* (rerun)

 

‘All serious art presents a challenge to its interlocutors, resists paraphrase and frustrates interpretation. The strange richness of Peggy Ahwesh’s filmmaking throws us up against the paucity of our own language. “Do I have words for what I am seeing?”: watching and re-watching her films provoke this question – the spectre of ineffability. This experience seems ever more curious when we consider the place granted to language in the films themselves. The films often cite (or even recite) any number of literary, theoretical and philosophical texts. Yet this practice of citation, appropriation and allusion, of folding language into, or asking it to hover above, the image is predicated on an understanding of the shortcomings of language itself. For Ahwesh’s work proceeds first from the act of seeing, or more accurately, looking – at the world and the bodies that inhabit it.

‘Ahwesh was reared in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, in her own words, “one of those sad industrial towns” near Pittsburgh. She went to school at Antioch College in the 1970s where she studied with Tony Conrad (“a father figure”) and was introduced to radical artists and filmmakers like Paul Sharits, Carolee Schneeman and Joyce Wieland. She returned to Pittsburgh after school, threw herself into its burgeoning punk scene and started shooting Super-8 films that documented, quite idiosyncratically, the things, people and places around her. In organising a film series at an art space called The Mattress Factory, Ahwesh decided to invite as her first guest George Romero, a Pittsburgh filmmaker himself, whose native city had paid him little notice before Ahwesh’s invitation. Their meeting led to Ahwesh’s working as a production assistant on Romero’s Creepshow (1982). The immersion in Romero’s phantasmagoria seems so uncannily fitting, given the trajectory of Ahwesh’s career, as to be nearly over-determined, yet, as anecdote (Ahwesh recalls that she was “assigned to entertain Stephen King’s son and played ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ with him”) it manifests the unstudied and nerdy cool of Ahwesh’s films themselves.

‘After the Romero stint Ahwesh moved to New York and continued making films and doing tech work at The Kitchen, one of the nerve centres of New York’s experimental performance scene. As her notoriety has increased over the past two decades she has been the subject of major museum retrospectives and the recipient of some of the most prestigious awards given to practising creative artists. At present she teaches at Bard College and continues to live in New York City.

‘Despite the Romero episode, biography does not go far in illuminating Ahwesh’s films, despite how much we actually sense her physical presence in many of the films themselves – behind the camera, on the soundtrack, etc. In fact, it is this palpable present-ness in her work that almost obviates the biographical crutch. For in looking at her work we feel summoned to participate in an epistemological experiment that is the very substance of the films themselves.

‘This is heady language – we might even think inappropriate – for discussing a body of artistic work in which memorable moments include a fake plastic hand playing a harp, a grown woman threatening to use a microphone as a dildo or Ahwesh herself playing the computer game Tomb Raider. Ahwesh’s is messy work – gloriously messy – and is deeply invested in the luxurious plenitude of the visual field. The films look great and yet are never merely pretty; they frustrate aestheticising, formalist tastes. Likewise, although the films often cite theoretical texts, they are never merely theoretical. They inhabit a strange stretch of territory in the world of experimental film and video, never exhibiting the formal shape of, say, a Hollis Frampton or the precise political clarity of a Su Friedrich. Ahwesh’s practice is a porous one, grounded on a radical technique of pastiche and aimed at unsettling categories and hierarchies.

‘As is always the case, it is better to attend to the films themselves than to belabour the qualities they share generally. I will start with The Deadman, a film Ahwesh made with her collaborator Keith Sanborn in 1990. It is one of her best-known films and one that immerses us straightaway into many of her preoccupations and methods.

‘The film grew out of Ahwesh and Sanborn’s interest in the work of Georges Bataille and in particular Bataille’s text Le Mort which Sanborn translated and on which the film is loosely based. Bataille’s investigations of the morbid and the transgressive found sympathy with Ahwesh’s Romero-inflected interest in the horror film. Shot in black and white 16 mm, The Deadman actually begins as a sort of horror film: its opening images are of a white frame house, shot from below, the time either dusk or dawn. On the soundtrack someone gasps in (what sounds like) agony. Next we hear the sound of breaking glass and the beating of bird wings, as the image cuts, first to a close up of chandelier, creaking as it sways from the ceiling, next to a shot of a man lying naked on rumpled bed sheets, his penis flaccid in the cradle of his thighs. Scoring the last image is the sound of a buzzing fly – a metonymic soundtrack of death and decay. The next shot is from the outside of the house again, as a woman, naked but for a thin plastic raincoat, leaves the house running. The naked man is the film’s ”Dead Man”, the woman, Marie. Ahwesh’s camera then follows her as she fucks, pisses, shits and vomits her way through the rest of the film. …

‘The film of Ahwesh’s that most determinedly takes on the subjects of sexuality and vision is undoubtedly The Color of Love (1994). Essentially it is a found footage film. According to Ahwesh, a friend dropped off a load of old film canisters that had been left outside, prey to the elements. Inside one canister Ahwesh discovered a Super-8mm pornographic film of two women making love to each other and to a man who appears to be dead or unconscious. The film had become degraded and decayed which gave it an amazing richness of color and texture. Ahwesh “did an improv on the optical printer”, “slowing some sections down and speeding others up a bit, repeating some things, and elongating the cunt shots”. Then she added a score of tango music. What resulted is one of the most beautiful and provocative artefacts in film history. The use of the tango music seems a clear nod in the direction of Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928). Like its surrealist predecessor, The Color of Love is an assault on the norms of vision. It is explicit; it shows too much. The seductive surface of the film (if ever there were a case for haptic cinema or embodied vision, this is it) draws us into a pas de deux of attraction and repulsion.

