JustJimAZ

It's Surreal!

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"Nightmares" are a popular them for haunts that want to do everything from clowns to dinosaurs to zombies. They are fun and anything can happen. Still, is that really how nightmares are? In a nightmare, aren't you likely to be in your childhood home when Bigfoot comes out the closet door and chases you over the water to the island, where you hop on your motorcycle and discover the ground is made of marshmallow and you are naked? Or something like that. Maybe it's just me.

I'm just thinking that it would be cool to REALLY lean into the surrealism of dreams in such a haunt.

How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A fish. Surrealism isn't about making sense. It's about incongruity.

I'd like to make a haunt with architecture from Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and populated by Rene Magritte.



It seems to me there is so much potential in Magritte's "characters":


Once it's designed and populated, maybe it could be decorated by that most famous of surrealists - Salvador Dali
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I think there is a lot of potential in really embracing the surreal to do more than just tie cool scenes together. It opens up characters that defy even basic anatomy, walls and floors that disorient, and props and furnishings that defy logic.

So, am I way out on a severed limb here? Would you be interested in walking through a haunt where everything is really, deeply, mad? A haunt with the disjointedness and impossibility of a real nightmare?
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