The John Cabot University gala.

On Monday night, John Cabot University celebrated its 40th anniversary with a gala at the New York Athletic Club. Brooks Brothers CEO Claudio del Vecchio and Valerie Salembiier of Town and Country magazine were honored, and soprano Krista Adams sang arias. It was an evening of toasts to the American university in Rome, an evening that the university hoped might supplant the brutal and seemingly senseless stabbing of one student, allegedly by another, that dominated the headlines less than two weeks before.

After clubbing and drinking for hours on Halloween night, two John Cabot students returned with friends to their off-campus apartment overlooking the Colosseum. Then, in the early hours of the morning, while Fabio Malpeso slept, his friend and roommate Alessandro Skepys Reid allegedly stabbed him 25 times. Mr. Malpeso's sister and her boyfriend, who were also staying in the apartment that night, came to his aid. Mr. Reid, an Italian-American with dual citizenship, said he cannot remember, or explain, why he may have stabbed his friend.

Mr. Malpeso, who was in critical condition after the incident, is recovering quickly and is expected to leave the hospital soon, University President Franco Pavoncello told The Observer. But the strangeness of the event, coming five years to the day after the Meredith Kercher murder and, much like Kercher case, involving two young students—victim and accused—entangled in a brutal stabbing with mysterious motives, made international headlines.

Mr. Pavoncello said that the university had decided to go on with the gala, which had been planned months in advance, in the hopes that it would restore a sense of normalcy.

"We felt that, given the circumstances under which the event happened, with the student recovering and almost out of the hospital, we should go on with it," he said in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. "If we had been talking about a death, it would have been very different. But we thought that this was a sign of hope for these two kids, to close the chapter and move on."

He added that the fact the event had occurred off-campus also influenced the university's decision. "The very marginal implication of the university in terms of the event itself, we thought it could be a way to move on and turn the page on this very sad affair," he said. "Had it happened on campus, or in a residence hall, it would have been a very different matter."

Mr. Pavoncello said that the event had been a shock to the university community as well as to the families of the two students—an American from New Jersey and an American-Italian with dual citizenship. It may have also come as a shock to the students themselves, friends and widely considered "very nice kids." Someone who witnessed the attack told an Italian newspaper that Mr. Reid behaved as though he were possessed. And perhaps he was, by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol: police reportedly found ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana in the apartment, according to The Daily Beast.

"I think this is an outlier event; this is not the kind of thing people are going to say, 'Oh my God, maybe I should try to avoid getting stabbed 32 times,'" said Mr. Pavoncello. "It is a freakish event, on the night of Halloween, with nightmarish outcomes, one gets up in the morning and attacks the other." It was not the kind of event, he wanted to emphasize, that had anything to do with the university, or security, or the safety of the city, but was the kind of tragedy that occasionally stems from thousands of young people living and interacting with one another.

As for the gala, he said that it was "very festive" and "really a way of bringing this university which is really a gem first and foremost for its own students, a place that changes completely the way they look at things." Rome, he added, was a very safe city, especially by American standards.

kvelsey@observer.com

Will this little tiger get to go trick-or-treating this year? (Flickr via ankatank)

John Carney, a senior editor at CNBC.com, is getting ready for Halloween. The Park Slope resident will be putting on a Tin Man outfit later this afternoon, while his wife--the director of legal hiring at a law firm, currently on maternity leave--will be the Scarecrow. And at around 4:30 this afternoon, they are taking their two small children (one 3 years old and going as Dorothy, one 3 weeks old and going as Toto) up and down the avenues of the Slope for trick-or-treating.

Ironically, the Frankenstorm is actually preferable to last year's freezing temperatures. "This will be our first year," Mr. Carney told The Observer. "Last year, snow killed it. The weather wasn't right to drag a then-2-year-old through the streets."

As Park Slope wasn't hit as hard as some areas, it will actually be easier to get ready for candy-nabbing this year, as Mr. Carney and many other parents are off of work. They plan to start trick-or-treating around 4:30, and hit most of the Slope's boutique stores, which annually hand out snacks so parents can avoid the awkwardness of ringing a neighbor's bell and realizing they have no idea whom they live next to. As for any damage or power outages, Mr. Carney isn't worried: "I think most will be open. Park Slope Barbershop really is a neighborhood treasure, always decorated for each holiday."

Mr. Carney imagines that there are some kids who probably think Halloween is always proceeded by a force of nature. "With storms two years in a row, there are probably kids who just think storms are part of the haunted atmosphere of Halloween," he said. "It's now a storm celebration."

