Each Halloween season, the subways in New York City are adorned with nightmares. They’re ever changing, but the residents know what it means: one of the city’s most lauded haunts is returning. And this year, with creator Timothy Haskell reluctantly giving in to his audience’s blood thirst, it sounds like Nightmare is at its most vicious yet. FANGORIA spoke with Haskell about his already hot button theme of serial killers, as well as the incredible gallery of murder history accompanying the 2012 chapter.

FANGORIA: From what I gather and what we've spoken about in the past, you sort of base each year’s themes off of exit polling in the previous haunts. Did this work that way?

TIMOTHY HASKELL: It was exit polling in a different way. My partner tells me never to apologize for anything, but “Fairy Tales,” although I personally loved it and I enjoyed working on it, some of our audience thought it was a bit soft. So, they let me know about it. So, my exit polling was that. What’s the opposite of soft? A house about serial killers.

I did ask people to tell me about—I didn’t use the word favorite as I’ll usually ask, “What’s your favorite ghost story, What is your favorite vampire?” This one, it’s a bit déclassé to say, “What’s your favorite serial killer?”

FANG: Although, people have one.

HASKELL: Sadly, people have them. Which I think is an interesting phenomenon and that’s a little bit of what our house is about. There is an obsession with serial killers and there’s a romanticizing of them, sex-ifying of them, which I don’t personally get. If they ever happened to be in the same room as them, they’d kill them. So, I’m not quite sure why… So, I did ask people what serial killers you were most interested in, which were most fascinating. They are truly fascinating. I’ve read a ton, and I’ve watched enough DVDs and documentaries and specials to choke a horse. I’ve learned a lot about these people and although, universally twisted and sick, the thing that’s really interesting about them to me, is that I and they are both people. I don’t mean that in a way that’s trying to humanize them. I mean that in a way that’s fascinating in the same way that when I see a hulking, 6’8” muscular person and compare myself. It’s amazing to me that as a species, we’re both people. It’s fascinating with the way that they think and what their modi operandis are, that we are both people.

So, I wanted to sort of explore what similarities we shared as people, as well as our vast differences. So, me being a little bit sheepish about the subject at first, I chose it because I thought, “you guys want scary and in your face, I’ll do serial killers.” It’s been the most requested theme in our nine years. I’ve resisted it and rejected it. I just didn't want to deal with the negative blow back of it. I thought “Why? There’s a million haunted house subjects.” I thought the time was right to do what is potentially the scariest haunted house that you can do.

FANG: Do you have an attitude of, “You may have regretted asking for this so much.” Do you have an aim—

HASKELL: To nail them down? Well, no, because the way that I’m presenting them, I don’t want to sound too dark, it’s really pitch perfect. I’m really happy with this. I regret—and I discovered this from a recent Huffington Post story that ran on this, not knowing anything about it—people’s reactions to it. It was very negative; people calling me all kinds of awful names. I regret people will come to that conclusion without getting to know the thing.

FANG: When anything lives on a fringe like that…

HASKELL: Anything insensitive, people presume that we are going to approach it that way, but not at all. In my original blog post, that I do every year, where I say,  “Hey, tell me about…” where it’s always a more trivial thing, I gave a bunch of disclaimers; a ton of caveats. Let’s keep the child killers to a minimum, let’s keep the women killers to a minimum. I figured that’s what people would be most sensitive about, and man, did my audience really lambaste me for this. They were like, “if you’re gonna do it, do it.” That was basically the response. If you’re gonna do a house about these people, do it the way you’re supposed to do it. If that’s what everyone’s telling me, then I will. But how I present them, will be my choice.

FANG: Within the house, are you recreating actual events?

