Halloween Haunt Makeup Crew Alumni - 1973-1974
The FIRST Halloween Haunt
Ladies and gentlemen, it might
just be best to let the following interview speak for itself.
In the following text, you will find for the FIRST TIME IN THE 30 YEARS OF HALLOWEEN HAUNT, the actual quotes, thoughts and memories from one of the people who actually helped to CREATE the event in 1973. The following information has NEVER been released to the public until now and it is Ultimatehaunt.com's honor and pleasure to introduce to you Mr. Gene Witham:
In the following text, you will find for the FIRST TIME IN THE 30 YEARS OF HALLOWEEN HAUNT, the actual quotes, thoughts and memories from one of the people who actually helped to CREATE the event in 1973. The following information has NEVER been released to the public until now and it is Ultimatehaunt.com's honor and pleasure to introduce to you Mr. Gene Witham:
I was a character/stunt person/gunfighter. We called ourselves the Knott's Berry Farm Funfighters. I was the comedy character, so I did very few stunts but a lot of comedy. I had a background in film and television as both a stunt person and a makeup artist. I had taken the job at Knott's originally as a summer "fun" job because there were no films being shot at the time period that I was associated with. It turned out that I stayed for two years as a Funfighter until the first Halloween Haunt.
How did that first Halloween Haunt come about?
Attendance at Knott's had dropped since the advent of the peripheral organizations (like Disney and the Wax Museum). Knott's was dropping down in attendance, except for one other time during the year when it was the Christian Week (they'd have a whole week devoted to Christian Organizations who would literally take over the park for a week).
The attendance was something like 27,000 people a day, but Knott's per se, general attendance was maybe 12-14,000 during that time period. They wanted something that would boost the revenue and get more people in.
When Disney raised their prices, Knott's didn't. Knott's had just built the front and back gate [admission gates]. Prior to that, Knott' was just open! You could walk in from almost anywhere. They built the attendance gates and realized their revenue wasn't what they thought it was. Haunt was just the first in many new venues they started.
When they built the John Wayne Theater, the idea was that they would have concerts there, which no other park had done at that point.
Knott's, believe it or not, has been an innovator in a lot of what is now considered permanent territory for amusement parks, the Haunt being the most significant.
The concept of the Haunt came about when Bill Hollingshead, Martha Boyd, Bud Hurlbut and Daryl Anderson (who was one of the Knott's family) got together.
We were called into a meeting and were informed by Bill Hollingshead that he had gone to the Knott family and had proposed a weekend for Knott's Berry Farm to celebrate Halloween. He didn't know how they were going to do it, didn't know what they were going to do. He got permission from the Knott family to do some kind of promotion and he had teamed up with Martha Boyd (who was in Advertising and Marketing). They decided they wanted to do something but they wanted some input on what they could do.
Martha Boyd called me into the meeting and said,
"You have experience in film and television and you're a makeup artist. Here's what we're proposing…"
She laid out a very simple plan. They were going to take the Ghost Town and make it a little more eerie and they would have some characters roam the park. They wanted them in makeup and they said,
"We don't know what characters. Let's sit down and talk."
That's how, originally, we all got together to start laying the groundwork for the first Halloween Haunt.
Based off of the outcome of the meeting, what were the duties that everyone was responsible for?
It was kind of mixed because we didn't have a "Haunt Committee". We had Bud Hurlbut over at the engineering and the actual construction and Bill Hollingshead ran back and forth to various points in Los Angeles with his experience prior to coming to Knott's. He went to his contacts to find out how we could develop special effects. What effects could work, what they would do to transform the park in a short period of time.
My job was to come up with characters that could be made up and roam the park and to pick the characters out. That's where Gary Salisbury came into play because he was head of Entertainment and officially was over me. I had to go through him to find out what people would be available and then decide what characters to put on which people.
If anything, I took liberties with the Universal characters, which were Frankenstein, the Wolfman and the Mummy. These were traditionally Universal Studios characters but at the time we just took license and made our own versions of them.
The Planet of the Apes came in as an added because it was current at the time. There was a series running and people could identify easily with the characters.
The Planet of the Apes pieces were original from the movies. I had worked on the original Planet of the Apes movie, along with 146 other makeup artists, and then worked on the four successive features that followed. I was one of 15 makeup artists in each program to work the shows. In a common bond, we share some of the glory with Johnny Chambers' Planet of the Apes award for the Motion Picture Academy. We share the recognition of being the 15 makeup artists that continued on all the series.
