Behind the scenes at Georgia’s most elaborate haunted attractions
Every Halloween season, visitors flock to haunted houses to have their adrenaline spiked by jump scares, monsters and special effects. Rarely, however, do they think about just how much artistry, imagination, skill and manpower goes into crafting these spooky spectacles. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution went behind the scenes to find out what it takes to bring two of Atlanta’s nightmare realms to life.
Netherworld’s complex: ‘a monster version of Warhol’s Factory’
Inside “Monsters Attack,” one of two mazes at this year’s Netherworld Haunted House in Stone Mountain, there is a rocket ship.
The ship looks weathered, its metallic panels battle-scarred and streaked in soot. From its belly, cables snake to a power core which draws energy from the Netherworld’s “elementals,” the supernatural beings born of nature’s primal forces: earth, air, fire, water and ice.
The elementals are under attack from an army of the dead. A skeleton is seen clawing the chest of a two-story robot near the rocket ship.
The elementals frantically attempt to fuel the rocket for launch. Their plan is to “blow up the Netherworld gateway and seal it off forever,” said Ben Armstrong, the co-creator and mind behind the evolving storylines Netherworld’s haunts are built from.
Armstrong is a mad scientist when it comes to penning fantasy horror narratives for his haunts. Each year, his storyline builds off the last. The saga has been building for 29 years. Next year, for Netherworld’s 30th anniversary, the current storyline will culminate in one last epic battle.
This year, the rocket ship is the cornerstone.
The piece was originally built for a locally shot movie. When that film wrapped its Atlanta production, Armstrong got a call. After nearly three decades in the haunts business, Armstrong is known as a collector of film set castoffs.
No one wanted to deal with the enormous missile-shaped monstrosity, Armstrong said. “It was so big you couldn’t even throw it away. They’d have had to cut it apart with chain saws.”
Armstrong went to great lengths to acquire the ship. He took a team to a warehouse in South Atlanta to load it onto a hitched trailer. When the car towing the trailer blew a head gasket on its way back, the ship temporarily became an impromptu roadside attraction for passersby.
The trip was by no means the first adventure Armstrong had been on to salvage materials. He once drove cross-country with his business partner Billy Messina to spend the night in a creepy house on densely wooded land in upstate New York to unearth a T-Rex mold stashed inside a barn.
On another occasion, he bought the dismantled remains of a McDonald’s PlayPlace after the chain retired its indoor playgrounds. The clear plastic domes that once served as portholes in crawl tubes now appear inside Netherworld — transformed into the helmet of a robot and the bulging eyeball of a monster.
“Most of it is assemblage art,” Armstrong said. His team is constantly reimagining old scraps into new terrors.
Netherworld is located at a former construction company’s headquarters, a two-story building with huge industrial warehouses on the first floor, and a long hallway of rooms and offices on the second. Armstrong and Messina bought the complex in 2017 when Netherworld outgrew its previous Norcross location.
Inside one massive storage hall, Armstrong keeps decades’ worth of monsters, sets, props, materials, paints and tools. His team of carpenters, set builders and monster fabricators can mine the archives to help Armstrong build worlds.
“A lot of what we do starts as a pile of junk. Once the artists get their hands on it, they start to see a creature hiding inside,” said Curt Allen, 28, a carpenter and monster fabricator who has worked at Netherworld for 11 seasons.
For the past five years, Allen has worked full-time, year-round, helping Armstrong bring his fantastical ideas to life.
Armstrong has roughly 15 year-round employees, many of them artists and builders, plus another 500 seasonal staff.
During the day, the collaborative buzz at Netherworld’s complex is palpable.
“It’s like a monster version of Warhol’s Factory — every corner, someone’s creating,” Armstrong said.
About mid-way through Netherworld’s active season, Armstrong is already communicating to his core team what the next year’s themes will be.
As soon as Allen knows, he starts imagining what elaborate things he might build. He usually starts with the giant creatures first. They might be built using an existing animatronic frame, or he might recruit one of Netherworld’s welders to construct a new metal frame.
Once he has a base, Allen does all kinds of reshaping, reskinning, sculpting, decorating, painting and molding. For example, this year, Allen made a character Armstrong calls the Render, a sort of demonic angel whose wings are made of his back skin peeled apart.
Allen used upholstery foam and pool noodles to build up the frame. He used latex fabric to sew together panels of skin. He stretched and attached the skin, then painted it with a coat of what he calls “liquid skin” (a clear latex paint coating). Next, he hand-painted details, adorned the body with chains and ritualistic instruments, and finished it with flame-retardant. Everything in the Netherworld gets fireproofed.
The Render took Allen about a month to complete while multitasking on other builds. This year, he made about 15 monsters, including four giants and an entire pack of wolves.
Trini Liska, 32, from East Atlanta, is another full-time Netherworld artist. Now in her 11th season, she started as a scare actor, but pushed to become part of the creative staff.
“I kept shoving my art into Ben’s face,” she recalls. “I kept bothering him until eventually I was on the team.”
Liska is mostly an illustrator and painter. Last year, she painted vintage carnival signs. This year she painted four mannequins. For one, she used a fine-line brush to paint exposed muscles and tendons. For another, she hollowed out the torso to create a three-dimensional artwork with spray foam, latex, found objects and paint.
“I created this weird inner world … harkening back to Salvador Dalí, melting odd things inside his torso,” she said.
