Last evening my hubbie and I had a fantastic time at what might be the best haunted attraction in the Louisville area, The Baxter Avenue Morgue.
What sets the Morgue apart from its competitors is how it creates a fascinating sensory experience. The detail work in the props appears to be (at least to this untrained eye) top-notch. The ground changes during part of the tour (going from solid floor to crumbled cement). There was a weirdness about the place that I found satisfying.
The actors in the house gave their all. Some rendered more convincing performances than others; but all of them put their heart (or spleen, or whatever other organs hadn’t yet decayed) into it.
The only problem is that I saw almost all the scares coming.
Authors are trained to think like Chekhov (that’s Anton, the writer; not the Enterprise navigator, Pavel); who said: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.”
Translated to Haunted Attractions; that means that if you have a row of coffins in a crypt, you know that, at some point something will jump out of one.
Also, I grew up in a dysfunctional family where people much larger than me were constantly running up and screaming in my ear. So (as an adult, and a taller-than-average one, at that) having high school and college kids (generally much smaller than me) run up and scream in my ear doesn’t make much of an impression.
So, I can’t say that I was really “scared”.
But I was fascinated.
Good job, Morgue!
