By Kim Velsey 10/25/12 6:20pm

Bad Real Estate

Imagine having that much space!

The Enduring Appeal of the Haunted House

In New York, there’s not enough room for the living, never mind the dead, but we still thrill to the idea of a haunted house. It sounds so exotic! Having a whole house to oneself and a few ghosts? What a dream! Even the demons on 666 Park Avenue don’t look so bad compared to some roommates.

And yet, it’s a little odd, in these days of torture porn and terrorism that we still find the idea of mysterious footsteps and suspiciously cold rooms so riveting, as a “paean to the haunted house” in today’s The New York Times points out. Things that go bump in the night seem kind of 19th century, frankly. Read More

By Drew Grant 9/06/12 12:51pm

Haunted Houses

The new face of terror (Facebook)

Paranormal Activity Producer Sets Up New Halloween Haunted House With ‘Terrifying … Smells’

Look, we here at The New York Observer are no scaredy-cats when it comes to haunted houses. After all, we’ve overcome waterboarding for the sake of journalism to make last year’s Halloween something special.

But even we are getting a little bit tired of the “real” horrors that producers have started coming up with in order to test our boundaries. For instance, this new haunted house by the creators of Paranormal Activity (1-4) and Insidious sounds terrible, and you couldn’t pay us enough money to go to Los Angeles and try it out. (Actually, you probably could … that number is around the dollar amount of a round-trip plane flight.) Read More