pink cupcakes to fund breast cancer research and the Georgia Special Olympics.
I walk through the first section of the haunt with a group which includes friends Anyata, Tequila and birthday girl Britney, who has opted for a ‘chicken ticket’. This has granted her a flashing pink pacifier she can activate to warn the monsters inside the haunt to back off.
A terrified Britney is supported by friends Anyata and Tequila
Once inside, we wind through a menacing diner scene featuring a chainsaw-wielding chef. Even with the pacifier flashing, Britney is so frightened her friends need to carry and drag her through most of the attraction – except for the trap section. When the 2 Chainz soundtrack kicks in the three girls dance through the menacing twists and turns – still holding each other tightly and screaming between lyrics. Britney’s verdict? “It was horrible. Hor-ri-ble. I don’t want to do it no more!” The girls head off for dinner laughing and accusing each other of cowardice.
Netherworld: an Atlanta institution
The Awakened King, one of the characters dedicated to spooking guests at Netherworld
The following night I visit Netherworld, recently transplanted from its home of 21 years to the outskirts of Stone Mountain park. Netherworld is something of an Atlanta institution – many people in the extensive queue are loyal fans who return year after year. In a city of frequent change and architectural flux, owner Ben Armstrong is understandably excited to finally own a permanent location. With over nine-and-a- half acres at the new site, the attraction now has ample space to realise any twisted them that might occur to the Netherworld designers – including Christmas and Valentines haunts.
Netherworld buy in some of their masks and costumes, others are made in-house. Staffing is also a massive undertaking, with casting director Jessica having to keep track of around a hundred actors and characters each night
Speaking to those eagerly (and apprehensively) queueing to enter, it’s clear that the Netherworld crowd, certainly, is here for some uncomplicated, non-political fun. We spend the best part of two hours weaving through mazes as monsters appear from all sides – including above. Animatronics bob and shake, floors drop away and vortices disorientate us, while all around us a diverse crowd of young and old jumped and yelled in the dark around us. Outside we catch our breath, have a donut, pet a Madagascan cockroach called Mittens and watch as walkabout characters strike sparks with their boots as they slide across the asphalt, terrifying the milling crowd.
The contrast between the Haunted Pink Trap House and Netherworld is marked: one is gritty and urban, the other rather more slick and sophisticated. But listening to the rev of chainsaws and giggles, gasps and screams, it’s clear that what both have in common is the ability to draw in a big and diverse crowd and to make them feel something visceral and vital. In the dark, strangers clutch each other for moral support, laugh at their own fear and apprehension, then wobble off breathlessly discussing the ordeal they have been through.
Netherworld is pure, enjoyable Halloween entertainment at its finest, while the Haunted Pink Trap House is keen to raise awareness of the city’s issues through its scare tactics. And although it’s unlikely that uniting in a fear of things that go bump in the night will solve those deeply entrenched problems, it’s certainly a fun start.
Guardian Cities is live in Atlanta for a special series of in-depth reporting. Share your experiences of the city in the comments below, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using #GuardianATL, or via email to cities@theguardian.com
