2011 Darkness & Lemp Tour

[spookhaven]

We attended all three. Jim & Larry's crew do great work. The actors were really good and all tours were fun.

Just thought we would thank you all for your hard work. We know it isn't easy to please other haunters but NO complaints here, just compliments to you all.

Awesome Awesome job everyone!

[Darkangel]

I thought the Darkness was better than last year.

Thanks for your hard work. I do think it should be the same price as it is during October with your regular staff we should pay less as haunters not more.

Good work though it looked great. A few too many of the same masks though from Creature Corp must've seen 30 of them on actors...

DA

[Jim Warfield]

I just might take a lesson from Mr. Larry.

I don't give price discounts here. I automatically invest alot of my very personal time and energy leading people through my house. If I was importing baubbles for a dollar and seling them for two, sure, why not discount a baubble, you merely turn it over with almost none of yourself invested in except writing a check to the suppler?
So be warned haunters! If you come through my house and act like a (bad) haunter, looking at everything like you are studying it's basic molecular structure, frown alot, make "Grump!" sounds under your breath and seems to have pre-decided Not to have ANY fun here.. guess what? I Will Know You are a (B*) haunter, and there will have to be an added surcharge!
No Fun For Jim, means a definate surcharge for sourpusses that think they are not here to be entertained.

[drfrightner]

Thank you!

It was a lot of work, and I'm happy its over and NO we wont' get sleep tonight AGAIN! The plumber came around 12:30am and tried to fix the sewer, had to clean up long drive home... I live about 40 minutes away. Monday you can bet wont' be answering teh phone as I will be sleeping all day!!! LOL

Looking forward to something that doesn't involve tons upon tons of stress...

Thanks again. Larry

[Darksydesigns]

Thank you!

It was a lot of work, and I'm happy its over and NO we wont' get sleep tonight AGAIN! The plumber came around 12:30am and tried to fix the sewer, had to clean up long drive home... I live about 40 minutes away. Monday you can bet wont' be answering teh phone as I will be sleeping all day!!! LOL

Looking forward to something that doesn't involve tons upon tons of stress...

Thanks again. Larry

Sounds like 'fun':roll: Glad that the haunt went well, though.

[spookhaven]

DA:

I noticed that with costumes at the Lemp & Terror Vision clown costumes however because we are not the "average" customers they might not think the way we do. Customer's would probably think the same person is following them throughout the entire house. That was my thought on why it was done that way.

I personally enjoyed Lemp and thought the actors did a really good job, loved some of the hiding spots, and just liked the location. The darkness I like much better with lights on. Way to many people going through it and trying to make it a "lights on tour". Made it harder for the actors to scare when we look like a cattle line going through and not like we should have been.

All in all, I think most were the same actors and they all did a great job in an unfamiliar haunt.

[Darkangel]

So how was Lemp? Was it comparable to the Darkness? I really wanted to see Lemp but got in last minute but went to the Darkness. I liked the snakes and scorpions the guys were holding too.

DA

[spookhaven]

Lemp was much different and somewhat more "real" per say in the way that there wasn't the detail that was created at The Darkness. It was all the real building, underground, not things "built" they used it's structure pretty much so it was just creepier to us. We also own an old brewery but it's nothing like this one in size or structure, so that might have been some of the swayed opinion.

My opinion is The Darkness is an awesome creation that most haunters would do to make customer's feel their surroundings. Very well thought out and an awesome place.

I like them both for different reasons. It simply shows the talent that Jim & Larry's crew has to take little and make a lot or go over the top "museum like" either way they put on a great show with what they have to work with.

For the record when we talked to Larry at the end he said, "Creepyworld was his favorite" but there was no way he could put it up for Transworld. So, I think they take pride in whatever they do.

It was for education on the lights on for "set designs" and lights off "showed you other actors in unfamiliar surrounds" are good no matter where they are.

I learned, I have more actor training and set design to do.

[Grimley]

We went to both haunts this year. Darkness was good as usual. Some of the animations had no sound and there is not a clear theme throughout the haunt. But it is still one of the better ones I have seen. We all loved Lemp. The building itself was perfect and it was fun to just look at the architecture. The haunt was long and well acted. Hope to see Creepyworld next year.

[Darkangel]

Any chance of EVER seeing Creepyworld during the show Larry?

DA

[Badger]

I thought the Darkness was better than last year.

Thanks for your hard work. I do think it should be the same price as it is during October with your regular staff we should pay less as haunters not more.

Good work though it looked great. A few too many of the same masks though from Creature Corp must've seen 30 of them on actors...

