A haunted house insider has lifted the lid on how he creates a horrifying show using rotten flesh scent pods, fake pus, and rivers of ‘blood’. The spooky spectacle at Blackpool Tower Dungeon attracts thousands of people each Halloween.
Jamie Humphrey, a fright-merchant at Blackpool Tower Dungeon, is an expert in all things gorey, ghoulish, and gross. His job is to help make the attraction the most terrifying it can be - whilst sticking to health and safety laws.
Now Jamie has dished the dirt on how he creates the attraction's infamous Halloween season show. Speaking about the stink that wafts through the attraction, he told the Mirror : "For the plague street we use a pod with a smell called rotting flesh.
"Another one is burning coal, we also have a forest smell, and in our monk show we have incense sticks. We have a sea smell in the smuggler section which used to be rotten fish, but we had too many complaints."
With Halloween just around the corner Jamie’s job is busier than ever. When the Mirror caught up with him he was shifting 275 pumpkins into the Blackpool Tower Dungeon for the Halloween festival - which runs from October 1 to November 6.
This year’s Halloween festival includes the Reaper’s Retribution show. It focuses on14th century occultist Edward Kelly and his apprentice, who attempted to cheat death by raising the dead and meeting the Grim Reaper, Mirror reports.
Walking through the doors of the attraction visitors will be transported back to the cobbled, horse-manure and human waste covered streets of yesteryear. This is due to Jamie’s strategic planning, with smell pods planted around the dungeon to create a rancid smell that sticks in visitors' nostrils when they leave.
The dungeon also features rivers of blood which run through it. Jamie reveals that these are simply water filled rivers with added food dye, which has to be changed every few months to stop it rotting.
The actors at the dungeon are also given a horrifying makeover each day. Jamie says: "We use scratch blood to do grazes and open wounds, and lots of latex on the actors which we then fill with fake pus. It's a synthetic pus from a company in London which gives the impression of buboes."
A larger cast of jump-scare actors are brought in especially for the Halloween period, with their synthetic lesions filled with greater and greater quantities of pus as the terrifying big day approaches. Guests are often left terrified, one even to the point of tears recalls Jamie.
He says that the most impressive scare he’s carried out was playing The Texas Chainsaw Massacrer at another attraction. He ran towards a large man with the ‘chainsaw’ whirring at which point the visitor “fell to the floor crying, asking me to back off.”
At Blackpool Tower Dungeon most of the public find themselves most scared at the end of the experience, at which point a drop ride 'hangs' guests after they're found guilty of being witches, Jamie says. He adds that “most people wuss out” at actors ripping parts of their bodies off during the show, another of his planned gorey surprises.
But even the actors and those working at the Dungeon get spooked on occasion, with some believing the tower is haunted. He said: "The tower has been here for 127 years and sometimes actors have said they've had weird experiences. They feel like there's people watching them in the dark or people grab them in the dark.
"Sometimes you'll find stools in the middle of the floor, so either someone is playing with us or we're horribly haunted." You can buy tickets to visit the Dungeon here .
