WATCH: Surviving 12 Hours of Terror at the Great Horror Campout
The high point, if you want to call it that, of the Great Horror Campout — a dusk-to-dawn immersive, interactive horror show — had to be the two of us standing in a replica meth-lab trailer at night in the mountains, as we took turns dry heaving while one of us stuck his hand into a putrid toilet in search of fake vomit, with a bloody tweaker cursing at us and the sound of a chainsaw looming just outside.
And yes, we voluntarily signed up for all of this.
This decomposing corpse sure was happy to see us at the Great Horror Campout. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
To some that may sound like a fairly insane thing to do. But the Great Horror Campout, which is more than halfway done with its summer tour through the West Coast (ending Aug. 23 in San Bernardino, California), is custom-made for people like us: people who want to be scared and grossed out while staying up until sunrise, and who will go great distances for the pleasure. Judging by the nearly 200 campers in attendance with us at the site, 45 minutes outside of Seattle, there are plenty of others who fit that description. Surprisingly, more than half of them were women, and there was a wide range of ages. Blood and gore apparently are great equalizers.
A bloody heart and a severed head, two of the Level 1 (aka most valuable) SCAG that you try to find during the Hell Hunt (Photos: Greg Keraghosian)
You might have one question: How scary was the Campout? As we’ll explain, the horror wasn’t on the level of “Blair Witch Project,” or even of Greg watching his Denver Broncos be destroyed by the hometown Seahawks in the Super Bowl. But the dark, woodsy atmosphere — think a haunted house absconded to the woods — helped us suspend disbelief enough to let out a few startled screams, and the interactivity with the cast and the games make it a worthwhile way to bond with your friends over a campfire and marshmallows.
Some pre-Hell Hunt marshmallows at the Great Horror Campout in Seattle (Photo: Justin Ocean)
From 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. we experienced all of these events: a demon woman fondling herself and filling a condom with greenish fluid, dumpster-diving while dodging goat men, climbing a spider web for the honor of milking the nipples of a spider monster, and getting dragged out of our tent by Bigfoot. Perhaps the biggest horror of the night, though, was bestowed on the poor bloke who lost his wedding ring in his wife’s presence as he dug through fake blood for scavenger hunt items. Hell hath no fury…
Here are the gory details of what we experienced.
Lose the map, and you may lose your life. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
The goal: To greet the dawning sun as Hellmaster, an award given to anyone who scores the requisite points during the Campout’s all-night scavenger challenge, the Hell Hunt.
The would-be Hellmasters: Justin “Bloody” Ocean, who has attended some intense haunted houses and flew 3,000 miles from New York for this; Greg “Beelzebub” Keraghosian, who recently overcame his fear of eating a live worm and arrived from San Francisco.
Greg makes friends with two of the “inbred rednecks” who served as camp counselors. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
The price: We were comped for this event, but tickets cost $139 per person for a two-person tent or $99 each for a four-person tent. If your idea of horror is Disney’s Haunted Mansion, you can elect to stay in the “chicken zone” — with a yellow bracelet, of course. We accidentally received a chicken-zone tent and asked to be moved, and while there were no spare tents to allow that, we were promised to get the deluxe treatment. Which the crew accomplished later that night for Greg.
Awaiting instructions in the Movie Zone before the Hell Hunt begins (Photo: Justin Ocean)
The rules: There are quite a few, actually. This is an 18-and-over event, and with good reason: Expect lots of profanity, over-the-top gore, creepy camp counselors smelling your hair, and monsters kidnapping you, grabbing you, and covering you with a hood. There’s no alcohol, no drugs (even in pot-legal Washington), no running, and no touching the cast. And you have to sign a waiver stating that you’re OK with all this in case you’re hurt.
No touching the actors … except, of course, when you’re ripping off a fingernail for SCAG points. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
The gear: There’s also no shooting video in much of the campground, though we broke that rule. Filming ghouls in pitch-dark isn’t easy, but Sony loaned us a camcorder that did the trick well: an HDR-CX900 with a one-inch sensor and infrared night setting. You can see how it performed in our green-tinted clips. We also used a GoPro Hero3+, which didn’t fare so well in low light and ran out of battery power within a couple of hours when it was connected to our phone for a Wi-Fi preview.
Reading the dossier during the event — OK, cramming — was probably not the best strategy to win the Hell Hunt. (Photos: Justin Ocean)
The setup: The producers of the event got a $2 million investment from Mark Cuban (of “Shark Tank”), and you can see they didn’t skimp on the cast or handmade props. We popped in before the event for a behind-the-scenes look and found a professional-grade mother lode of fake blood, severed heads, and disemboweled mannequins, along with scores of actors — who all play distinct characters — receiving convincing makeup. Up to 70 locals are hired in each new city.
The course includes a labyrinth; a gauntlet of monsters in the woods who will try to capture you; a “Blood Tag” zone where you shoot each other with tinted water, wearing mandatory white T-shirts; a pitch-black swimming pool; the aforementioned Tweakerville with an RV; and a whole lot of other challenges where you can earn SCAG — which stands for “Sh*t Campers All Get.” By collecting enough SCAG, you can become Hellmaster.
Participating in a bloody operation — and correctly identifying the organ we pulled out — won us a skinned face as SCAG. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
Some of the SCAG is easy to find, but to win you really have to do your homework. Twenty-four hours before the festivities begin, you get a dossier full of clues you’ll need to decode — such as how not to get caught by the chupacabra in the labyrinth and how to make the moth man let you go when he traps you in his wings.
We could tell that other campers, some of whom wore uniforms and camouflage, had done their homework. As for us, after a night of drinking absinthe in Seattle, we were left cramming for the exam minutes before we got started.
