NIGHTMARE: FAIRY TALES
A Haunted House in Manhattan by David Haskell
107 Suffolk Street, New York, NY
When I ventured into the Nightmare: Fairy Tale haunted house on Suffolk Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan the other day, I’m not gonna lie. I was in it for the free press tickets. Being a writer and blogger has its advantages, and one of those advantages is getting asked to attend events on the off chance that you might write about them for your website. It’s pretty sweet. Of course, some of those events suck, and you never can know before you go which ones they are, because — and here’s another great thing about being a writer — you usually go before any of the reviews are written. They ask you to go because they want you to write the reviews. So you have no idea if what you’ve signed up for is going to be worth your time.
I was a little leery of Nightmare: Fairy Tales. It’s been well over a decade since I was in a formal haunted house, and the last one was run by my dad’s friend in his spooky old stone house in the middle of town. No joke, that guy spent half of every year planning and preparing for Halloween. And swear to god, that shit was scary as hell. So I wasn’t entirely confident that Nightmare would be able to measure up to my expectations, even with all the press from previous years calling it “a whole new level of insanity” and “deliciously, awesomely sick.”
Creator David Haskell’s newest creation promised to show old-school “fairy tales at their most gruesome and horrific,” and I’m a sucker for the real ending of Snow White, and the terror of Little Red Riding Hood’s wander in the woods. I absolutely love being terrified, so I was game, but I didn’t know if I’d get a good toe-tingling rush from any of what awaited me inside the Clemente Soto Vez Cultural and Education Center on Suffolk. Nor did I know if there would be anything for me to write about, because, frankly: I write about sex. Not spooky haunted house stuff. But hey, free tickets! What was there to lose? Well, luckily, there was a bar in there. I figured if nothing else, I might be able to draw a parallel between the adrenaline rush of being terrified and the rush of sex, but that was pushing it. Lucky for me and my lusty nature, I was in for a very appropriate surprise.
For when I wandered into the dark, misty, claustrophobic and winding paths leading through the man-made forest inside the nightmare chambers of the haunted house, lo, what should my pervy eyes behold? Well… Ever wonder what the devil’s dong looks like? I used to. But I don’t, not anymore. Because I saw it. A giant, bloody, awful mess of a jelly dong dangling low between the wide-spread legs of a massive, monstrous demon straddling a shaky bridge over which my party and I were forced to walk. Trust: it is not pleasant. I’m short, but I still ducked very low to avoid being brushed by Satan’s foreskin. I’m not kidding. After having crossed the bridge, I turned around to watch the others cross, and as the bridge shook beneath their querulous steps… the dong swayed dangerously close to their heads, lightly tickling the crowns of the heads of the taller among them, who looked mortified and a little sick. The thing was easily two feet long, somewhat misshapen, pendulous, and creepily slick-looking as it brushed the tops of people’s heads. I could not stop laughing.
That is, until a figure I thought to be just another creepy statue with a spooky mask jumped out into my face and screamed. And again when I was taken into a chamber where I watched a witch’s feet being burned off, and again when my +1 and I got lost and separated from our group in a dark corner, with screams, howls, and sobbing the only sounds we could hear. And yet again, when Pinnochio… oh my god. Well, let’s just say that the scare factor was definitely there, and weirdly enough, so was the sex factor. Jelly dongs played a much larger role in Nightmare: Fairy Tales than I’d expected. Not only was Satan’s schlong swinging over that fateful bridge midway through the house of horrors, casting its long, lugubrious (I never thought I’d describe a dick as lugubrious, but seriously: go see it and you’ll know what I mean), love-muscle over the freaky forest setup in which you’re walking, but soon you come face-to-face with a wretched Rumpelstiltskin so upset over his inability to conceive that… well… let’s just say there might be another jelly dong involved, and if you don’t retch before backing out of the room, tripping over your feet and pushing your fellow horror-seekers out of your way… You’re a lot braver than I, friends.
So, to recap: I thought I’d go to Nightmare: Fairy Tales for shits and giggles, but what I go was pants-shitting scares and a whole hell of a lot more in the way of monstrous demon dongs than I had anticipated. And if that’s not worth an excursion to what’s been called a “spectacularly scary haunted house,” then frankly, I don’t know what is. Check out their site for info and tickets, and don’t let another Halloween go by without haunting, horror, and jelly devil dongs!
—Miss Lagsalot