HASKELL: That’s what I very intentionally did not do. There are no reenactments. Well, that’s not true. The reenactments that there are, are from pre-1920 events like H.H. Holmes and Jack the Ripper; things that are not too soon. The others, I’m treating for what they are: very scary, very horrifying, terrible people; what people refer to as bogeyman. Just like Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, vampires, werewolves, Frankensteins are bogeyman, these have become part of the cultural fabric. John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, they have become icons. Obviously, not positive ones, but they are icons in the same and they are icons for being scary, awful people. So, I’m going to treat them like that. You are supposed to be afraid of them, so I will make sure that you are. In that way, I don’t believe I’m glorifying them, making them sexy. I’m making them exactly what they are, which is very scary. And in some of them, they get their comeuppance. Not to give away any secrets, but there will be an execution. You will experience some of the crimes through the victim’s family’s eyes, and not necessarily the perpetrator’s. You will be the perpetrator, at times, and you won’t feel good about it. But then, the rest of the time, you are either the victim or the perpetrator’s target.

So, the one thing I did not want to do is sensationalize watching Richard Ramirez kill some young person. To me, aside from that being presentational and not very scary—it is certainly disturbing—I don’t find it to be in good taste and wholly unnecessary. It is not like a museum exhibit, like “Watch how John Wayne Gacy murders this person. Now let’s discuss. Watch how Jeffrey Dahmer would murder this person. Now, let’s discuss.” That’s not really what a haunted house will do. So, I didn't think reenactments were in order. Aside from I find them completely tasteless and insensitive, but I thought they wouldn't make for a very good haunted house.

So, to me, it sort of worked out perfectly. I don’t regret picking the killers that I picked, the subject, because I feel like it really lends itself to a haunted house without having to be tasteless or insensitive. I am in the job of scaring people and people want me to scare them, and I feel like this is a really scary one.

FANG: NIGHTMARE has never just been about the jolt, but an atmosphere and you always include audience participation. This year sounds like you’re never omnipresent. Does this push the audience participation further than before?

HASKELL: Yes, in line, I am asking who wants to participate, and furthermore, who wants to be touched? And then—I’m not going to put a swastika, because that’s going too far—but in a Manson-esque way I’m going to grease pencil an “X” on everyone who wants to participate, which by the way will be 95% of people. There are people who are, “keep your hands off me, I do not want to participate,” but most people do. So, the actors in the room will know who we can touch. Every room, you will either have something happen to you, or you will do something to someone else. Every room has the opportunity for someone to participate in a big way, not just that I’m going to scare you, but that you actually have to physically do something or become a victim of something elaborate.

Or, there are a lot of people that really want to be spectators and they have that opportunity. They can watch. If not a single person in a room wants to participate, the rooms can happen just the same. And if you’re in a group where everyone else wants to participate and you don’t, then you’re going to love it because you’re going to watch everyone else in the group have things happen to them. And if you’re someone who this whole time you always want something to happen to you, there are thirteen rooms and only groups of ten. You will definitely have the opportunity.

FANG: Is each room predicated on a different serial killer?

HASKELL: Yea, it’s exactly that.

FANG: Are certain rooms and killers unrevealed, so far?

HASKELL: I don’t want to reveal all. I don’t know if I’m ever going to mention all of them, and there are a couple of reasons. One, if for some reason there’s one people will be particularly outraged by, I don’t want to deal with it. Also, I don’t want people going into the house analytically. I feel like that sort of dampers their fear receptors. So, if they know all thirteen of the killers and they go into each room like, “Oh this is the such and such room,” then they’re automatically thinking. I want them to be more disarmed then that. In the past, I've listed all the ghosts, or all of the vampires. I want people to be as disarmed as possible, and then they can discuss it afterwards.

I’ll tell you this, there’s nobody as recent as twenty years ago, besides Jeffrey Dahmer. He’s the most recent. To me, like H.H. Holmes deserves his own haunted house. If this one does well, I think next one we should call “Horror Hotel” and just do a whole hotel on H.H. Holmes, because that guy was sick. What he did, was so incredibly elaborate. He built a hotel. Each room was a torture room, and there were secret passageways. That could be a whole hotel.

So, he has a room in this house, but maybe next year we’ll build his whole hotel.