"I think my daughter kind of thought 'the big storm' was perhaps something we arranged to go with the Wizard of Oz theme," he said.

Author and Vanity Fair copywriter Mike Sachs was also planning on taking his daughter around Park Slope, despite the cancellation of the annual neighborhood parade. "Truthfully, nothing would convince a 3.5-year-old dressed as a Rainbow Kitty that it was too dangerous to go out because of a storm that took place a few days ago," he said. "She's intent on hitting the streets for the sweet stuff, and poppa has to obediently tag along."

But while Park Slopers might be out and about because of the minimal damage in their area, others don't plan on knocking on doors at all.

Touré, the MSNBC co-host of The Cycle and author of Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, said that he hadn't planned on taking his children around his Fort Greene neighborhood. "We've never done the rounds on our block," he wrote via e-mail. "NY doesn't seem friendly to that. We don't know a lot of our neighbors. Last year a friend invited us to their apartment building (built in security) and we went door to door."

The writer and television personality, whose kids are 4 and 3, said he would consider doing that again, "though Sandy may put a crimp in everything." They already had two kiddie Halloween parties on Friday and Saturday, and he alerted us to the fact that BAM is putting on another one tonight.

"But generally [we] wouldn't knock on strangers doors," he said.

In the city, Red Rover's Kathryn Tucker decided that Halloween would be too creepy for her 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son on the powerless Lower East Side. The founder of the location-based app has taken her family Upstate to trick-or-treat. "Most people I know have hightailed it out of there," she added, referring to the LES's darkened district.

Real Housewives of NYC star Aviva Drescher said her UES building has postponed trick-or-treating. "We don't know what to do," she wrote on Twitter. "Trying to keep kids in their routine despite devastation." And for kids, what could be a bigger devastation than having the year's biggest candy-grab canceled?

Last year's Occupy Wall Street zombie protests

Forget about not looking back, Mr. President. We want to know if we should start taking notes while watching  AMC's The Walking Dead.

While it's not news that the Center for Disease Control has been warning us on proper zombie protocol for almost a year now--while simultaneously claiming there is no such thing as a zombie attack ... not even when you're high on bath salts--yesterday a new government office took up a "tongue-in-cheek" zombie cause. It's those pranksters Homeland Security,  known for issuing fake threats just to rile up people near the holidays.

Wait ...

From The Huffington Post:

Tongue firmly in cheek, the government urged citizens Thursday to prepare for a zombie apocalypse, part of a public health campaign to encourage better preparation for genuine disasters and emergencies. The theory: If you're prepared for a zombie attack, the same preparations will help during a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake or terrorist attack.

Emergency planners were encouraged to use the threat of zombies – the flesh-hungry, walking dead – to encourage citizens to prepare for disasters. Organizers also noted the relative proximity to Halloween.

Thanks for noting this, organizers! Now we're not terrified at all of Resident Evil/al Qaeda hybrids coming for our children when we sleep, because apparently that's less scary than the actual threats that you don't want to goof about.

We just wish Clint Eastwood would have asked Invisible Obama what he planned to do about the zombie threat. Then we would have taken him seriously.

Illo: Peter Oumanski

“I don’t recognize you,” said a man in a black negligee, black corset, black heels and two stuck-on circles of black mesh, one covering his mouth and another covering his crotch. It was early Sunday evening, Halloween eve, and he was talking to a man in a dress, with pink hair.

Somehow, he managed to nestle a cigarette into the small indentation in the spandex oral wrapping.

“I don’t recognize anyone.”

And how would he? Sprinkled along the charming stretch around 39th and Eighth were androgynous men in rubber-skin lady masks stumbling around on mermaid legs, models with their dainty cheekbones shattered by ballistics, beetle-eyed priests, monks, monarchs, morticians and their corpses, blacks swans, white swans, baseball stars, David Bowie, cops, criminals, African Queens.

But at La Escuelita, a gay bar, heavy on baile funk, which snuggles under the Port Authority’s vagabond-packed bus terminals, perhaps every night is Halloween. It doesn’t have to be the last day of October for a man to become “Jasmine International” and then have Jasmine International become Jennifer Lopez. Those men and women shuttled into town on Greyhounds just a few feet away—they could be men, they could be women. They could come to La Escuelita and be whomever they wanted.

The Observer was not sure whom we wanted to be. We had a red scarf pluming from a ratty tweed jacket, and round spectacles that profoundly limited our ability to see what was happening.

