The Weird Beauty of Scream Town

MAtt dunn and scream town residents; Photo by TJ Turner

Anyone who’s braved the intimidation tactics of your standard, schlocky, carnival-style haunted house knows there’s not a lot to get. Usually, it’s dank, dark, and you can’t tell what species of costumed teen has popped out to make a loud noise. This means I’m likely mistaken when I recall the time, as a kid, I walked through the haunted mansion at the Minnesota State Fair and saw an elaborate tableau of a young woman in chiffon tipping a dagger against her collarbone. I doubt, in a $5 house of jump-scares, that an actress would perform such a psychologically complex gesture—out of rotted love, presumably, or fear of the werewolf clawing at her door.

Imagined or not, that scene has stuck with me. It told a story, and that’s why I’m drawn to the more sophisticated Halloween attractions going up this time of year. They’re big October events that rise and sink across the country like ghost ships, set in cavernous malls and shuddering cornfields.

Granted, adrenaline’s still the big draw. We’ve raised the stakes for screaming. We want to get chased, touched, breathed on. We want chainsaws and liability waivers. We want a municipality, not just a house. And the Midwest’s flat, forsaken ’scapes, quietly hellish by themselves—they make perfect real estate.

Minnesota’s Scream Town has built a reputation, over the course of a decade, as one of the country’s best haunted-house attractions. A few dusty roads from the Twin Cities, stewing in a Chaska cornfield about 40 minutes away, it has been voted fourth best in the country on HauntedAttractionsOnline.com. Every year, it gets a little bigger.

For scale, compare the furbelow of fog under the State Fair’s neo-Georgian to the 200 gallons that lift into the naked Chaska sky. Every October weekend, they churn over Scream Town’s 35 acres—spewing fast from 50 fog machines and taking only a few minutes to transform a moonlit clearing into Sleepy Hollow.

Matt Dunn; Photo by TJ Turner

The Pumpkin King

Within Scream Town’s gates, it’s pretty much the Halloween Town of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

A Gothic fountain is flanked by eight themed façades, some of them multi-storied, a few tucking their trails deep into the surrounding cornfields and the 200-year-old woods. There, acting aspirants—mostly young theater nerds—put months of preparation into action. A high school-age boy musses up his blonde hair an hour before go-time. He’ll be the one growling beside a buffet of brains in the zombie-themed house. One girl among many dressed in a Harley Quinn–esque getup will unsettle those waiting in line for the twisted clown attraction, telling stories, in a piping quaver, about how her dolly hanged herself.

While the rest get into costume behind the façades, Scream Town founder Matt Dunn—the entrepreneur who has rented out all of this suburban acreage, cut the grass, planted the corn, and provided the sets and props from two decades’ and some $300,000 worth of collecting—hurries house to house. He has to ensure everything’s in working order, that this year’s new air compressors are ready to breathe sharp bursts of life into the zombie animatronics, and you could easily mistake him for one of the kids. It’s not just his boyish face (recalling Matthew Lillard, or Shaggy from the live-action Scooby Doo) and his worn-in black sweatshirt. It’s also the Christmas-morning bounce in his step. Referring to his work, he calls himself an “adult child.”

So, how does one rise from theater nerd to Pumpkin King? It’s essentially professional-grade audience manipulation, and Dunn started early. He first learned to work a crowd at age 6, borrowing his neighbors’ Fischer-Price magic kit so often they handed it over. Soon, he was sawing neighbors in half and making cars disappear in the Plymouth, Minnesota, cul-de-sac where he grew up.

Halloween would come around, and Dunn would opt out of trick-or-treating so he could rig up displays in the family garage. “I felt like the Home Alone kid,” he says. “You know, with the ropes tied, and he’s pulling everything? That was me. I had strings pulled up in the trees, and I was dropping stuff on people and flying pheasants out of windows.”

Dunn graduated from an entrepreneurship program at the University of St. Thomas and launched Scream Town shortly after, at 24. The initially modest idea has blown up, but Dunn still pads out about half his income working as a magician. Some kind of performer-audience relationship informs just about everything he does. “I like to see people’s reactions,” he says, “whether surprised, scared, or laughing.”

Casually Grotesque

“Scared”—more so than “surprised” or “laughing”—is a vulnerable place to put someone. Understandable, then, why some might enter the gargoyle-sentineled gates of Scream Town with a degree of cynicism. I, for example, didn’t enjoy scary things as a kid. Back at the State Fair, I could have invented that romantic tableau to create distance. More like a movie scene, it raised a fourth wall against interaction.

Today, though, I’ve changed my mind. Fear is something I recommend to friends. We know, as children, that indulging this curiosity dangerously expands the imagination. And as adults, that’s exactly the point: to escape from the safe and mundane, from everywhere we’ve already been.

The denizens of Scream Town who hang around the square have their twisted origin stories memorized. They’re grim but also lunch-break nonchalant. A socialite woman’s fur coat still looks bloody from skinning. This year’s “mayor” resembles the clown from the most recent It movie. He stands outside a tall cage, where you can pay $5 to spend five minutes alone with him. He draws in a small group of girls, and, moments later, they scatter from him like geese. Whoever he is, he’s nailing the scratchy voice. Meanwhile, his looming wife wears a mask similar to the wan face of the widowed bride in the Insidious movies.