DA

As someone that worked both nights, a lot of actors, especially ones from out of town, got there with little time to do much more than put on a mask and grab a quick costume. I expect that's a LOT different during the regular season. I was lucky enough to use makeup for both...

[shawng]

Yeah I thought the darkness was amazing and personally told Larry that as he greeted people at the end. As for lemp, the building was crazy cool but i feel it was more of a unit 70 display than anything else, still a great setup, but more unit 70 showroom! Also, i cant believe people can actually find Lemp, even my GPS had me taking a handful of turns. Then you pull into the driveway, some dude with a flashlight tells you to drive down to the end of that building and talk to the other dude with a flashlight. So you drive down, and the 2nd guy tells you to drive down even furhter and park, in addition he tells you to "walk down the dark alley between the buildings, under the covered area, and someone will greet you at the end". Being from Canada, and knowing St.Louis reputation, i thought we might get stabbed, lol. But eventually we found the entrance, but there were people walking around the complex that were clearly lost. I guess during October there is better signage and direction.

[Jonathan]

Nothing but great things I heard about the tours.

Also I had some of the Rotting Flesh Radio Crew working the event with Badger being a Slider and also Lauren (part of my crew and works for the Darkness)

Tell me what you think of the tours. Leave your thoughts to air on RFR at: 641-715-3900 x35822

[drfrightner]

Couple things... I just woke up. I slept for almost 16 hours. This is the longest I've ever slept in my life. Also lucky for the show itself its snowing and raining in St. Louis started last night and still going on today. Glad this didn't happen while the show was going on.

Anyway... yes the truth is most of the actors have never worked at either Darkness or Lemp ever before. There really was no ryhme or reason to where they go and what they should do. Our focus was on the haunted houes themselves and with about half the people working coming from somewhere outside our own town what are you going to do?? It was rush rush rush... and you are right during the normal season it would not be like that... you train people in September and you work out all the bugs throughout your first few weekends and get things down to the right actors and right costumes for the scenes.

Normally we'd have about 70 actors for Darkness on a busy night and during the tour we had about 40... Lemp should have about 60 and we had about 40. I think all the actors did a great job for just being thrown into the fire. I heard Cameron the little guy scared basically everyone at both Darkness and Lemp... again. LOL

As for Lemp being a showroom for Unit 70... hmmm. I don't think that is an unfair comment however let me explain there. Last year we sorta had our hand forced in doing the show, we wanted to wait until this year but that wasn't an option. Soooo... we bought a ton of wine barrels and made a lot of crates and bought tons upon tons of Unit 70 stand up figures and build the scenes in about 6 days. I came up with a plan that could allow us to create something quickly and lot somewhat authentic.

This year we worked on the scenes for about two weeks and again we can't do anything amazing because there is no time so the shortest route is to again fill every crack with some sort of monster figure to help hide the fact that there isn't a lot of original creations going on... personally I think it works for the most part.

We did however build many new scenes things we could quickly for this tour... shower scene, changing room, room with the vats, spark fence room, and many others I'd have to get a list while making the other scenes better. Its a work in progress... we will expand Lemp and do more build out on the place as time goes on.

Lastly... Creepyworld?

It is my favorite haunted house we own and operate, I think its the best one of the three, it also does the most business here locally. Its about 20 miles from Darkness. Creepyworld would be very very hard to open for this show. Its something we will look into but I can't promise anything on that... Creepyworld takes about a hour to go through and includes a hayride, 3d haunted house, cemetery, mansion, silox, scare zone, and a drive inn movie theater attraction.

It takes ALL SUMMER to set up and build... if we did it for this show we'd be doing that in the WINTER!

Larry

[drfrightner]

2012 Plans:

DARKNESS: As of right now our plans are NOT TO OPEN Darkness again as we will NOT do another major renovation on the place for some time to come. We are considering building ONE ROOM, so advanced, something so hard to do, so amazing that I might if I can do it before TW, then we might consider just some minimal amount to just walk through and see it. It would be as advanced as something in Harry Potter ride. Just FYI.

LEMP: We migth do an all out expansion of Lemp to DOUBLE the size of LEMP and if we do we'll open LEMP for sure. We have other rooms we can use that are ever cooler than anything you guys saw but to use them we have to do a lot of extra work on the place. It would be very hard! But I think we will do it.

CREEPYWORLD: There is really no way to open it... however we'll look into it. Its possible we could do an event just for the trailer haunt that is there so people could see what is and how to do a trailer haunted house. Would there be any interest in that???

Larry