All this reinvention made for an appropriate place for Terry Richardson and V Magazine to host a Tea Dance and Halloween Revue, with models Joan Smalls, Candice Swanepoel, Sui He, Hanaa Ben Abdesslem and Bambi Northwood-Blyth in tow. A costume was required—Mr. Richardson couldn’t be himself, but anyone else at the party could without much trouble. All they needed were the large-framed Moscots.

“It is kind of odd, isn’t it?” the photographer’s girlfriend, Audrey Gelman, said to The Observer as we sidled up to the bar for two vodkas. A female model with brushed-on stubble and Mr. Richardson’s signature glasses had just walked by.

“He’s sort of everywhere.”

“Where’s he now?” we asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But he’s dressed as a Hasidic Jew.”

There was a quick compliment about our glasses, but she didn’t inquire further as to whom we were dressed as. So we slipped them an inch down and could finally see the scene unfolding—mostly a blur of zombie makeup and garish shoes, all of it spinning and reflecting off the mirrors and black glass. There was V editor Stephen Gan as a pharaoh. There was PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach smothered in silver glitter. “I went to Ricky’s and I said, ‘Hi, do you have any of these street performers’ outfits?’” he told The Observer, referring to the tin men who mime on the street for money. “And they didn’t have it in the Halloween costumes—they had it in the regular costumes.”

Ms. Northwood-Blyth, whose visage pranced around the room on multiple TV screens, stood near the stage in a long and lacy white wedding dress.

“It started out as a twisted bride and ended up Madonna—‘Like a Virgin’ Madonna,” she said. “What are you?”

We shrugged and adjusted our glasses.

“Oh, well, how about”—she grabbed our notebook and pen, scribbled a circle and little rectangle on the back cover, and held it like a camera—“you can be Bill Cunningham, and take a picture of me!”

We took the notebook to our face, she curtsied, and the fake shutter of the fake camera made a fake pop.

One person not in costume was Lady Bunny, though she did a pretty good impression of herself. We asked if Lady Bunny had a favorite costume, and then a woman dressed as Lady Bunny walked up to us.

“I’m her favorite costume!” the woman said.

Ms. Bunny ignored her and sized up the room.

“I host nights here at La Escuelita,” she said to The Observer. “Usually it’s reggaeton at 2 in the morning, with 18-year-old Latino and black kids. This is a little more fashion-y.”

“I want to get my picture with you!” the woman in a Lady Bunny costume yelled.

“And a little more white,” Lady Bunny said.

The bouffant-bearing-one’s main responsibility for the night was hosting the Halloween Revue, which showcased La Escuelita’s top-shelf lineup of drag queens pretending to be their idols. The Observer took a position by the edge of the stage, next to men in bondage gear with wads of ones in their palms, ready to slip the bills into the G-strings on display. (“They all have crack habits to support,” Ms. Bunny reminded the audience.)

“Is that a man, or a woman?” wondered a giant rabbit suit beside us.

We slipped down our glasses and stared at the silky rendition of J.Lo’s “On the Floor” that was exploding right in front of us.

“They’re all men,” we said.

With that, the performer’s robe came off and only pasties covered the naughty spots.

“My god,” said the rabbit suit, who would identify himself only as a British tourist. He was pointing and booing.

“It’s a man!” he yelled. “It’s a man! Get off! Get off! This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

But he stayed until the end, when Ms. Bunny closed the revue with some not-too-classy Amy Winehouse jokes. With the main event over, The Observer went upstairs and out into the world on the streets near Port Authority—everyone oblivious to the rampant performance below—where we ran into a friend sporting red lipstick and bunny ears.

“Who are you supposed to be?” she asked.

“Well,” we said, taking off the glasses. “Whoever you want me to be.”

nfreeman@observer.com

A rich witch? (Photos via Matt Stopera)

Occupy Halloween will feature an array of activist art and performances including the Radical Cheerleaders, masked performers, live musician, dancers, a plethora of giant puppets and an army of Working Class Super-Heroes battling Wall Street Super-Villians including "The Outsourcer", "The Pink Slip", and "The Budget Axe". Other puppets include a giant Lady Liberty who will fight the Evil Wall Street Bull and his minions of corporate vampires until the Chinese dragon-inspired Brooklyn Bridge swoops in to defeat the Evil forces and Liberty is restored to the huddled masses.

Though our blocked view on 6th avenue didn't allow us to see these Occupiers in action, we did manage to piece together some of their performances.

