Behind The Screams

As the sky loses its final light, Noa Laporga and Angelina Khan know it’s time to release their monsters.

Each October, the pair turns Hawaii’s Plantation Village in Waipahu into Haunted Plantation, a village-wide walk-through with scares lurking (and screaming and crawling) throughout the property. It’s generally considered the most frightening haunted attraction on the island — and even regularly receives national buzz — and draws in a growing crowd, with lines sometimes starting as early as noon. This year, it had one of its biggest opening nights yet.

When Laporga and Khan give the go-ahead, their creatures pour out of a tunnel — a bloody little girl, a masked man with a chainsaw — and spend a few minutes leering at the crowd. Then they all disappear again, resuming their hiding spots to lay in wait.

These characters elicit screams from the audience now, but just a couple hours ago, as Laporga points out, they were “just a bunch of goofy kids” putting on their makeup and eating snacks to gear up for their shift.

To find out what goes on behind the screams of this attraction, Laporga and Khan gave Metro full access to the site on a Saturday afternoon early in the season, and we learned a little bit about the ins and outs of producing Haunted Plantation and the people who make it happen.

Here’s what we discovered.

They’re Just Regular People

For Laporga, Halloween was a big deal in his household growing up. His parents would take him around to haunted houses, and creative costumes were the norm.

“My parents would always figure out (how) to dress up on a budget,” he recalls. “One year, I was a Jack-in-the-box clown (made from) paper mache.” It came complete with a balloon popping on the inside to make that Jack-in-the-box sound.

Laporga loved dressing up, and over the years, he taught himself how to create special effects to suit his costumes. In 2006, he held the first Haunted Plantation.

Earlier this year, he and Khan — who joined the team as a scarer in 2010 — launched a special effects company, Black Box Fx, that produces movie-quality masks and prosthetics.

Throughout the year, the pair also puts together other haunted attractions — including the theatrical 1706 that took place last winter (so extreme that it required a safe word and one of those sign-off-on-anything-that -could-happen waivers) and The Outbreak Experience, an interactive zombie-infested warehouse going on now in Kakaako (see sidebar for more).

Although these attractions have limited run times, putting it all together is a long-term effort.

“We actually work on it almost year-round,” Khan says. “We make everything from scratch — from sculpting and molding masks and painting them, it’s all done in-house.”

The actors they employ range in age and are from all different backgrounds — a chunk of them, especially for the more theatrical attractions like The Outbreak Experience, are professional actors or have at least some theater background. But the people doing the scaring really come from all career paths — students, nurses, restaurant workers — and in the case of Haunted Plantation, many are in their late teens or early 20s.

There Are Certain Occupational Hazards

On the second night of the season, 19-year-old Taylor Turansky saw a golden opportunity: A man walking through got separated from the rest of his group, and he got turned around.

“He went the wrong way and couldn’t find the exit,” she says. “So I cornered him, and he punched me in the face.”

As she’s telling the story, she’s smiling. Getting hit, of course, was not fun, but she sees the bright side: “It was good because he was scared,” she says, “so I did my job right.”

It’s Turansky’s first year working Haunted Plantation, so that had only been her second night on the job ever — a rough initiation — but yet here she is the next night, putting on her makeup and getting into a tattered white dress, making herself into a ghost bride.

Laura Pasternak, who’s an essential oils educator and registered nurse, has had similar experiences.

“People have reached out and tried to hit me,” Pasternak says. “Somebody picked up one of our candles and whipped it in my face.”

Plus, even when they’re not at risk for personal harm, it’s still a long night. They have to be on site by 4:30 p.m. each day to get into costume. By 7, they’re in their places, where they stay until all of the guests come through (save for a short break), which can sometimes go past midnight.

And many of their acts require at least some level of physicality. Kristi Lyn Shin-sato, for instance, spends the night jumping in and out of a tub or climbing up a bookshelf. In another house, Kyley Watanabe crawls and slides around on the ground (“basically like The Grudge,” she explains).

“You have to be in good physical condition — you’re squatting, you’re lunging, you’re doing quick turns, and you’re yelling and screaming,” Pasternak says. “It takes a lot of energy.”

The Scarers Get Scared

If the actors at Haunted Plantation scare you, just know that they’re getting spooked, too. They have a grim mantra: “We don’t build haunted houses; our houses are already haunted.”

Actors have reported all kinds of things. Mysterious bruising on their bodies. Doors slamming themselves shut. Heavy footsteps. Props going missing. All of those things likely could be attributed to clumsiness, old houses or forgetful young actors, but there have been a few occasions that even Laporga — who considers himself a skeptic — admits defy explantation.

According to Laporga, an actress once ran out of a house with watery eyes, gasping and holding her neck.

“I sat her down and gave her water, but she keep saying, ‘I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe,'” Laporga recalls. “And she just quit.”

That particular house is said to be home to a choking ghost — and that actress is just one of a number who have quit because of it. Others who have worked in that house, including Pasternak, have reported feeling pressure on their throats even after leaving the plantation.

“When we hire people, we don’t tell them about (these incidents),” Laporga says, “but it’s funny that a lot of the stories align with each other.”

