05-09-12
The other day, driving to class, I found myself caught behind a vehicle that I’m certain was exhumed from a retired little-known Disney Amusement Park ride. It was a glittering gold VW bus with a makeshift second tier of windows cobbled onto the roof, creating a double-decker effect. Adorning the roof and all sides were lively skeleton statuettes – grinning and dancing arm-in-arm, sporting top hats and canes, or draped in jewels. The back of the bus (of which I caught the best view, driving behind it) was framed in smiling skulls, bones, and jewels, with the words “Never-Never Van” sparkling below the rear windshield. I can’t imagine any practical purpose for such a van, other than taking amusement-park-goers through the Pirates of the Caribbean / Indiana Jones / Peter Pan / Haunted Mansion ride – and I hoped I might be caught, briefly, in the van’s magical tail winds and allowed to traverse the imagined Disney ride in my Honda Fit.
It didn’t happen. But it did remind me that in my last blog entry a million years ago, I promised to tell two stories, the first about Halloween.
At the beginning of October, I saw an ad: “Actors Needed for Haunted House.” Intrigued, I showed up to the Corn Maze at twilight for the auditions, where a group of about 10 of us limped, drawled, screamed, snarled, and wailed our way through a series of ridiculous improv games based around the Haunted House’s theme of zombies in the Louisiana bayou. I was invited to join the fright crew the very next weekend; I think it was my character “Swampland Mary” (creepy, “undead,” on an eternal search for her lost frogs) that sealed the deal.
Excited to strike some fear into the hearts of adrenaline-seekers for one of America’s least wholesome holidays, I showed up for my first night of work 2 hours before the Maze opened to get into costume and makeup. I was cast as a zombie, so the crew found me an Elvira dress and proceeded to tear it mostly to shreds. I wore flannel pajama pants and a turtleneck under it because it was cold outside, and purple Doc Marten boots because it was muddy.
Some fellow zombie girls did my hair like theirs, ratting it up to oblivion and spraying it with enough super-firm-hold hairspray to asphyxiate anyone but the undead. The makeup crew gave me a nasty hole in my cheek; and on my way out to my post, a guy dressed in a bloody butcher’s costume holding a 2-liter water bottle full of corn syrup, cocoa powder, and red food coloring spattered me in fake blood, head to toe.
I was entering the crew late in the game; a few zombies had dropped out, so I was a replacement. As a facilitator led me to my place, I passed a slain bride, a giant spider web, a scarecrow that came to life, and a swamp monster dressed in camouflage and partially submerged in water. There were two other zombies stationed near me, and I asked them about scare tactics as we were waiting for the first victims to pass through the maze.
Highlight: Lunging out to scare a lone male, perhaps 17 years old, and causing him to scream and jump 3 feet in the air.
Lowlight: Hearing a 4-year-old child approaching, crying, being dragged by his parents muttering things like “you were the one who wanted to come!” and “toughen up!” When they reached my station, I didn’t jump out at them. The mother caught my eye, stopped and knelt down to the wailing child, who buried his face in her chest. “Look!” she commanded him. “Look behind you. Turn around and look! This is what you wanted to see! Look, she’s not even that scary!” The child would not be consoled, and as he sobbed, the mother looked up at me and said, “he’s been begging to come here for weeks, and now he won’t even open his eyes,” at which point his father bent down, shook him by the shoulders and said “stop crying right now!” I turned my face to the ground and inched backward, waiting for them to move on, and hid in the recesses of the corn row for the next few passers-by, trying to regain my own sense of morals in my monster-role.
Highlight: Entering the Haunted Maze before it opened and hanging around all the monsters, joking and laughing, feeling safe behind the scary façade.
Lowlight: Lunging at a pack of 10-year-olds whose leader sneered at me and told me I wasn’t scary, and proceeded through the maze jeering at the freakish, bloody, terrifying monsters, unfazed. How does our world create such impervious, unreceptive children – and by playing a zombie in this funhouse, what was I doing to perpetuate this impassiveness?
Highlight: Hiding in the theatrical fog, between the rows of corn, under a full moon, during a lull in the evening. I felt simultaneously lonely, powerful, mysterious, and full of the night.
Realization: I’m not cut out for haunting. At the end of my second night, my feet were aching and blistered; my quads were burning from the short sprint/lunge routine I’d developed as my optimum scare tactic; my voice was raw from my experimentation with screaming and growling; and both my own morals and my judgment of other people’s morals (for scaring small children whose parents shouldn’t have brought them into this terrifying maze in the first place) were seriously compromised.
After only two nights of haunting, I resigned as Center Zombie #2.
This brings me to my second promised story, the day I spent as a “featured extra” for a promotional Nike video a few weeks later. The audition called for women who “appeared high school aged” in “extremely good physical condition” to be on a women’s cross country team for the video. The audition consisted of pinning a number to myself, saying my name, and sprinting down half a city block toward the camera – a feat which took all of 7 seconds.
I was hired along with 30 other girls; it turned out we were playing members of multiple competing teams at a cross country meet. When we showed up at 7am on the day of the shoot (a morning in early November) we were given track uniforms (shorts and tank tops) and Nike shoes to wear.
Costumed and ready by about 8am, I wondered briefly if there was any chance this cross country meet would be indoors. No such luck. I followed the crowd outside and across a field, huddling in my coat, noticing my breath puffing out in misty clouds, my feet crunching through the frosty grass.
Soon, though, the cold became less of a problem than my realization that when they asked for people in “extremely good physical condition,” they weren’t kidding. I go to the gym daily. I run. I lift weights. I take physical fitness very seriously. But apparently, not seriously enough to be a contender on a fake TV high school cross country team.
We filmed in four separate locations around the field (which was actually a horse racing track, go figure), and each shot involved us sprinting from one point to another (around a bend; on a long, straight path; over some small hills; and through a giant puddle of water and mud). At each location, they needed a variety of different camera angles, and they also needed to time the actors’ lines against the group of running girls – so we did about 25 takes at each of the 4 locations.
I would exaggerate for dramatic effect, but there is no need. After the first 3 takes at the first location, I was no longer cold. After 3 more takes, I decided my character would be a straggler – somebody the coach kept on the team out of pity because she could never keep up with the group. I put on my game face and melted to the back of the group, shortening the distance I had to run by a few feet whenever the director would yell “cut!” and we would jog back to our starting positions.
By noon, I was exhausted, sore, and seriously wondering if this ordeal might actually kill me, not make me stronger. On top of that, the shoes we were all wearing had unusually high arches that were bothering most of us. I took mine off at lunch and could actually see bruises beginning to form in the middle of my feet.
My straggling technique paid off at the first location after lunch. The director decided he only needed half of us for the shoot, so I sat it out. Somehow I made it through the day, and the hot bath that night never felt so good. I walked with a limp for a week afterwards.
I received a copy of the video, and after watching it, there appeared to be no evidence that I was a part of the team. Most of the shots are from the front, so you can really only see the first half of the team before the camera cuts away to something else. Determined to prove (if only to myself) that my hard work was not in vain, I scoured the shots for any sign of me. I finally found, by pausing 17 seconds in, that I am visible for about one second at the back of the group, rounding a bend. It was in our first location. I could have left at 10am and their video would have been exactly the same.
I learned: that it’s not a good idea to break in brand new shoes by running in them for eight hours straight; that if you make a point of dawdling behind the action of a filming camera, you probably won’t be in any good shots; and that sometimes, the job of a “featured extra,” while not necessarily “featured” on screen, is still very, very demanding.