‘The Scary Movie (1993) is another collaboration with Martina Torr, who by the time the film was shot, was some years older than she was in Martina’s Playhouse. Shot in wonderfully high contrast black and white with very low key lighting, the film is one of Ahwesh’s most beautiful and most light-hearted; it is also the most reflexive of her many nods towards the horror genre. The film features Martina and co-star/playmate Sonja Mereu. While Martina is costumed in cheap girls’ dress up clothes, Sonja has a fake moustache, black gloves and prosthetic monster fingers. The first shot is a repetitive and jerky hand-held pan of a hand drawn music score while the sounds of Psycho-like violins play on the soundtrack. So begins what might be called an anatomising re-reading of the horror genre. The entire soundtrack is a pastiche of music and sounds native to the horror film – screams, strings, squeaking doors, footsteps, etc – although with a few corny phrases and sound effects that sound as though they’ve been lifted from a Warner Brothers cartoon. At various points a prosthetic rubber hand (obviously manipulated by a human extending from offscreen space) reaches mock-eerily to caress Martina who pretends to be asleep. Sonja probes/assaults Martina with kitchen tongs and later stabs her repeatedly with a tin-foil knife, and in turn is stabbed by the rubber hand wielding a similar weapon. In the middle of the film’s duration, Sonja holds up a poster announcing the credits (she is credited as the “Doctor/Killer”, Martina as the “Patient/Hand Lover”). Then we see the girls screaming, then dancing. They seem to have escaped their outing into the horror genre. The film ends. …

‘The contours of Ahwesh’s work expand far beyond the few examples I have discussed here. What holds the body of her work together is its global resistance to the notion of being held together, to boundaries, to resolution. Ahwesh’s explanation of her resistance to narrative might serve as a sort of ars poetica: “The reason I’ve never liked narrative is because traditionally narrative film has to have resolution. By the end, you’re supposed to be able to figure out why things happened the way they did. And I’ve always been more into presenting a problem and getting you into an emotional place where you understand the calamity or joy or desire within a person’s life. It’s like a texture, or a mood, a moment – not this is the story and this is how it turns out.”

‘This attitude has generated a labile openness and indeterminacy in Ahwesh’s work that has proved richly rewarding. While her films consistently engage and challenge us in their experiments with form, they do not present us with a closed textual or authorial system. They have, rather, the courage to act centrifugally – to fling us away from themselves and back into the world from which they come, of which they are a part and which they have enriched.’ — John David Rhodes, Senses of Cinema

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Peggy Ahwesh’s Vimeo channel
PA @ Electronic Arts Intermix
PA @ Video Data Bank
Two Serious Ladies: Peggy Ahwesh and Jennifer Montgomery
PA @ Microscope Gallery
Peggy Ahwesh Stands By Her Man
PA @ IMDb
Corpse, corpus, contingency: Peggy Ahwesh’s ‘deadman’ trilogy
Vertov from Z to A edited by Peggy Ahwesh & Keith Sanborn
The Blind Field: Peggy Ahwesh’s Kissing Point
PA @ mubi
PEGGY AHWESH – THIS LONG CENTURY
NEASY ENTANGLEMENTS: FILMS AND VIDEOS BY PEGGY AHWESH

 

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Extras

Episode 1 Module 5 – Peggy Ahwesh Interview

Midnight Moment April 2015: “City Thermogram”

Notes on the Death of Kodachrome

NYUFF ’08 Trailer by Peggy Ahwesh

 

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Interview

Scott MacDonald: You take pride in your Pittsburgh background, in part, I assume, because it’s been important in experimental filmmaking, with Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Field of Vision, the scholar Lucy Fischer at University of Pittsburgh. Also, it’s Warhol’s hometown. But maybe on some level it’s most of all George Romero. Is it true that you worked on George Romero films?

Peggy Ahwesh: Yeah. I moved back to Pittsburgh after college. I went to Antioch from 1972 until 1978. I studied with Tony Conrad, who I still think of affectionately as a father figure, the elder statesman in the field who bequeathed upon me the esoteric knowledge of initiation that propelled forward . . . [laughter] whatever. I also studied with Janis Lipzin. And Paul Sharits was there. Cecil Taylor was artist-in-residence. Jud Yalkut had a radio show that I listened to a lot. There was a lot going on.

I particularly remember a show Janis organized: Joyce Wieland, Carolee Schneemann, and Beverly Conrad did presentations. It was a major event for me to meet these women and hear them talk about their work.

