Highlights

Let's feel a bit scary this Halloween

By Shi Yingyingand Ma Zhenhuan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-31 08:50

SHANGHAI: It's Halloween, folks and time to get away from the monotony and pressure of everyday work to embrace the fun recipes of Jack O'Lantern.

And to have the best of times, welcome to an eerie new home in an old warehouse along Suzhou Creek in Shanghai. Things here go bump at night, and decapitated ghouls and Nosferatu float around in creepy darkness. It's a night full of shrieks in a house full of hair-raising, heart-throbbing creatures and gadgets.

Shanghai Nightmare, the first American-style haunted house in China, has received more than 10,000 visitors since it opened five weeks ago. Co-founder Gan Quan said recently that it had received 800 guests a day (nay, night) twice the number it had expected and planned for.

On Saturday, things could have gone bump even outside the house and the ghouls could have flown under the open sky. But "the planned Halloween party on Saturday night had to be cancelled out of safety concerns", the 26-year-old Gan said.

Built inside a 107-year-old 500-sq-m property, the haunted house has them all: ghouls, ghosts, a stomach-churning "beheading room" and other props such as a jailhouse door to maintain a scary ambience.

One by one the lights go out as the intrepid visitor is blanketed in darkness upon setting foot in the first corridor. There are 13 horror walkways, starting with one on which a girl in a nightgown crawls across a darkened hallway. And then there are horror rooms full of rogue surgeons, dead teenagers and cockroaches on the walls.

"I'd be scared even the second, the third and the fourth time, with all those bodies popping out everywhere," Lin Li, a 19-year-old student, said after coming out of Shanghai Nightmare. "The whole idea of visiting a haunted house is cool, especially the day before Halloween."

"This haunted house is unlike anything people have seen in China," Gan said. "This house tells a story. It combines art, thrills and a touch of magic, and it brings together some of the most stunning audio and visual effects that we have seen in our travels across America."

Though China has its own tradition of ghosts and ghouls, Gan, who grew up in the US, and his partner Charlie Xu said they built Shanghai Nightmare to give Chinese a real taste of Halloween.

The two came up with the idea when Gan visited Shanghai in October 2008 and found it to have a promising market for Halloween parties.

"We wanted to introduce this fun part of American culture to the people of Shanghai because we felt people here were ready for it," Gan said.

Data released on Taobao, China's largest online commercial site, supports their contention. Online sales of the most popular Halloween prop, the pumpkin light, reached 100,000 last week and 2,000 masks were sold across the counter in two days in Shanghai.

"Since Halloween goods and costumes are usually difficult to find in stores, people turn to online shopping," said one prop buyer, surnamed Zhang.

Some Taobao shops promote tombstone-shaped chocolates, vampire bats and spiders to meet consumers' special needs during the last week of October.

Even Shanghai's comic artists have been bitten by the Halloween bug. Young artists from Changning Folk Culture Center are planning to organize a ghost-themed evening party of cross talk on Saturday.