FANG: Well, normally there’ an addendum each year, right? Like a separate piece? Did you ever consider just giving Holmes his own mini haunt?

HASKELL: Our addendum this year is the gallery ["The Mind of Madness"]. We are renting and purchasing hundreds of paintings and artifacts from actual serial killers, as well as novelties that are about serial killers and memorabilia. We've got everything. We've got "wanted posters," fingerprints; we've got Pogo the Clown paintings. But then, the novelty section’s really interesting. We've got trading cards. There was a Jeffrey Dahmer cooking apron. There’s some really ridiculous, stupid stuff; calendars and games. And we’re going to feature all of it.

I think it will upset people, but to me, I don’t quite understand because I’m fascinated by it. I don’t necessarily think it’s beautiful, but as artifacts go, these are important, dynamic, interesting. I don’t feel like this is making them out to be heroes as much as, “Hey, this is how some of these really sick people thought. This is the effect that they had on our world. This is how people feel about them. These are some relics that you might find really interesting.” People come to New York City and they want to go see the Statue of Liberty or Empire State Building and to us, these things have sort of lost their allure. And the Empire State Building isn't even that beautiful of a building. So, it’s not at all that you think John Wayne Gacy’s paintings are attractive, but everyone’s seen his self portrait of Pogo the Clown. So, just seeing it will be like seeing something that you’re really, really familiar with. That’s kind of fascinating to see it live. It doesn't mean you think John Wayne Gacy’s amazing. I don’t think anyone would think that.

FANG: In picking the rooms, did you try to search for anything regionally specific to New York?

HASKELL: That was one thing, because victim’s families of David Berkowitz are still alive and I’m not that crass, so I tried to avoid New York and the tri-state area. Some people might think that people picketing would be really great for press or something like that, but I’m just trying to make a really good haunted house. I want it to sell tickets on the merits of the events that I’m doing, not so much on the controversy around it. So, I didn't do anybody in the area. The only one is Albert Fish, but he’s from the 1920s.

There are also several women. People don’t think there are women serial killers, but there are. I have three of them in the house, and Aileen Wournos is not one of them. Most people know one, we've been out there promoting it on the Facebook page: Lady Bathory. It’s funny, I try not to read those comments on that Huffington Post thing and I stopped, but I found it awfully naïve that some people would call me a misogynist and insensitive to the victimization of women. The victims of the killers portrayed in the house are majority men. That’s true, if you take out Lady Bathory. That’s kind of ironic, because she killed like six hundred girls. Take her out, and the majority of victims are men. It’s ironic that it’s a women that pushes it over the top.

FANG: Are there things you've put in there coming from your anthropological standpoint, that you've gained insight to, or you believe made a room better?

HASKELL: Hm, that’s a good question. I assume all my education informs everything I do.

FANG: This one seems relevant, based so much in reality.

HASKELL: I did a lot of research. The Ed Gein room is going to look like Ed Gein’s house. That was the thing. Last year, we went with a really stylized look that people didn't quite understand. Some people thought it was a lack of attempt, but I made everything two-dimensional because I wanted it to look like a pop-up book.

FANG: That’s strange it had such a bad reaction. I remember being blown away specifically by how stylized it was.

HASKELL: Artistically-minded people, I think thought “Fairy Tales” was their favorite house, but a lot of our audience, they can’t really get their hands around that. So this year, stylistically, is photo-realistic. Sometimes, you've got to fudge the history. Lizzie Borden, she’s mythology at this point. She actually was acquitted of all the murders.

FANG: So, you can essentially do what you want with that?

HASKELL: Yea, she’s just a monster, you know. That’s what I find funny about the whole thing. All of them are. What’s the truth about them? Some people, you know more details than others, but for the most part, they’re all mythology. They’re just monsters, and haunted houses are good places for monsters.

NIGHTMARE: KILLERS is open September 28-November 3 at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center (107 Suffolk St). For much more, including tickets, head to its official site Haunted House NYC.

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