After singing a lullaby, Greg kneels before a rotting corpse who was eager to give him some sticky sludge from her lady parts. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
The opening act: It didn’t take long for the gross-out to begin. Upon entering our tent, we found an unpackaged (hopefully unused) condom, and as the Hell Hunt began, we learned how to use it: Greg sang a lullaby to a skeleton woman’s baby, which enticed a demon woman to approach him, dig inside her pants, and fill the condom with a greenish fluid. He wasn’t sure what all this meant, but you’d better believe he put it in his bag.
Meanwhile, Justin got trapped in a cage by some inbred van family, and he didn’t get out until another trapped camper snared the key with a makeshift hook. He also got slimed the first of many times by Cthulhu, a squidlike tentacle-faced monster, who kept catching him off-guard.
Justin tries to fashion himself a “fishing” hook to escape the redneck’s cage…
…only to repeatedly be surprised and slimed later by Cthulhu’s dripping tentacles. (Photos: Greg Keraghosian)
The first hour or two of the Campout were the closest we got to scared. We didn’t know the monsters’ tricks yet, and you don’t need to be in costume to startle people in the woods at night when the only light is from your headlamp and the moon. Eventually, we learned to keep our heads on a swivel.
The middle act: This is where we almost puked. We had to search the Tweakerville RV for both baby-embalming fluid and a bag of vomit — again, none of this is made up. Justin directed Greg to search the toilet, which, aside from smelling beyond rancid, had a few streaks of blue liquid that we thought we needed. The only container we could find was a crushed plastic bottle, and Greg tried to scoop the liquid inside it the way an alcoholic tries to add a few spilled drops back into his glass.
Justin retched, and Greg reacted by doing the same à la “Stand by Me,” as his hand now smelled like an open sewer (and would remain that way until he flew home and showered). The best part? None of this was necessary. The vomit was actually in a pitcher in the next room — and through whatever dark alchemy, it was a sticky yellow sludge that smelled much, much too accurate.
Trying to fill a bottle with smelly vomit is a disgusting and scream-inducing task — especially when a bloody hook man keeps sneaking up on you. (Photos: Justin Ocean)
A lighter note came when we attended the birth of a demon spawn in the forest. The creepy witch-doctor guy asked each of us what our deepest secret was, and we mostly gave smart-ass responses. Except for one guy, who said in all seriousness, “I slept with my best friend’s fiancée two weeks before their wedding.” Things got really quiet for a few seconds there. Then another guy won for his answer and got sprayed with the mother’s placenta juice. Sadly, we did not win a piece of the umbilical cord, a Level 1 SCAG item.
Some voodoo dancers — “straight from New Orleans” — held the key to finding a severed head. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
We did, however, make friends with our fellow campers during mandatory “bunk checks,” like the soft-spoken cat lady from Seattle, who came alone and was having a ball (technically, she was a cat hoarder, being two cats over the legal limit in the state of Washington, as we learned during a get-to-know-you game). It was offbeat moments like this, along with a “Camp Skits” interlude in which campers hilariously reinterpreted famous horror-movie scenes, that added some levity to the thrills. We expected to get a fright, but we didn’t expect to laugh as much as we did. The producers of the event really nailed the right wry tone.
What do you find after digging in a blood-filled stump that resembles an alien egg? Why, a tooth, of course. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
The final hours: Surprisingly, running around the woods for hours late at night can make a person tired. As the 2:45 a.m. Hell Hunt deadline drew near and we scrambled back and forth, we passed the monster forest gauntlet so many times that we started to get annoyed with them.
We won a tug of war with rope so covered in fake blood that it stayed on Greg’s hands for a full day. We also won a “human centipede”-inspired race that allowed us into a new maze and that saw Greg stepping shin-deep into a moat of fake blood and soaking his foot; then the two of us milked the spider monster’s plastic boobs for SCAG points.
Greg shows off the Mardi Gras beads and candle he found in the forest. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
Just before last call, we engaged in Blood Tag, whereby our white T-shirts were rendered unrecognizable with paint blasts, even though Greg used a tall fellow camper as a human shield, his reward for finding a plastic cockroach on the ground — have we told you that we’re making none of this up?
SCAG check after the Hell Hunt ended. Among the finds: a severed tongue and ear, a used Band-Aid, a skull, some baby embalming fluid, a bag of vomit, and a devil’s coin. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
While 21 campers did earn Hellmaster honors, we fell way short because we simply had the wrong strategy and failed to win the high-level items, which included a severed voodoo head and “freshly” severed finger. It was now past 3 a.m., and Justin decided to stay up, roast marshmallows, and join in lively debates with the campers, while Greg remembered that he was 38 years old and collapsed into his sleeping bag.
A roaring campfire and horror movies kept the smart campers up till dawn. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
That was until just after 4 a.m., when his tent was invaded by Bigfoot, who dragged Greg and his bag onto the wet grass. He didn’t sleep long enough that night to have nightmares.
All horror movies get sequels — indeed, the night was sponsored by “Wrong Turn 6” — and we suspect that the Great Horror Campout’s reign of terror will resume next year.
Surviving to the “dawning sun” means…
…an exhausted photo op with the Headmaster and his turtle-faced Counselor. (Photos: Justin Ocean)
BEHIND THE SCENES
Melissa Meyer, COO of Ten Thirty One Productions, gives Yahoo Travel a behind-the-scenes look into the makeup, props, and production of the Great Horror Campout during its inaugural Seattle run.
Buckets and buckets of blood — and “hillbilly piss,” “green gak,” and various icky fluids — plus many different handmade props go into the production of the Great Horror Campout. (Photos: Justin Ocean)
Mount Rainier was a sight for scared eyes after surviving the Great Horror Campout. (Photo: Justin Ocean)
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