Over a decade of work scaring the crap out of people!

Little did I know that a random gig that’d present itself to me in 2008 would mark the beginnings of collectively ten years of sweaty passion doing something I not only loved to my skeletal-core but would become clear to me as one of the most under-appreciated (yet difficult and risky) types of LIVE performance in entertainment. (I do always seem to find the live ones don’t I?)

keep IN mind, flash warning for gifs below!

ScareActing is performance art of the most personal kind where you get in as close and as intimidatingly and aggressively as you can without anyone touching anyone. It’s being as menacing, threatening and seem as inhuman as possible by moving and using your body in every unnatural way your can think of–twisting, contorting, stalking, hiding and busting out as fast as you can, winding up for the kill and stopping before the follow through, etc.

Out of everything I’ve done in my professional career, it’s by the far the hardest and most risky type of work playing with peoples emotions at their most vulnerable (or drunken states), scaring hard hundreds of times a night with big motions that use your whole body and sometimes for thousands of guests until the wee hours of the morning. Invisibly, the most dangerous part of the job is the repetitive motion injuries! When it’s our season, it’s requires our whole lives and all our energy to give the best performance possible. For these reasons, ScareActors deserve respect and I’m proud to have that title on my home page’s banner!

For two years, I was headlined in the Midwest as the improvisational “tour guide” that would bring group after group through the entire attraction in character for a center called The UnderGround: as an every smiling mortician and then a maniac in a straitjacket wrapped in (real) heavy chains.

For the next three years, I was again a tour guide for the newly created Sinister Illusions in my hometown: first as a greasy janitor with a huge collection of jingling keys and a shovel I’d scrape across the ground. I would also perform as a fully animated and voiced Beetlejuice at a secondary event being held at The Underground and then twice at an attraction called The Spooktacular.

Then excitedly for remaining years, I decided to spend 90 hours to create my own character to reprice my role as the attractions tour guide, creating a mold of my entire body in 20 rolls of jumbo duct tape, stuffed with cotton and covered in home-made fake skin to be a once-human creature bio-morphed by an alien virus into a four-legged monstrosity (inspired by my love for Dead Space!)

See the clip of me below! his name was “stalker.”

In Los Angeles, the first ever gig I got was being cast in Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood as a victim being sawed in half by a clown in the “Clowns 3D” maze (repeatedly until the end of time.) The most flattering thing about this year was when I later found out that anyone who was put in this maze scored in the top 30-40 amongst 1,600 auditionees that year! At the very least, it was proof that I knew how to die (again and again!)

I would later decide to perform two more years at Halloween Horror Nights, the second of which became the peak of my scareactor career as I soon was chosen as a permanent cast-member of The Last of Us as the blind-yet-deadly “Clicker” monster fully immersed in one my favorite gaming franchises. It was the most physically-demanding role I ever did burning 3-7,000 calories a night (according to my Fit Bit) but looking back, it was one of the coolest moments in my career thus far. As a fun plus, before I was permanently was placed as a Clicker, I was a substitute for every role in the maze (except for Joel, the “Bloaters” and Ellie of course!) “Mmm, this is awkward!” Several of my friends even came through to support (and I scared them sh*tless as thanks!)

The next and final year at HHN, in a stroke of luck, I was placed in the SEQUEL to the one other maze I wish I could have permanently been placed in the year prior: Monstrous: Latin American Nightmares where I was the legendary “bogeyman” of the south, El Cucuy, all season. Truly, what I think I can always say is the best thing about HHN is how you almost never meet another performer who’s less than one of the most stellar entertainers who’ve ever met.

Scareactors deserve the best, they are my family. They deserve respect from the rest of the entertainment industry as professionals, they deserve to be seen and treated as performance artists, they deserve at least 25 an hour for putting their bodies and safety at risk with every scare–and I will always call myself a Scareactor and be there for a performance community I love. We scare because we care!