Soon, he was sawing neighbors in half and making cars disappear in the Plymouth, Minnesota, cul-de-sac where he grew up.
He first learned to work a crowd at age 6, borrowing his neighbors’ Fischer-Price magic kit so often they handed it over.
So, how does one rise from theater nerd to Pumpkin King? It’s essentially professional-grade audience manipulation, and Dunn started early. Referring to his work, he calls himself an “adult child.” It’s not just his boyish face (recalling Matthew Lillard, or Shaggy from the live-action Scooby Doo) and his worn-in black sweatshirt. It’s also the Christmas-morning bounce in his step. He has to ensure everything’s in working order, that this year’s new air compressors are ready to breathe sharp bursts of life into the zombie animatronics, and you could easily mistake him for one of the kids. While the rest get into costume behind the façades, Scream Town founder Matt Dunn-the entrepreneur who has rented out all of this suburban acreage, cut the grass, planted the corn, and provided the sets and props from two decades’ and some $300,000 worth of collecting-hurries house to house. One girl among many dressed in a Harley Quinn–esque getup will unsettle those waiting in line for the twisted clown attraction, telling stories, in a piping quaver, about how her dolly hanged herself. He’ll be the one growling beside a buffet of brains in the zombie-themed house. There, acting aspirants-mostly young theater nerds-put months of preparation into action. A high school-age boy musses up his blonde hair an hour before go-time. Within Scream Town’s gates, it’s pretty much the Halloween Town of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.Ī Gothic fountain is flanked by eight themed façades, some of them multi-storied, a few tucking their trails deep into the surrounding cornfields and the 200-year-old woods. Matt Dunn Photo by TJ Turner The Pumpkin King Every October weekend, they churn over Scream Town’s 35 acres-spewing fast from 50 fog machines and taking only a few minutes to transform a moonlit clearing into Sleepy Hollow. Every year, it gets a little bigger.įor scale, compare the furbelow of fog under the State Fair’s neo-Georgian to the 200 gallons that lift into the naked Chaska sky. A few dusty roads from the Twin Cities, stewing in a Chaska cornfield about 40 minutes away, it has been voted fourth best in the country on. Minnesota’s Scream Town has built a reputation, over the course of a decade, as one of the country’s best haunted-house attractions. And the Midwest’s flat, forsaken ’scapes, quietly hellish by themselves-they make perfect real estate. We want a municipality, not just a house. We want to get chased, touched, breathed on. Granted, adrenaline’s still the big draw. They’re big October events that rise and sink across the country like ghost ships, set in cavernous malls and shuddering cornfields. It told a story, and that’s why I’m drawn to the more sophisticated Halloween attractions going up this time of year. Imagined or not, that scene has stuck with me. I doubt, in a $5 house of jump-scares, that an actress would perform such a psychologically complex gesture-out of rotted love, presumably, or fear of the werewolf clawing at her door. This means I’m likely mistaken when I recall the time, as a kid, I walked through the haunted mansion at the Minnesota State Fair and saw an elaborate tableau of a young woman in chiffon tipping a dagger against her collarbone.
Usually, it’s dank, dark, and you can’t tell what species of costumed teen has popped out to make a loud noise. MAtt dunn and scream town residents Photo by TJ TurnerĪnyone who’s braved the intimidation tactics of your standard, schlocky, carnival-style haunted house knows there’s not a lot to get.