Also in attendance? The "Sexy Stewie Float" from WPIX that made us very happy.

Bette Midler and Steve Wonder at the Waldorf (Photo via Mia McDonald)

We felt woefully under-dressed as we stepped into the 2nd floor foyer of the Waldorf-Astoria, the entrance to Bette Midler's Hulaween party. The theme was Día de los Muertos - the Mexican Day of the Dead - and although we felt like zombies after occupying Wall Street earlier that Friday evening, we weren't decked out in any apparel that suited the $1,000-a-plate dinner.

Martha Stewart, eschewing the night's theme, decided instead to dress as what the party was raising money for, the New York Restoration Project. (The event raised $1.9 million to create and restore public parks and community gardens in the city.) Wearing butterfly extensions that actually looked like giant monarchs, Ms. Stewart batted her lashes in the direction of Robert Diamond, her set decorator who won the night's costume contest with his green-beaded Emperor of the Butterflies ensembles. The mask itself took him 52 hours to bead, he told reporters; a skill he picked up French fashion designer Thierry Mugler.

Judy Gold, currently starring in her one-woman off-Broadway show The Judy Show, MC'd the evening dressed as Chaz Bono. Toeing the line between political humor and the fact that yes, most of Manhattan's biggest real estate developers were currently "Occupying" the party, her jokes earned more uncomfortable twitters than full-blown laughs. "You guys are really a great audience," Ms. Gold said sardonically as real estate developer Douglas Durst (dressed as a tree) kept his eyes on chef Rick Bayless' mole chicken dish. (Mr. Bayless was dressed as a skeleton: take from that what you will.) Later, Mr. Durst would win Ms. Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings" award for his donations to the Restoration Project.

Michael Kors, who presided over the costume contest, was almost certainly dressed as a Mexican Tony Clifton and virtually unrecognizable. Sam Champion was a Mexican matador, Alan Cumming an adorable bear, and Debra Messing as a ghost having a really bad hair day. Soprano Renee Fleming, the cast of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Sandra Lee, Patty Smyth, and John McEnroe rounded out the celebrity attendees.

The clear highlight of the evening (besides the fact that the "Best Group Costume" award went to several individuals dressed as the Dead 27 Club) was Stevie Wonder, who performed his classic hits as a Skeleton Pirate. You haven't seen anything until you've seen a bunch of tipsy socialites who just bid $2,500 on a tree (one table over, an interior decorator dressed as a mummy and his fiance dressed as a Mexican skeleton promised to name their tree after us!) start mobbing the stage and screaming to "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours."

It was, we'll admit, a little bit scary.

Yes, another one.

New York City's news cycle has taken yet another earthly-related turn for the worst: In January, New York City registered record-breaking snowfalls. Over the summer, the city enjoyed both an earthquake and a hurricane (one of which disturbed a day, the other shut down much of the city for a weekend). And now, we have—of course—snow on the way. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Projected snowfall accumulations have drastically increased since Thursday’s forecast. It now looks likely that the suburbs will see up to a foot of snow, with an outside chance for six inches of snow inside New York City. October snowfall of this scale is unprecedented in the last 140+ years of official weather records at Central Park. The force driving this unlikely forecast is a Nor’easter of mid-winter proportions brewing off the Carolina coast. On top of the snow, this storm will drop temperatures into the 20s and 30s and spread strong, gusty winds.

Monday—Halloween—holds its own grim possibility (30% chance of rain with an overnight low of 39 degrees) for trick-or-treat-ready families and those adults shuttling around from party to party in their costumes, which are widely understood to often carry the possibility of being exponentially more effort than they're worth, as one rips it off at the end of a long, loveless evening, throwing it in an MTA trashcan, and waiting thirty minutes as one sobers up to go home so painfully, achingly alone.

We should also probably mention that the trashcan might not even be around this year.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Heidi Klum's Annual Halloween Party(Photo via Patrick McMullan)

You have a lot of options when it comes to Halloween parties in New York. From free parades to art shows to celebrity-hosted galas, it's natural to feel overwhelmed. That's why we've found 10 of the best parties over the next four days for you to pick and choose from. So if your taste runs in haute creature or is more hipster horrors, you'll be sure to find something to suit your inner (sexy) monster.

Spooky! (Image via Getty)

While there's nothing scarier to Michael Bloomberg than Occupy Wall Street protesters, for the rest of us they generally are more zany than terrifying. But as we approach Halloween, the outfits worn by OWS-ers to make a statement about...something...can often be confused from your average New York costume party. (Especially when they all dress as zombies.)

