But the actors who haunt the Edge of Hell and the Beast have only one goal: to reduce us to quivering blobs of fear.
The two long-established haunted houses — two of four operated in converted West Bottoms warehouses by Full Moon Productions — each year attract tens of thousands of people (or more) willing to pay for the pleasure of experiencing maximum sensory overload.
Roaring animatronic werewolves appear from nowhere, actors in ghastly makeup leap from dark corners, visitors grope their way through pitch-black corridors (“I’ve got a wall,” is a frequent refrain).
This is a rarified form of theater and a strange corner of show business executed by enthusiastic artisans, most of whom have learned on the job.
Guys like Larry Edgar, who manages the Edge of Hell.
“The actors not only have to be obedient to us,” said Edgar, a broad-shouldered man who trains boxers in the off-season and for fun wrestles alligators on Florida vacations. “They have to have passion. I tell ’em to own their position. They can’t be fakin’ it. If you can get them thinking on their own, they’ll come up with something good on their own.”
Edgar, who claims no formal theater training, oversees about 35 actors every night whose job it is to, well, scare the hell out of paying customers.
Edgar has worked for Full Moon Productions for 20 years, give or take a few.
“If I added it up I’d probably embarrass myself,” he said.
In addition to the Edge of Hell and the Beast, the company operates Macabre Cinema and the Chambers of Edgar Allan Poe, all in the West Bottoms. It all started in 1975 when the Edge of Hell was in an old building at Seventh and Wyandotte. It was there that Edgar got involved in what might be called blue-collar theater.
Edgar, who has collected reptiles since childhood, had a big snake, and he asked the owners if they could use it in the haunted house. They took a look at the snake in question and signed him up.
Now between the Beast and the Edge of Hell, Edgar is responsible for the care and feeding of two boa constrictors, three pythons, two anacondas and one alligator named Clamp.
“I didn’t have any intention of working at a haunted house,” Edgar said. “I just had a big snake.”
The active verb for what the actors do is “spook.” And to hear Edgar explain it, the people playing zombies and werewolves and vampires have to be every bit as committed as someone playing Willy Loman or Blanche DuBois.
“We can give ’em the spot, but they have to own it,” he said.
Amber Bequeaith, Full Moon’s press representative, is part of the family that has put on shows and haunted houses since the mid-1970s. Her uncle, Monty Summers, is the company’s president. When she was a little kid she appeared as a performer in the original Edge of Hell.
Some of the 250 actors required to staff all four haunted houses for two months have theater backgrounds. But that’s not really a requirement. What matters is how scary they are.
“Some do and some don’t,” said Bequeaith, who was a theater minor at what was then Central Missouri State. “Some of them don’t have our kind of stage presence. A lot of actors don’t like to be touched. They want to have a barrier between them and the public. Our actors have to have endurance.”
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