‘The Creature Shop’
While the artists and builders are hard at work on the first floor, a team of 20 makeup artists per night, hair stylists, costumers and mask makers are on the second.
At the end of the long corridor is what Armstrong calls “The Creature Shop” (an inadvertent but apt nod to Jim Henson’s creature shop). Inside is a chaotic mess of molds for pouring latex masks, gloves and body parts, fabric spools, sheets of EVA foam and bits and pieces of half-created monsters. It is the Frankenstein’s laboratory of creature creation.
Down the hall is the makeup studio where a team of roughly 15 makeup artists each have their own station equipped with airbrush wands, paint brushes, creams and pastes. In the back corner is a baking rack where trays of homemade Pro-Zay transfers — a type of adhesive prosthetic — are drying on cookie sheets.
“We affectionately call that the ‘squishy corner,’” said makeup artist Bethany Michel, who previously did special-effects makeup for “The Walking Dead,” “The Last Exorcism” and for military trauma simulations.
Next door is the hair and wig room where stylists rethread wigs, tease synthetic fur for werewolves, and braid the hair of actors to keep it from tangling beneath silicone masks.
An entire room is devoted to an armory of fake weapons. Another is for masks, claws and gloves. Another few for costumes.
“In most haunts, people just buy props and put them up,” Armstrong said. “But here, everybody builds something.”
Fright Fest: Team molds maggots, bakes prosthetics
On the other side of Atlanta, 45 minutes west of Netherworld in Austell, another large-scale horror production is underway at Six Flags Over Georgia.
Fright Fest, the park’s annual Halloween festivity, features two haunted mazes and four themed scare zones where costumed actors leap from fog and shadow to startle unsuspecting park-goers.
Because the park spans hundreds of acres, the scale of Fright Fest’s production might be easy to underestimate. But step behind the scenes a few hours before Fright Fest opens and it becomes clear just how much labor and artistry fuels the nightly scares.
Inside the former Batman Stunt Arena, which now serves as the staff staging area for Fright Fest, 200 actors per night and a flurry of costumers, makeup artists and staff members gather. There is a tent for costuming, and a garage where 13 makeup artists fill the air with fumes as they airbrush on makeup, glue on home-baked prosthetics, secure wigs and glue things like fake worms into open flesh wounds.
Makeup artist Amber Cochran said this year she personally baked more than 300 prosthetics in the park’s dedicated on-site oven.
Costume designer Stephanie Dixon learned how to make maggots out of latex to attach to one actor’s outfit. She also custom-sewed the costume for a fur-covered, four-legged monster that required careful tailoring for a performer on digi-stilts.
“I had to make sure the fur stretched right and that nothing snagged when they crouched,” Dixon said. “It’s mostly faux fur, but we layered it in latex and painted it to make it look matted and old.”
Each year, a few of the fright zones or houses debut brand-new themes with new costumes, sets and props. This season’s additions include “The Rotted Ones” scare zone, a decaying harvest of pumpkin-headed monsters, and “Disciples of the Beast,” a cult of horned creatures who worship a four-legged Wendigo-type beast.
Both concepts originated from within Six Flags Over Georgia’s staff. Rozzie Pearson, a Fright Fest supervisor who’s been with the park for more than a decade, dreamed up “Disciples of the Beast” after bingeing cult documentaries and watching the horror film “The Ritual.” He wanted something ancient and oppressive, he said.
“The Rotted Ones” storyline was written by Adair Lawrence. The 58-year-old started out at Six Flags as a maintenance man 17 years ago before expanding his horizons at Fright Fest as a scare actor, mask maker and prop builder. Fright Fest, he said, has allowed him to exercise his creativity and imagination.
He wrote an entire narrative for “The Rotted Ones.” The story revolves around a farmer who uses tainted fertilizer on his land.
“It seeps into the soil where bodies are buried. The pumpkins grow from that — twisted vines wrapping around the dead,” he said. “The fertilizer brings everything to life. Farmer Jenkins and his wife think the pumpkins are their children.”
Lawrence carved more than a dozen foam pumpkin heads, fitted them with LED eyes and distressed their surfaces with layers of latex, paint and straw.
The actors, too, have proven dedicated to their crafts. One scare actor, Emris Eillis Harper, who plays a nun and an owl cultist, drove 2,800 miles from Oregon for the job. Her acting coach told her whenever she gets an opportunity “to go full throttle and take it.”
“I wanted to work somewhere that really took the art seriously,” she said. “You can’t just scare someone once — you have to haunt them.”
When the clock strikes opening time for Fright Fest (varies by night), the 200 actors who spent hours transforming backstage fan out across the park, taking their places in the scare zones and haunted houses.
The pop of firecrackers thrown by monsters startle passersby. A four-legged beast stalks people through fog as his antlered cult followers chase down victims. Pumpkin-headed monsters with glowing green eyes pop out from the shadows. The farmer’s wife shows children her dead birdie. Shrieking screams echo as the darkness of night creeps in.
If you go
Netherworld Haunted House. Select nights through Nov. 8. $35. 1313 Netherworld Way, Stone Mountain. netherworldhauntedhouse.net.
Fright Fest at Six Flags Over Georgia. Select nights through Nov. 2. Tickets start at $69. 275 Riverside Pkwy, Austell. sixflags.com/overgeorgia/events/fright-fest
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