We've taken 18 images from Zuccotti Park as well as New York's annual Village Halloween parade. Can you tell who is dressing up for candy, and who is dressing up to make a statement against big bank bailouts? Scroll down each photo entry for the answers, and remember:  "Occupy Wall Street protester" is not a good Halloween costume.

What comes to mind when you think of a haunted house? Is it being handcuffed, waterboarded and physically assaulted by a bunch of burly men screaming obscenities? Would you pay good money for the experience of walking through a re-imagining of a “dehumanizing” “torture chamber”? If so, congratulations: one of the basic staples of Halloween culture is now catering exactly to your needs.

Let’s backtrack a bit: haunted houses, in the most basic sense of the phrase, are operating under a false premise. Unless you are unlucky enough to have stumbled into a Stephen King novel or an episode of American Horror Story, these pop-up “haunted houses”—which rake in (according to the Los Angeles Times’s math) approximately $150 million to $200 million every year—are of course not haunted. It is doubtful that anyone has even died on-site, let alone that vengeful spirits are presiding over the premises. In fact, if you were to attend a Halloween haunted house and find yourself actually dealing with a ghost, monster or other-worldly being, you would most likely demand a refund, if not pursue an outright lawsuit for psychological distress.

Yet every Halloween, millions of American do not become outraged over false advertising after paying for entry into a haunted house or “haunted attraction” (defined here as a spooky show that does not take place in a traditional setting, but rather a corn maze, a basement, a hotel, the woods or some such). In fact, that’s what we pay our money for: to be scared by a bunch of off-season actors dressed up in ghoulish makeup, popping up at us from around corners or—if we’re dealing with a high-class joint here—enveloped in smoke from a fog machine. This is the way it’s always been.

But as gross-out torture-porn movies become more mainstream and our country clamors for more “thrill-seeking” opportunities, some haunted houses have given up all pretenses of being “haunted.” Instead, they charge higher prices, strip down to the bare minimums in props and design, and rake in the profits while garnering praise for offering up the exact opposite of “haunted.” Like New York’s Blackout's attraction or this year’s Universal Studio’s Scare Zones’ seasonal attraction based on Eli Roth’s Hostel films (for which the P.R. sheet used “dehumanizing” as a tantalizer for horror buffs), entertainment which might be better described as “hunted houses.” In an attempt to scare patrons, the terrors of these attractions have become rooted in reality. But who in their right minds would want to pay $50 (which is what Blackout costs) to experience what’s it like to be chased around a Slovakian dungeon by rich men who want to snap your Achilles tendon for sport?

Apparently, a lot of people.

According to The New York Times, Fangoria and many other experts of horror, there is nothing in the state scarier than Josh Randall and Kristjan Thor’s Blackout Haunted House, now three years in the running. There is nothing supernatural about it: nothing that couldn’t happen to you in real life. (Or an episode of Law & Order: SVU.) This is an attraction designed to “test your limits.”

Blackout’s exterior was not much to look at: a storefront in midtown, with dark paint obscuring the windows. We were obligated to sign a waiver before entering on a Monday night two weeks ago. Lining up with us were a couple of teenagers in a group, shepherded by their father. (Though he had a hearing aid and had just come out of knee surgery, we learned, he would be allowed to go through the house.) A couple of older, bigger men had scared girlfriends in tow. They had good reason: Blackout is definitely oriented as a “guy’s-guy” kind of freak-fest, an endurance game of sorts.

In retrospect, if we had paid a little more attention to the first couple lines of the waiver, instead of scoping out our fellow patrons, we might have had a better understanding of exactly what would happen after we were shoved through a curtain and the lights went off.

A portion of the Blackout waiver:

“I have been advised and acknowledge that graphic scenes of simulated extreme horror, adult sexual content, tight spaces, darkness, fog, strobe light effects, exposure to water, physical contact, and crawling are an integral part of the experience of the House. My participation is with full knowledge thereof. I have no physical or emotional condition or impairment that would be impacted by my participation in the House, and I hereby consent thereto.”

The key phrases that would jump out at most people would be “physical contact” and “exposure to water.”

Theoretically, a predetermined safe word could be called out at any time, but we found it remarkably hard to do so when we were handcuffed, forced on the floor with our heads tilted backward and had water poured onto our face, Alberto Gonzalez-style. We were instructed to “Bark louder, bitch!” But it was all we could do to breathe through the cheesecloth hood over our head. By the time that rapey-Abu Ghraib portion of the Blackout was over, it felt pointless to scream out our safe word. What was done had already been done. What were we going to do, press charges? We signed up for this.