Those types of real hauntings happen to the guests, too. People walking through often claim that the actors touched them. While Laporga says that actors get close — maybe close enough to occasionally graze against you — they’re not allowed to touch. So if you feel something grab you as you walk through the plantation, it’s not an actor.

But many of the actors who have had creepy experiences — Shinsato has had a few, including an incident involving footsteps forming from the bathtub, and Pasternak has witnessed a prop thrown across the room — continue to return. The reason is simply that …

They Love Scaring The $#*& Outta You

During her first year working at Haunted Plantation, Khan recalls one woman who opened the door to the first house — “and then she just said, ‘Oh hell no’ and asked to (leave). She couldn’t even enter the house.”

At a haunted house, screams are like the fear-fueled equivalent of applause. So it’s a crowning achievement when someone asks to leave. And it happens quite a lot. During this year’s opening weekend, there were about 100 people who had to be escorted out — a record high.

“It’s just really fun getting that kind of reaction out of people. We love escorting people out who get too scared,” Khan says.

If they can’t scare you off the property, there are some other reactions that these actors are striving for: screaming, running, tears, and — a surprisingly common one — falling down.

Cassandra Oshita spends her nights at Haunted Plantation hanging upside down from the rafters dressed as a demon. She recalls one particularly memorable scare.

“When I dropped down, (a man) looked right in my face and he immediately turned around and ran right into the wall by the entrance,” she says, laughing at the memory. “Instead of running into the door, he ran right into the wall — and he was just pinned there and started to slide down.”

Deriving such extreme reactions from people, many actors say, is an adrenaline rush. Oshita, who makes a living as a server when she’s not doing this, says that she’s typically a quiet person. As she practices her signature move, letting out a shrill cackle as she hangs, you’d never know it.

“I can do whatever and no one will realize that this is me,” she says.

As Haunted Plantation organizers see it, there is a craft to the art of scaring — and it’s one that they meticulously relay to their team through what they’ve dubbed “scare school.” Held throughout September, after all the actors have been hired through an audition process, Laporga and Khan teach their employees how to scare — covering things like timing a pop-out, how to snarl and ways to contort their body.

“The less human-like things they do, the more scary it is, so we kind of teach them to get weird,” Khan explains.

“(Scaring people) is something that we love doing,” she continues. “We love getting that reaction out of people, so that is our No. 1 goal —to scare the beep outta you.”

Haunted Plantation is located at Hawaii’s Plantation Village at 94-695 Waipahu St. It runs from 7 to 11 p.m. Oct. 23-25 and 30-31.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT HAWAIIHAUNTEDPLANTATION.COM.

A SCREAMING GOOD TIME

Here’s a few other places to go for a good scream.

Nightmare at Dole Plantation III

This team of scarers comes from modest beginnings — it all started with staffers at a community college constructing a small house on campus for their colleagues. It since has grown into an annual event at Dole Plantation with two attractions: the House of Nightmares haunted house and Nightmare Express, which features ghostly tales with Lopaka Kapanui as you take a trip down the train tracks. Both attractions run from 7 to 11 p.m. Oct. 23-24 and 30-31 at Dole Plantation in Wahiawa. nightmareslive.com

The Outbreak Experience

Also brought to you by Noa Laporga and Angelina Khan of Haunted Plantation, The Outbreak Experience is, as Laporga explains it, “a hybrid between a theatrical play and a haunted attraction.”

Featuring professional actors, The Outbreak Experience makes you part of the scene. Set in Honolulu, some sort of parasite has infected most of the city, giving people symptoms like aggression and lots of biting. You’re one of the lucky ones who has managed to escape, except there’s one hitch: You’re stranded in this dingy abandoned warehouse that seems to be ground zero for the parasite. Your mission is to escape the warehouse alive, while avoiding the zombies that come charging from all directions.

They’ve transformed the Kakaako warehouse to look like a set straight out of The Walking Dead — and the zombies themselves are extremely realistic as well (realistic in terms of, you know, looking and sounding like the zombies on TV).

The Outbreak Experience is located at 1020 Auahi St., Building 3, and runs Oct. 23-25 and 28-31, from 6:30 to 11 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, and from 6:30 to 11:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Shows start every 15 minutes. theoutbreakexperience.com

The Revenge of Dr. Carnage and The Zombie Uprising

The Scream808 team has been putting on a range of haunted attractions since 2008, and this year, they’re running a two-forthe-price-of-one event: The Revenge of Dr. Carnage haunted house, followed by a zombie paintball shooting gallery.

“The backstory is about this crazy doctor — and how he takes people’s body parts and reuses them,” explains Cedric Duarte, who does marketing for Scream808. The Revenge of Dr. Carnage takes the house part of haunted house pretty literally: You have to walk through the rooms of a house, each that has a new horror waiting.

After you make your way through, you have to fend off the undead in The Zombie Uprising, where you get to shoot at moving targets with paintball guns.

The attractions are located at 445 Cooke St. in Kakaako and run Oct. 23-Nov. 1, beginning at 7 p.m. scream808.com