Chelsea Allen, 16, was screaming, crying and occasionally cackling as she practiced twisting off her boyfriend's head with a vice Saturday night. Nearby, a devil made small talk with a guy sitting in an electric chair, and Mike Myers — never a man of many words — milled around silently.
They were all part of a terrifying cast of characters, waiting around Slaughterhouse & The Grand River Corn Maze, 5781 E. Grand River Ave. in Fowlerville, before the first crowd of customers arrived. Each of them was preparing their acts for the first group of visitors.
Northville High School senior Alex Kendra had warmed up in his car on the way to the haunted hangout.
"I kind of practice," said Kendra, who plays a maniac in a straight jacket. "I just scream randomly on the way there because I have an hour drive."
Regardless of what their warm-up techniques were, the monsters in the haunted house, corn maze and wooded hayride trail all shared at least one thing in common — they were in for a much different treat than those waiting in line as customers.
Kendra said being part of the action at Slaughterhouse is much more exciting and much less scary than walking through as a customer.
"You're feeling excitement and a little bit of nervousness because you don't know if you're going to screw up or not," he said.
"Screwing up" happens when his monster-face mask, chains and blood curdling screams aren't enough to scare a passer-by. Scaring people, he said, is the highlight of his night.
"I get pleasure out of scaring people," he said. "I like seeing the people's faces, and I like hearing people scream — just to know I did that."
Later in the evening, while Kendra chased people through the haunted house, a man in a zombie costume stumbled along the trail of the corn maze with jerky movements, coaxing a group of teenagers away from the cemetery and urging them to follow him.
"Why should we follow you?" a girl inquired.
"Because …this is where you will meet your death," he replied.
The girls giggled at his awkward improvisation, but a second later they were screaming — he had led them straight to Bancroft resident Dennis Warner, who charged at them with a chain saw.
A bus driver for the Morrice School District by day, Warner said the reactions he sees when people hear his chain saw — they often end up in a pile on the ground — is reason enough to work at a haunted corn maze.
"You get your people who don't think none of it is scary, and there's some of them that don't even flinch at all," Warner said. "Some of them look at you and laugh, but 90 percent of them get pretty scared when you run after them."
Fowlerville resident Tim Bean said workers see a variety of reactions from customers.
"People are usually scared to the point where they curl up and don't want to look at you," he said. "There are people who are deathly afraid of haunted houses, but they go anyway because their friends or boyfriend and girlfriend want to, and there are other people who will shake your hand and give you a high five."
Bean said the monsters — from the zombie chasing people on stilts to the gang of clowns hiding in the corn maze — target the ones they can scare the most.
"We prey on the weak," he said. "You can tell when people are genuinely frightened, and when we see that we try to taunt them even more."
South Lyon High School senior Ben Berg said his job in the haunted house is a great way to step outside himself and put on a performance.
"It's the first real acting job I've ever had," he said. "It's really fun to see people's eyes widen when the lights go out and the strobe light comes on and Samara comes out of the TV. It's a huge adrenaline rush."
Berg, who ushers people into the room dedicated to the horror movie "The Ring," said people react in a number of ways to the impending visit from Samara — from hiding and crying to trying to leave the room altogether.
"Right when I turn the TV on, the whole group is like, 'Aw, hell no,'" he said. "A lot of them turn away, but then I say, 'It doesn't matter if you can see her, she can still see you.'"
But Berg said he gets the most satisfaction when he can scare the guys who are trying to act tough.
"When the big tall guys freak out, it makes me laugh, and that makes it worse because I'm finding pleasure in their pain," he said. "If you come in the room and act like you're not scared, I will scare you by the time you leave."
But with all the merciless spooking, there are also times when customers' reflexes take an ugly turn, Bean said.
"Whenever someone is kicked, punched or grabbed, we just tell them to walk away and get out of the situation," he said. "It's usually at the end of the night, with drunk people. That's the worst time for that."
Kendra said his latex face mask saved him from injury when he got too close to a man walking through the house.
"I got punched in the face," he said. "It wasn't that hard, had my (mask) on my face so I couldn't really feel it."
The hit seemed to come as a reflex, Kendra said.
"He said he was sorry and just kept on moving, I think he felt bad."
For Berg, in "The Ring" room, one customer liked his performance a little too much.
"One time, this little fat woman tried to kiss me, and when Samara came out of the TV, she just waved and didn't move," he said.
Allen, a junior at South Lyon High School, said she gets a variety of responses for her own demented performance as a jealous girlfriend pretending to behead her boyfriend for "looking at other girls."
"I can see some of them feel their neck, and they call me a spaz a lot."
She dubbed her character Despair Slaughter and said she reaches a peak in her performance around the midpoint of her four or five-hour shift, when she is warmed up but not yet feeling the headache she gets from screaming.
Jef Brannan, one of Slaughterhouse's three owners, said the people who work there get paid to do something they all enjoy — scaring each other.
"We all get a sadistic little thrill out of scaring people, and it comes out in people working in haunted houses," he said. "We're a bunch of sadists, I guess is what I'm saying."
