We Let Scare Actors Kidnap Us - Here’s What Happened
LAUREL, MD — We truly love what we do. As experience vloggers and haunt enthusiasts, we’ve been able to see dozens of haunted attractions across the United States during the months of September and October. Each and every one of them is unique, exciting and terrifying in its own way, and we make haunt friends everywhere we go. There are, of course, some places that we find ourselves going more often than others - sometimes because of proximity and other times because of a deep love for the experience or the staff - and as creatives, it’s easy to fall into habits and rhythms and create the same content over and over again. So, when our good friends at Laurel’s House of Horror offered us an opportunity to do something different, we leapt before we looked.
The concept was simple: craft a narrative piece where the scare actors stuck to character, and Tim and Katie become their victims in the haunt. The monsters would run the majority of the vlog, and Tim would regain control at the very end so that he could do a proper outro and re-establish the status quo. In practice, however, it’s a lot more complicated to shoot scripted content than it is to run-and-gun an experience vlog. And it would need to be scripted content - at least very loosely scripted - in order for the piece to work. Luckily, the key staffers at Laurel’s House of Horror are absolute pros and are always up for a challenge. And on that note, we want to say a HUGE thank you to the actors, the makeup artists, the technician, the costumers and (of course) to Mandy Gibson and Alejo Casalotti, the show-runners, all of whom went above and beyond to turn this crazy idea into an even crazier reality.
Above: Beetlejuice (left) and Ms. Laurel (right) took their fans on a thrilling daylight tour of the haunted house while Tim and Katie were “all tied up”.
We’ve done scripted work before (long before we had a YouTube channel) but after five full years of whimsical improvisation, naturally we were a bit out of practice. The first challenge was coming up with a shot list. Having visited Laurel’s House of Horror no less than 11 times prior, we were largely familiar with the layout of the maze and had a general idea of which scenes might play well in which areas of the haunt. Leaving aside the fact that some darker corners of this retrofitted movie theatre might actually be haunted, there are certain legs of the walkthrough that are more spacious and - by extension - more accommodating of multiple bodies than others. So while we kept it just vague enough to be flexible, we had a general idea of what we wanted to do and where.
Then came the second challenge: performer availability. The video we were creating was (canonically) meant to take place over one day and night on property, but we knew that some of what we wanted to do would take time to shoot. To avoid disrupting business for Laurel’s House of Horror, that would mean coming in to film a little early…before the haunt opened to customers for the season. In theory, this would give us more flexibility to do what we liked with the scare maze…but it also meant that only select staff would be available to appear in the video, with others tied up by other commitments and pre-season travel. On top of this, Katie’s availability was thinner than my own due to some family commitments, which meant finding creative ways to pull her involvement back while still giving her ‘main character’ status in the narrative. But Laurel’s team was amazingly adaptive, and we all worked together to figure out a shooting schedule that got everyone where they needed to be. We were lucky to be able to secure two house icons, Ms. Laurel Cipriano and Beetlejuice, for the overwhelming majority of our footage, and they both delivered Oscar-worthy performances. Supporting cast included Buckshot (“BS”), Petunia and Dinnwiddie the Clown, all of whom played a role in carrying the narrative forward.
With a rough plan, a handful of talented actors and a location secured, we were on to our third (and perhaps greatest overall) challenge: continuity. Normally, continuity is seen as less of a challenge and more of a method - but in our case, it was definitely a challenge. For starters, Laurel’s House of Horror would open multiple times a year for off-season events including ‘Krampus Nightmare’, ‘Love is Blind’, ‘Halfway to Halloween’ and ‘Purge Night’, the lattermost of which had occurred only a month prior. As a result of the recent event, there were areas of the haunt that were cluttered, decorated inconsistently with the rest of the haunt or even outright gutted in preparation for the transition to main season. This wasn’t a logistical issue, but it had the potential to become a narrative one if we weren’t careful - remember, this video was shot in two days, but it all had to look like it was shot in one day. If we pointed the camera in the wrong direction at any point during either shoot, it would ultimately appear like a pile of chairs or a purge mannequin was there one moment and just gone the next. In that same pursuit of continuity, we would also need actors to keep their looks consistent - both makeup and wardrobe.
I went alone to shoot the first half of the video on Labor Day Weekend, during which I’d largely be a cinematographer and would only appear on camera briefly as a helpless victim, tied to a chair and tormented by Buckshot and his terrible hygienic practices. The goal was to cover an introduction, a daylight tour of the scare maze, daylight tours of the escape rooms and my scene of desperation in the hot seat. Despite the overwhelming fatigue - these poor actors had stayed up until 2am at a collaborative event in Pennsylvania, and then come in bright and early to shoot at their own haunt - our core cast performed brilliantly and we got most of the essential content canned and ready to edit several weeks before the intended release date. In the time between the first shooting day and the second shooting day, haunt season would formally begin and we’d visit three other haunts before circling back to Laurel’s - and as any filmmaker will tell you, the more time that passes between shoots, the more challenging the shot continuity becomes.