For those of us who weren't there to see it, what was the early theming like in Ghost Town in 1973 and 1974?
To be specific, we were given some very hard restrictions by the Knott
 |
So, they gave us the restrictions. We proposed covering Ghost Town in a fog layer. They said (at the time) that it would be an extreme safety hazard. They were afraid that the fog would not dissipate soon enough and that it would create a health hazard breathing the fumes.
We were restricted from ANY physical contact whatsoever with the guests. They discouraged jumping out from behind anything and even saying, "boo!" It was okay to roam the park and come up behind someone quietly, but we couldn't jump out, touch people or interact with them in any way other than quietly appearing and disappearing.
The restrictions made it almost impossible to do anything! You have a natural instinct to say, "Hey, I'm a monster!" or "Boo!"
 |
We had flats built up in Ghost Town to create dark areas and to create a guide to move people in certain areas by building these barriers. There were a few effects that had not been used before. Moving the invisible rocking chair, using lights and sound to create an image passing through something…very, very amateurish. Even though the concepts and illusions came from professional people, as it translated down, it wasn't as professional as it could have been. They didn't hire the professionals in to do it. The professionals told them how to do it and we recreated it on our end.
In all deference to the people that started it who had very little concept of what to do, the mechanics were done very well considering. I'm sure they've improved it 10 fold since then. The first Haunt was unusual and therefore, everything was in the experimental stages.
Larry Vincent was a movie/horror host (which there were several out in California at the time, and they were all competing for time and space). He was probably one of the most "far out" of the horror show hosts because he had a great reverence for the old horror movies. He broke the tradition of movie hosts because he would break in and narrate during the film, which had never been done before that. He was so odd that even at his prime, he looked like he had just been dug up from the dead! Kind of like John Carradine. He had a magnificent personality that came across the screen.
I had met him before he went to Knott's for the first time. I had met him at KTLA Studios where I worked part time as a makeup artist. I got to like him because he so irreverent. He didn't care much for authority. He had a very quick mind and a quick wit, but yet he was almost like a very traditional British humor…so dry that sometimes you missed it!
When Knott's announced that they were going to have him as a host, I went out to KTLA and sat down with him. All I wanted to know was what he wanted from me makeup wise. He said, "With my face, what CAN you do?!"
We developed, over lunch, a very good rapport and he started asking me "What do the people at Knott's want?" I was kind of like a go-between; between what I knew of Knott's and what he wanted to know on how to present the show.
The first year he was very cautious. He had his standard shtick that he did on air and he just added a few innuendoes to see if he could pass the Knott's censors.
He had such a wry sense of humor that if someone associated with the Haunt saw him socially or away from the Haunt setting, although he was always Larry Vincent, he wasn't always Seymour. You could tell that he looked like Seymour, but it would be like, "Gee, you look like Seymour!" And he would really play it up! He would say, "No, no. I'm Larry Vincent" Then he would break into the Seymour. He always carried his hat. It was the kind of a hat that could be popped out, like a top hat. He would slip it on and say (in his Seymour voice) "YES! I'm Seymour, Master of the Macabre!!" The people would just freak! He loved to do that for people.
Because of the repartee that we had created on our first meeting and subsequent meetings, I got to become fairly good friends with him. We socialized a little bit outside of the Knott's experience and between the first and second Haunts, my wife (at the time) and I became very good friends with he and his wife.
He was sick the first year but it wasn't totally crippling. By the second year, there was great concern on whether he would or not be able to do the show. He had been at St. Josephs Hospital in Burbank as late as two weeks before the Haunt. They were very concerned that he might not make it. They booked one of his coworkers, Moona Lisa just in case he couldn't make it.
 |
He thought the Haunt was the most fun experience he ever had professionally. He said it was his first opportunity to really interplay with an audience and get immediate feedback. He felt the appreciation and the love that came from the audience for he and his character, greater there than he had ever done in any personal appearance, anywhere. He said he was sorry that they hadn't come up with the concept of the Halloween Haunt five years before because he would have left his regular job to go do anything he could to do this kind of performance because he loved it so much. He said he got more recognition because of Knott's Berry Farm than all the work he had done in his whole career.
