Hotel Slaughter, a local Halloween attraction on the outskirts of Rolling Pines, Washington, is staffed entirely by attractive local teens, and, as a result, isn’t as scary as it could be, sources say.
Visitors to the haunted hotel had high hopes, based on the fact that Hotel Slaughter was set up in an actual abandoned hotel on a distant access road, and required guests to spend at least five minutes in each of the hotel’s 11 rooms with the door shut.
“I went with two friends, and we were expecting to basically pee our pants the whole time,” says Candace Schmeel, 31, who believes the building to be haunted. “But then you get in a room with these gorgeous prom court types and there’s fake blood all over their Abercrombie shirts, and you’re like, ‘What are we doing here, exactly?’”
Hotel Slaughter’s producer and manager, Kevin Percoup, 38, has run the haunted hotel for three years, and says he tends to hire high schoolers because of cost, mostly.
“It’s cheaper to use young people,” says Percoup. “And let’s face it—we don’t want to be scary-scary.”
“The zombie housecleaner was hot,” says hotel visitor Jeremy Strange. “I mean, she did a good job and everything. But am I scared by an adorable girl-next-door type coming after me with a glow-in-the-dark vacuum hose? Not really. Plus, she was clearly chewing gum.”
“I totally freaked out this one group of guys,” says Lorie Lindler, who played the zombie. “They were like frozen in place, just staring. And their eyes got real big.”
Other characters at Hotel Slaughter include a shirtless bellhop with a fake knife through his head, a busty waitress in a wolf mask, and a tall male mummy who you can tells played football.
During the finale of the haunted house, where several of the actors appear to be eaten alive, patrons were seen clapping and saying “aww” as the costumed teens screamed in agony.
“It wasn’t 15 bucks of scary but it was 15 bucks of something,” says Hotel Slaughter guest Carly Jeffs.
Asked if he intended to make next year’s haunted hotel scarier by casting older people, Percoup demurs.
“Casting attractive teens is sort of my thing. It’s how people know me,” he says, as a supposedly dead cheerleader with cascading red hair crawls sexily past him on the floor. “Why mess with success?”
