Halloween Haunts: My Season as a Scareactor
By Rob Tiemstra
It’s September of 2018. At Universal Studios Hollywood, rehearsal is underway for this year’s Halloween Horror Nights. My friend Noelle walks out onto the deserted upper lot and pantomimes howling at the moon. The rest of her cast converges behind her as the soundtrack kicks into high gear and they charge forward.
Even without anyone in costume or makeup, the staging is a thrill to witness. This act will become the Opening Scare-emony of HHN 2018. The inhabitants of the Upper Lot Scare Zone — themed after Michael Dougherty’s Trick r’ Treat — are going to spend most of their time wandering amongst the crowd of guests, searching for free range tourists to shock. But in the meantime, they put a lot of time into the Opening Scare-emony. They very kindly performed it for a nearby maze that was also rehearsing at the same time.
Which is to say, my maze. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
I am one of 17-30ish scareactors who will play the titular role. Most of us landed the gig because we are around 6 foot tall and generally fit (‘get in Shape’ had a different meaning for me that fall). On the other end of the spectrum are our non-Michael scareactors — a combination of little people and smaller teenagers, who will play the Trick or Treaters in the section of the maze that re-creates Halloween III: Season of the Witch. It’s a colorful ensemble of working actors, live entertainment veterans and theme park regulars.
And then there’s me; An aspiring writer & filmmaker who just happened to be tall and fond of Halloween. I’d auditioned for HHN on a whim — after all, it sounded a lot more fun than the production assistant work that had been paying my rent for the last 2 years. Some last-minute coaching from Noelle, herself a seasoned veteran of haunts across the west coast, had helped me not embarrass myself. To my surprise, I’d gotten the gig. Here I was, in my early 20s, and an official employee of Universal Studios, in spite of not having done any live performance since high school theater. It’s a weird headspace to be in.
There’s a sort of ego death that occurs when you play The Shape. A lot of horror fans associate the character with the inquisitive tilt of his head after he pins a victim up against a kitchen wall in the first film. But we, the Michael Myers performers at Universal, were told to avoid such self-conscious gestures. We were to be mechanical — pop out of our various hideaways with intensity, raise the dagger, then reset. It makes one feel less like a performer and more like a cog in a scare machine. The most creative part of the gig was how we timed our scares. Which isn’t nothing; when you get the timing right, you can really feel it.
During the season, I kept careful count of how many people I scared so badly that they fell over. By closing night, I’d reached 99 (one woman memorably stumbled backwards into her whole family, knocking the lot of them down like a cluster of bowling pins).
I’ve also just started writing regularly again. I’d made many stabs at writing as a profession, mostly clickbait listicles and web content. But earlier that year, I had recently landed my first freelance podcast writing job. Over the summer, I’d written several Fairy Tale adaptations for this podcast studio, and by the time I started at HHN, I was working on a 2 part episode about the Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis from 2002 (as a sidebar: imagine my surprise when I found out that one of my fellow Michaels was Ukrainian and had been in Moscow at the time this event happened). Needless to say, my routine is exhausting: I wake up, research and write for a few hours, print up the pages I have, and bring them backstage at Universal. While not playing my part as the terror of Haddonfield, I’m hunched over a table in our green room, editing my manuscript for the next day. Needless to say, I am not the most social of the Halloween 4 cast.
Which is partly by design, if I’m honest with myself. An unfortunate side effect of casting for mostly 6 foot tall dudes is you cultivate a very bro-y atmosphere backstage. Since the Michael Myers outfit is basically a workman’s jumpsuit with a William Shatner mask on top, backstage it felt more like a construction site than a theater. I made a few friends that season, but as a closeted theater kid, I struggle to fit in with this fairly masculine cast.
In the haze of fall 2018, I remember little. Burning the candle at both ends, my daily routine collapses into a fever dream set to John Carpenter music… But there is one night I will never forget.
On the last day of the haunt season (November 2nd or 3rd, I think), everyone in the various mazes start goofing off. People double up their scares, swap positions with their castmates, even start to insert prop comedy into their routines. Our Dr. Loomis, whose job is to point a gun at Michael and recite a line, replaces his prop gun with a banana. That’s the sort of night it is — everyone’s a little sad the season is coming to an end, but also punch drunk from exhaustion and long overnight shifts. I’m on my break for the last 30 minutes of the night, when one of the other Michaels comes up to me.
“Grab your mask,” he says.
“I’m on break,” I reply, confused.
He doesn’t explain further, just insists I follow him. I comply, putting on that sweaty rubber Shatner face one last time. I join a group of us — a half dozen Michael Myerses in various stages of injury and distress — who wander into the maze when they’re supposed to be on break.
The second room in this maze is a diner set, re-creating an early scene from Halloween 4. All these off-duty Michael Myerses wander in, and sit down at the tables all around the diner, perfectly still. Like a Norman Rockwell from hell.
I wish I could have seen that night through the eyes of the guests. What it must have been like to wander into a diner and see it completely full of Michael Myerses. Some of the guests loudly exclaim “NOPE!” when they walk in, and I have to stifle a laugh behind my mask. We’ve collectively changed the genre of our maze – it’s gone from a traditional slasher to a Lynchian tableaux.
Once the last guest walks through, all of us stand up in unison, and in a column, follow the guests out of the maze. As we peel out of the maze, all the Michaels gather in a huge group. Someone puts a remix of the Halloween theme on full blast and we have a big, exuberant dance party by the exit of our maze.
And finally, at the very end, I feel like a part of this cast.
It’s September of 2025. I am standing in line at Universal Studios, this time as a guest. I’m no longer the same starving artist I was in 2018. In fact, I got my first full time writing job six months after my time as a scareactor ended, and writing has paid my bills ever since.
But it’s that diner full of Michael Myers clones that keeps me grounded. I spent maybe a half-hour sitting there in reality. But in many ways, a part of me has never left. There’s a joyful absurdity of being a Scareactor which I will always cherish, even if I don’t work at a haunt ever again.
So, Halloween enthusiasts: if you are fond of going to Haunted Houses during Scare Season, keep an eye on the performers who pop out to scare you. We may just seem like things that go bump in the night, but we do, in fact, contain multitudes.
Robert Tiemstra (they/them) has been a member of the HWA since late 2024. Their upcoming short story, Biting Into Yourself will be published in the 7th edition of Dracula Beyond Stoker this November (see https://www.dbspress.com for more info). As a writer of audio fiction & nonfiction, they have written over three hundred podcast and audio drama scripts, for Spotify Studios, iHeartRadio, Wondery and The NoSleep Podcast, among others. Short horror & genre films they’ve directed have played at over 50 film festivals worldwide. They currently reside in the rafters of a repertory cinema in Los Angeles (no, not that one).
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