During filming, was there any Halloween haunt you came across that was too extreme for you?
Zack Andrews: We were doing a press tour a couple of weeks ago and we went to a haunt in Mexico, and the first thing they did was put bags over our heads. Then they put shotguns in our backs and they separated us. Each one of us had a different experience going through. So I get done and I’m standing out front for 10 minutes by myself and Bobby comes out and I’m like, “Oh my god! What happened?” So we’re talking about what we did and then we know how claustrophobic Mikey is so there’s no way Mikey was able to handle being put in that box. So he gets out and he doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. He actually got pushed off a ledge 10 feet down and fell into a mattress, so that was pretty extreme.
Bobby Roe: After all the research we’ve done, some of these guys… I don’t know when they are going to snap.
How challenging was it for you all to blur the line between what’s real and what is not? Towards the end it is hard to tell, and part of me wants to believe that it’s not all real.
Brandy Schaefer: Well everything was real for me, you know? Going through the haunts was real, being thrown in the trunk of a car was real, and all of that stuff was very real. I think that’s the scary thing and that’s the interesting part about it. When does it stop being real?
Mikey Roe: I think Bobby did a really good job of blurring the lines, and that’s what makes the movie I think really original. The people who do understand it and see it for what it is correctly just absolutely love it because they do not know which part is real and what isn’t. We’ve had people talk to us before where they were like, “well did you sue them?” And you’re like, “wow you really missed all of it then, didn’t you?”
Zack Andrews: It was important for us too to make sure as a viewer you could go on this ride with us. That’s why we cataloged the haunts in the cities that are listed in the credits. I want people to do that. That experience of what we all did was a lot of fun, and the cool part to me is that these guys can go meet the characters.
Aside from found footage movies, was there any other horror movie that inspired this film?
Bobby Roe: Well, there are two. Cannibal Holocaust was one which is horror, but the fact that they used real natives and that they went into the environment, that was a real inspiration to this. What’s funny enough is there is a lot of Borat in this ,which is a really weird example, but if you take out the comedy part, exactly what Sacha Baron Cohen was doing we tried to do. We tried to get into the environment, talk to these people with loaded questions and try to get real reactions and see what happens.
Mikey Roe: We got people to be who they are, and that makes it a lot more fun when you really see some of the creepiness that comes out of it. And some of the lines that are not written by us that they delivered that are fantastic really add to the element of what we were trying to do about blurring the lines just like you said.
As those interviews go on, they seem to get creepier and creepier and creepier. Was that intentional on your part?
Bobby Roe: Yeah. As our haunts became more extreme we wanted the interviews to do the same. We have so much stuff, so many interviews and will try to include as much as we can of that on the Blu-ray because these guys… You couldn’t write some of the things that came out of their mouths. Some of the guys are really, really savvy and some of the guys you are afraid to be in the dark with.
Jeff Larson: I think for us it wasn’t so much acting as it was just being a haunted house enthusiast and having the story come to us. We weren’t really manufacturing anything. We were there and we were enjoying it and it was coming to us.
That concludes our interview, but we’d like to thank everyone for their time. Be sure to check out The Houses October Built, as it’s now playing in theatres.
