The cast of Nashville Nightmare is an interesting topic for us. For starters it should be noted that we visited them on one of their busiest nights of the season. For haunts like this that have thousands of guests per night, we expected the actors’ interactions with us to be somewhat limited so we weren’t tempted to slow down and clog up the ‘flow’ through the haunts. Unfortunately, describing the actors’ involvement with us as ‘limited’ would be a bit of an understatement.
Pretty much all of the actors here, except for the queue roamers and those stationed at the haunts’ entrances, are set up for ‘pop scares.’ This type of fright-giving technique is where the actors will suddenly spring out of their hiding spots, give us their routines and immediately reset for the next scare opportunities. This is a fairly common method used by haunts of this caliber (again, to discourage groups from slowing down through the haunt), but the ‘routines’ that we saw were kept extremely short’ shorter on average, in fact, than any other large-scale haunt we’ve visited to date. While we could still write this off as a ‘busiest night of the year’ issue, the bad part was that we walked past several actors that made no attempt to scare anyone in our group of 8 people and there was no one directly behind us that they should’ve been waiting for.
In Undead, most of the characters were of the zombie variety, so of course, they didn’t talk much. But we didn’t see any non-zombie military guys either, so the ‘jump out and ‘RAWR!” method got a little repetitive for us. Despite that, their slobber-filled war cries were realistic enough to make us not want to hang around for long! Reformatory was next and showed a marked improvement, as the actors were able to use some more creative dialogue. One of the nun actresses was particularly interactive and seemingly ‘floated’ past us without walking! Phantoms’ cast seemed to know their scenes very well and most of them were able to come after us multiple times. They also seemed to have more energy, as there were multiple ‘sliders’ (actors that slide at you on the floor) that kept the scares coming from a different angle. Though, there were still a few actors that simply watched us mosey on through their scenes. Fairy Tale Hell had a remarkable selection of actors that were able to mimic the static props and mannequins around them’ that is, until the time was right to suddenly spring to life! Of all the ‘pop scares’ we encountered here, this technique tended to be the most effective for our group, so we give mad props for that (pun intended), especially to Krampus! The puppeteer was another memorable actor who used some crafty dialogue in his scene… asking us where our strings were as if we were puppets ourselves.
Overall, we feel that most of the cast were doing their best to find a common ground between giving scares and not giving away their hiding spots. The vast majority of them stayed in character well, but if you’re looking for a haunt with a cast that gives wildly elaborate and interactive performances, Nashville Nightmare is probably not where you’ll find it’ at least not on their busiest of nights.
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