We returned to Laurel’s House of Horror three weeks after our first shoot and picked up where we left off - but this time, we had prime season actors shuffling in and out of the space, actual paying customers lining up outside for one of the haunt’s busiest seasons yet and the weather looking very different. Continuity is a beast, my friends…little things from sound loops to set dressing had changed throughout the walkthrough, which would surely make the resulting video a little disjointed. But there are two things to remember when you’re trying to produce something a little more narratively-aligned - first, you can resolve a great number of continuity conflicts with clever edits. You may have to let go of a shot you were fond of, or cut a little quicker from one shot to the next, but you can usually salvage the believability of a multi-shoot scene by trimming the fat. The other thing to remember - and this is the one that I struggle with personally - is that filmmakers are cursed to notice every inconsistency in their work, but general audiences rarely study the finished products closely enough to pick them apart.
In the rare case of continuity problems that we couldn’t work around, we decided to “steer into the skid” - we playfully called attention to the fact that Ms. Laurel was in a different gown, made a passing mention that we “could have sworn there was a prop there before”, and so on. In my experience, you can circumvent a great deal of artistic criticism by beating your critics to the punch! We also had Katie with us for the second shoot, and that made it much easier to juggle two cameras and various lights to recreate more of the scenes we had set three weeks prior. Her presence was also the only means by which we were able to address our final challenge: Tim being on camera.
Above: As Ms. Laurel says, “You can’t take that Dinnwiddie nowhere!”
When you’re a vlogger, you’re also - at least peripherally - an actor. You spend a fair amount of time on camera and your “on camera” personality usually has a bigger, better-workshopped presence than your “off camera” personality. This isn’t true for everyone, of course, but it’s definitely true of the majority. Think of how your voice changes when talking to your partner versus talking to a client, or discussing a bank loan versus ordering from Wendy’s. So, while the Tim and Katie that you see in our videos are fully and authentically Tim and Katie that we are, they are also more curated than the Tim and Katie that we would be off-camera. For this particular video, the “Tim” persona had to be true to character while also acting genuinely terrified of these wonderful people that we’d known and loved for years. So, how could we make that persona more convincing? Well, in the end we decided that the easiest way to force a juxtaposition with our usual content was to pepper me with battle scars and lipstick prints, flood my rants and speeches with profanity and encourage the staff to have fun with it. As Ms. Laurel herself said during staff announcements that night, “The schtick is that we’ve got Tim and Katie hostage and they’re trying to get away, so when I say I need you pumped up tonight, it means I need you pumped the **** up!”
““The schtick is that we’ve got Tim and Katie hostage and they’re trying to get away, so when I say I need you pumped up tonight, it means I need you pumped the **** up!””
To be clear for all those visiting, Laurel’s House of Horror is a no-contact haunt; under normal circumstances, the actors will not touch you and you should never touch the actors. But for this one, crazy, spooky and chaotic evening, I was to be the exception to that rule. The actors were definitely going to touch me, and they were not going to be gentle…but it’s worth noting that this was all carefully choreographed with our dear friends at the haunt, and all physical interactions were planned and consensual. In pursuit of our narrative and the “reset” back to normal timandkt content, I was the first to brave the scare maze that night, and - though my walkthrough was a bit more intense than usual - it concluded in the way it normally would. I successfully escaped Dinnwiddie’s swinging chainsaw, made it back to our car and did a seated outro panting breathlessly about how terrifying the DMV’s largest indoor haunted house was. Oh, and of course there was a little stinger, where Katie presumably murdered me, but I digress.
This project - and that’s exactly what it was, a project - was one of the more complicated endeavors we’ve undertaken since starting a channel, and I truly don’t believe that it would have been practical (or maybe even possible) with any team but Laurel’s. Firstly, because we have an established rapport with the Laurelites and have had years to get to know and trust one another. Secondly, because all of their staff are legal adults who understand the lines between ‘just enough’ and ‘too much’ - an important distinction to be able to make when you’re “abducting” two aspiring influencers. Thirdly, and most importantly, the actors at Laurel’s House of Horror are so completely and totally committed to their characters that they can easily banter back and forth for an hour without needing to be prompted or guided. Will there ever be a second chapter to this exciting endeavor? Maybe, maybe not - but if nothing else, it made for one of the most unique, interesting and narratively compelling videos that we’ve done to date, and it made Laurel’s House of Horror look as authentically fun, chaotic and stimulating as it is. Bottom line: don’t be hamstrung or pigeon holed by routines - there’s always room to try something new!
Laurel’s House of Horror (935 Fairlawn Ave., Laurel, MD) will open next for its Krampus Nightmare event on December 20th and 27th, and the scares continue in 2026 with the fan-favorite Love is Blind event returning on February 14th and 21st. Escape rooms and paranormal tours are available year-round. Additional special-event announcements, collaborations and seasonal surprises will be shared in the months ahead. For details and tickets, visit https://laurelhaunt.com/.