Blackout definitely offers an “extreme” experience, not for the faint of heart (or anyone not in great physical or mental health). It’s not even fun. Though that may be the point. Mr. Randall was interviewed this month in Psychology Today, where he described the core concept behind the show:
“Being mugged, raped, tortured, etc ... these are real life scares that take the ‘fun’ out of being scared, and push people into a place of genuine fear. If we can make someone forget that they paid for this and that they’re just in a safe environment, and make them actually question whether or not they will really get hurt, we’ve done our job.”

Taking the “fun” out of being scared? Making people question whether or not they will actually be hurt? You’d think that barring a few extreme horror fetishist types, this would not be a huge crowd-pleaser. Yet, Blackout is already sold out until Halloween, and has extended its performances into November.

Jim Faro, the raspy-voiced owner and co-creator of New York’s “premier” haunted house, Blood Manor, is not a fan. “I could bring you into a room and hold a gun to your head, sure,” Mr. Faro told us while taking tickets on a Friday night in mid-October, the line for his show already around the block. “You’d be scared. But that’s easy, and it’s not fun for you, or for us.”

Mr. Faro’s Blood Manor is more traditional in its approach—if you can call a Rob Zombie-esque carnival of chainsaws, midgets, 3-D glasses, and horror movie villains chasing you from room to room “traditional.” None of the actors are allowed to touch you (though they get close), and you go in with a group with whom you quickly form a bond as you scream and laugh your way through the event. Tickets range from $25-45, making it the cheapest of the three houses we visited.

Blood Manor has been compared to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, something the creators clearly encourage: waiting in line outside in New York’s Hudson Square, we were approached by everyone from Freddy Krueger to an Edward Scissorhands/Joker-type character. Even the guests dress up, we were told. Blood Manor was scary, weird, and fun. It’s also a very expensive production to put on. Compared to the bare rooms with one hanging light-bulb that Blackout uses for scenery, Blood Manor employed a “diesel truck’s” worth of fake blood for its showcase.

We happened to go to Blood Manor same night as our editor. When we caught up with him outside the house, he gave us a shrug. “Not that scary,” was his final verdict.

So maybe people do want to be terrified, physically threatened even. As that bar for terror becomes increasingly higher, not even a truck’s worth of fake blood can get your adrenaline pumping the way being waterboarded does.

By far, the least scary haunted house in New York’s trio of infamous attractions would be Nightmare. Co-creator Timothy Haskell picks a theme every year (this year’s is “Fairy Tales”) and then constructs a more traditional haunted house around it. It’s not that scary, but it does have a couple things going for it (you can bring your kids there, for starters). The designer of the show, Paul Smythyman, works at Lincoln Center and was most recently the production manager for Warhorse, a fact that definitely shows in the carefully constructed tableau of each room. It costs approximately $500,000-$600,000 a year to stage Nightmare, and $100,000 of that goes into advertising on subway platforms, billboards and subways.

Mr. Haskell’s production charges $30 for regular admission, but can go up to $100 for VIP experience (which includes a free drink and T-shirt). A source who worked with the company last year said the show raked in “around six million,” and though that number seems extremely high, last year’s attendance saw 35,000. Assuming each paid the regular admission price, Nightmare would still end up garnering somewhere in the low seven figures in ticket sales in less than 45 days. Subtract the cost of putting on the show, and you’re still left with a nice pile of Halloween loot.

Yet even Nightmare seems to be following this new torture-happy trend. A second “portion” of the show we saw involved an upper-level “research facility,” where audience members are told that will be subjected to tests as part of an experiment on fear. The whole sterile lab atmosphere and the “this is not part of the show but actually a real experiment” conceit is a little played out, especially when the actors portraying the doctors didn’t seem to know what they were supposed to be doing. At one point, they brought a woman on stage and tried to force her hand into a terrarium of hissing cockroaches, telling her she’d have to leave if she couldn’t perform the task. Needless to say, she was almost brought to tears. Another young girl had a live rat dangled directly in front of her face.

We were jarred and disappointed by the second portion of Nightmare; the scare-tactics were not “fun,” but cheap.

Perhaps, though the future of haunted houses does lay in Mr. Faro’s vision: people lining up to pay $100 a pop to enter a dark room and get mugged at gunpoint. Then again prices being what they are for these extreme attractions, the robbery might actually be happening before you even enter.