Flutterby™! : Dimensions of Darkness

This last weekend, Charlene and I flew out to Detroit where my sister picked us up for a visit to family in Whitehouse. Or at least that's what we told family, but the real reason was to visit Dimension of Darkness.

If you're not into the scene, it's a "haunt", not "haunted house", because it's not a house. But the transformation made to an empty storefront in a strip mall is pretty cool. The primary driver behind Dimension of Darkness is my sister Sara's husband Matt who, along with Autumn, a woman who has "gore" tattooed across her chest, a reference which has nothing to do with that particular inconvenient truth, and a few other partners have long wanted to create one of these.

And it's a hell of a lot of work. We went through almost as regular customers on Saturday, my parents and Sara were well enough recognized that the cast gave us slightly special treatment, but my real appreciation for the art of the thing came on Sunday when we went back over to help reset the space for that evening's festivities, and I got to see all that went into the place.

The lighting is all 12v LED, to allow spot lighting without having to have all the fixtures UL listed and every junction inspected. The place is laid out such that no point is more than 50 feet from any exit. Heat detectors on the ceilings, with the alarm system, a calm voice instructing visitors to "please move calmly to the nearest exit", on batteries. And the whole thing is constructed out of fire treated lumber (which is bright pink in its unpainted state, a circumstance that I'm told led to any number of hilarious exchanges with people watching from a nearby bar when they were building the place).

But as impressive as the planning for safety that went into the design and construction is building the place so that the cast of high energy goth kids banging their heads on the wall, and freaked out customers running headlong into places there aren't doors, only destroy the place to a state where it's possible to reconstruct it every day.

It's not really my scene, the demographics are targeted young and we were joking later about things that'd terrify the over 35 crowd (having mortgage payments leap out at you...), but it's really cool.