Fright Night in Vancouver: Scary models reflect times of terror

By John Mackie, Vancouver SunOctober 14, 2009

VANCOUVER — The ancient Greeks were an intellectual lot, producing philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, and concepts such as democracy.

But they had a nasty side, too. Witness The Brazen Bull.

No, it’s not that old steak joint at Clark and Hastings. It’s a torture device dating to the sixth century BC, when an inventor named Perillos pitched it to a tyrant named Phalaris. (A replica is on display at the PNE’s Fright Nights Halloween attraction, which opens tonight and runs through Oct. 31.)

The basic concept was to build a life-size brass bull with hollow innards accessed via a small door. You took a criminal, political prisoner or someone else you wanted to torment, stuffed him inside, then lit a fire underneath. The brass heated up, and the unlucky soul was roasted to death. Slowly.

As if that weren’t nasty enough, the head of the bull came with ingenious acoustics that converted the victim’s screams into bull-like bellows and snorts. When they opened the device the next day, there was supposedly nothing left but roasted bones, which were apparently quite shiny, and were sometimes fashioned into jewelry.

There’s more. When Perillos presented the finished device to Phalaris, Phalaris decided to test it out by throwing Perillos inside and lighting a fire. He hauled the hapless inventor out before he died, but then took him to the top of a hill and threw him off.

Perillos did get some posthumous revenge when Phalaris was overthrown and was roasted in the Brazen Bull by his successor.

With such a gruesome debut it’s no surprise that the Brazen Bull became a favourite torture/death chamber for centuries. The Romans used it after the Greeks, and psychotic leaders in central Europe used it right up to the Middle Ages.

But it was just the stuff of legend until a couple of years ago, when the History Channel had the Ohio company The Scarefactory build one for a TV show, Surviving History.

The Scarefactory is reputed to be the top Halloween effects company in North America, supplying special effects to 500 “haunted attractions” worldwide. These range from theme parks like Disneyworld and Six Flags to Hugh Hefner’s legendary Halloween parties at the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles.

The PNE’s Fright Nights has proven to be a huge success since it was introduced in 2003. Last year it attracted 82,500 visitors. This year, the fair is upping the ante with a quartet of new Scarefactory haunted houses: The Haunted Mansion, Hollywood Horrors, Asylum and Darkness. The PNE spent $1.5 million on Fright Nights upgrades.

The new haunted houses are, in fact, pretty scary. Hollywood Horrors takes its cue from silver screen epics from Dracula to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist to Halloween. Jason lunges at you with a knife, you walk through a ring of dead people hanging from the ceiling, and there are all sorts of vampires, mummies and werewolves.

Darkness is even scarier. It’s so dimly lit you really can’t see where you’re going, which enhances the horror of walking through a waterfall of human skulls, seeing a werewolf feast on a dead body, and having unseen hands grab you as you walk by.

Naturally all the attractions come with blood-curdling screams, spooky noises and appropriately dissonant music. Oh, and we shouldn’t forget the giant monsters that mark each attraction. Darkness, for example, has the Angel of Death, a winged creature from some dark underworld that flies out into the fairground waving a menacing-looking scythe.

The Angel is quite ghastly, with demonic eyes, an exposed rib cage, skeletal hands, big teeth, and no nose. Of course it’s clad in a black hood and matching cloak, and just in case you don’t get the picture there’s a mutilated person hanging from a dead tree nearby.

Josh Craig is quite fond of the Angel of Death. The 28-year-old from Columbus, Ohio was sent up by the Scarefactory to set up this year’s haunted houses, and will be on hand until Fright Nights closes.

The moving ghouls and undead are called “animatronics,” and are supplemented by live actors.

“There’s over 60 live actors,” Craig said.

“On top of that we probably have over 100 automated scares on the property, with props and monsters and ghouls. Anything you can imagine — and some you can’t imagine — we’ve done it.”

The PNE is opening up the entire Playland amusement park for Fright Nights, which means attendees will be able to take 16 rides, including the roller coaster (which you ride in the dark, a very scary proposition). All the rides have been decked out in Halloween garb, with macabre mannequins placed in key locations; there’s a (dead) Michael Jackson clone in a slouch hat and red and black vinyl jacket on the Music Express.

The Brazen Bull is one of a dozen or so torture devices that are on display in the midway, all made by the Scarefactory for the Surviving History series.

The Iron Maiden looks pretty painful. They strap you into a metal cage, standing up, then close the doors. The catch is, the doors have sharp metal spikes, which turn you into a human pincushion.

“We learned a lot of stuff on the show,” Craig said.

“Believe it or not, the original purpose of the Iron Maiden was not as a torture-slash-death device: people volunteered to get in it. It was supposed to resemble the bosom of the Mother Mary or something, and people would sacrifice themselves.”

The Halifax Gibbett is the father of the guillotine. Essentially they’re the same, save for the fact that there is nothing to restrain the victim at the bottom.

“This was an ineffective way to do it,” Craig said.

“They would have to drop it up and down several times to chop a person’s head off. The design was flawed.”

The gnarliest torture devices (the Pear of Anguish and the Judas Cradle) date to the Spanish Inquisition, when they really liked to make people suffer a slow, agonizing death. The Head Crusher doesn’t look like a lot of fun, either. The gist of it was that you’d stick your head in, then “they would crank it down and it would crush your skull from the outside in.”

All the torture devices are built to scale, and some are the only working models in existence. Craig was one of five people who hammered together the Brazen Bull out of steel.

“I want to turn it into a barbeque,” he laughed.

“Seriously, I think I could sell that for $10,000 to some barbeque nut. I’d like to have one. I think it’d be sweet. Put a little grill in there, a little rotisserie ... you could go to town.”