You can find horror filmmaker James Wan’s influence elsewhere, too. Dunn identifies as a fan, and, naturally, each of the eight attractions makes you jump—with things bursting from around corners and out of cupboards. If the houses look ramshackle from the outside, the insides tighten. Many of the 100-plus scenes are so dense with minutiae they reward a slow walk. Others unfold without warning: a buoyed, bobbing rush through a strobe-lit hall where bodies dangle like butchered meat. And the actors—warping their voices, and, in one case, choreographing their movements around the creepiest silhouette a bare lantern can cast—have their roles well enough in hand to avert potential awkwardness.

It’s not only a chance for them to hone improv skills; they get to feel belonging, too. An hour before opening night, the sky is still clear, and the mayor’s wife, mask off, does stretches under a tent. Dressed down in black spandex, she lifts her arms in rising-sun pose behind the nearly fortress-size “Clown Asylum” attraction. About 20 mad clowns gather nearby. Some of their makeup invokes Insane Clown Posse, and their leader, sporting a red faux hawk, reads directions off a clipboard. Feet away, a girl in an Einstein wig clenches a cigarette between orange and pink fingernails while jiggling a jug of fake blood over a cartoonishly huge syringe. A corpse bride sips an energy drink. A swamp thing calls “Cousin!” to his counterpart. The mayor’s wife, dressed now in her black-and-lavender gown, goes searching for her husband. “Are you the mayor?” she asks me. Finally, it’s obvious. “We meet at last,” says the Bill Skarsgård-as-Pennywise lookalike. They compliment each other’s costumes, then discuss whether wearing a latex mask is worth the discomfort. When they talk shop—their approach to their characters—it sounds like method acting.

And maybe it is. In the sprawling alien-themed attraction, there’s a young, lanky farmhand, who, in flurried seconds, drawls his story to visitors. This is the post-arrival countryside, where his cow has gotten beamed up, his parents brutalized, and as for him—“Isn’t she beautiful?” he croons, stroking his dead mother’s cheek.

You would have found Dunn crafting sets for high school plays when he was these actors’ age. At the end of the month, everything comes down, and the year pushes on to our more family-friendly holidays. That’s when you can catch Dunn holed up in a treehouse for the off season, tucked away in Plymouth, where he puzzles, like the twisted Santa of one of his attractions, over the ways he wants to frighten people next year. “Fear of heights?” he wonders. “Maybe something with mirrors…”

Matt Dunn; Photo by TJ Turner

Fear of Heights

As you might expect, the creator of Scream Town himself is not easily spooked. His horror movie collection runs deep, and if there’s a spider in Dunn’s bathtub, he takes a shower anyway. Heights, though, do make him queasy. His Plymouth treehouse goes up nearly 30 feet. At the top, he wants to install a zip line.

There, standing on the high balcony in the backyard of his spacious estate, I look through the surrounding oak trees, and Dunn feints a push at me from behind. He laughs as I jump, and I laugh, too. He tells me he does that to everyone. “And they all do what you just did,” he smiles. “They freak!”

When I suggest that Dunn manipulates people’s emotions for a living, the same way a film director does, he balks at the description. After I take in more of his treehouse—with all its via-Craigslist furniture, upholstered in red-wine velvet that lends a cigar-lounge feel while a taxidermy zebra head conjures Addams Family surrealism—I rephrase my thought: that he creates atmospheres for a living. “Exactly,” he agrees. “I like giving spaces an emotion.”

Dunn has spent tens of thousands of dollars on Halloween props, collected since the entrepreneur, now in his mid-30s, was 10 years old—including a couple hearses, caskets, a gutted pig, all, again, from Craigslist. Combine that with the thousands of feet of electrical wiring, the fog machines, this year’s air compressors, and the ten dozen or so fully realized scenes, and Scream Town evokes old-school Disneyland charm. (The historic woods help, too. Lost in darkness, my friend points to a mouse darting across a branch. “Is that real?” It is; the light from our lantern follows the rodent as it scuttles over a doll arm hung as perfectly as an ornament.)

Still, eliciting reactions is more art than science. How people respond to Scream Town varies—and tells you a lot about them.

Inside one vine-enclosed attraction, altars and tombstones transfer their religious tones to the voodoo-lamp, chicken-skeleton jitters of a bayou village. The woman ahead of me—she’s pulled her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands and cupped her hands over her mouth—readily shrieks. A stoic bearded man reinforces his ego with hands in his pockets, head back, not flinching. The tall guy with hockey hair makes off-color jokes to assert dominance over the atmosphere.

But the most common reaction bubbles up as laughter. Not derisive or dismissive. Instead, the same chortle—cathartic, a little self-deprecating—that escaped me when I realized I was not, in fact, shoved over the railing of Dunn’s treehouse. I was safe.

I thought about why kids scare more easily. Adults feel as if they can safely expect things to continue on. Really, we stand next to the edge. When a creepy sound rises from that chasm, we register, in our gut, that it opens there, without a safety net.

Here at Scream Town, the threat is only a puppet—a hag on the end of a lunging mechanical arm. But you scream. Afterward, you can laugh or cry, so you laugh.

Scream Town
7410 Highway 212 E.
Chaska, MN
September 28–November 3, 2018