I’m from a little coal town down river—Cannonsburg (famous for Perry Como and Bobby Vinton), one of those sad industrial towns. But I loved Pittsburgh and still have a lot of nostalgia for it. I found it very freeing, artistically; I felt like it was mine; the landscape was mine, the people were mine. Everything about it was up for grabs. I liked that it was “nowhere.” It was not overdetermined as an art melieu like New York.

I got very involved with the punk scene there in the late Seventies and made a lot of great friends overnight. We documented the punk bands, and we were all making Super-8 sound films, and there were all these crazy characters to put in your movies.

My first job was at this place called the Mattress Factory, which was just opening in the north side in what’s called the Mexican War streets, a rough-and-tumble working class neighborhood with slight gentrification. I’m sure that neighborhood has changed. The Mattress Factory was this big art warehouse, and I ran a film series there. For my first guest I decided to call George Romero. He told me that no one in Pittsburgh had ever invited him to show his work locally. I was the first. I couldn’t believe it.

He came with his wife, and we showed The Crazies [1973] and Night of the Living Dead [1968]; one program at the Mattress Factory and another in a local high school. It was great. He was so friendly, open, vulnerable, not an egomaniac in any sense. I also knew a lot of people who worked in his movies, including several of the guys who were the red-neck bikers in Dawn of the Dead [1979]; they were George’s lighting crew and worked locally.

I worked on Creepshow [1982] as a production assistant, but I did all kinds of bizarre jobs–like I was Adrienne Barbeau’s assistant at one point, which basically meant going out and buying her specialty foods because she had very particular tastes. And for about a week I was assigned to entertain Stephen King’s son and played “Dungeons and Dragons” with him. I had a walk-through in a shot where Adrienne Barbeau gets shot in the head at a lawn party. And I worked with the camera crew in the scene where the guy finds this meteor and the green stuff gets all over his place. People had to make the green stuff and dress the set, and I helped the camera people get the right amount of out-of-focus green stuff in the foreground and in the background.

I had a very flamboyant best friend, Natalka Voslakov. She’s in some of my movies, and I shot some of her movies. She was one of the staples of my Pittsburgh years, an incredibly striking woman. Of course, she got a much better job with Romero than I did [laughter]—she was first assistant to the assistant director. My friend, Margie Strosser, who I’ve worked with over the years, was an assistant editor. We all got to know each other.

MacDonald: Were you a fan of the films? Dawn of the Dead is a favorite of mine. Romero was so good about gender and race—and class: he gave us the first working-class American horror monsters.

Ahwesh: Oh yeah. I’d seen all the films: Martin [1978], and The Crazies [1973], and Season of the Witch [1972]. Night of the Living Dead [1968] is amazing.

At one point when I was working at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, George had given us a bunch of old film to re-use for slug–a whole collection of public service announcements he had done for local television, TV commercials about toilet cleansers, ads for candidates running for office, an anti-rape PSA, and a film about professional wrestling. I remember looking at this stuff to get the inside the enterprise that was George Romero. For me, he’s an important model for how to make independent personal films. I liked George’s style, and he was such a warm, human person. George’s groove was, “Have fun; make a movie; make friends; and mess around.” I liked that he was a genre filmmaker and able to penetrate the popular psyche in a really profound way. I like that he’s a populist. There was as little hierarchy as there could be on a feature film. Working with him was really fun.

Ed Harris was very open to hanging out with us local kids. He went out dancing with me, Natalka, and a couple of grips, at one of the local watering holes, and I remember having such a good time. By that time Natalka had been demoted to Production Assistant, just like me! [laughter]

MacDonald: Pittsburgh Filmmakers is going by this time, right?

Ahwesh: Yes. I worked as a programmer there for two years, during the time when Robert Haller was on his way out. I was the next generation. As a programmer I was free to do what I wanted, and I applied for grants and I brought in a lot of interesting people and did collaborations with local clubs and the University—a lot of things that couldn’t have happened under Haller.

MacDonald: At what point in this history do you start making films?

Ahwesh: I made Super-8 movies before Pittsburgh, at Antioch and elsewhere, but when I landed in Pittsburgh, everything sort of came together. I was very involved; my boyfriend was a filmmaker–all my friends were filmmakers, musicians, photographers. The punk scene was us and various hangers-on. We would document the bands, and the bands would play at the clubs where we showed movies—we were our own on-going entertainment.

In 1980 at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, I did a big group show of local filmmakers. I was hot on the idea of group shows because they got everybody involved.

I did some shows where I’d put people’s names in the calendar and make up titles for films they hadn’t made yet. For one particular show I announced “Wrapped in American Flags” by one person; “Dreams Congo” by another. But often people did make films to go along with these titles. That wasn’t a thing you could sustain, but it was fun as a programming concept. We had a good time with it. It was a kind of cinematic match-making that went hand in hand with the parties and general flirtations among us.

MacDonald: Tell me about your Pittsburgh Trilogy—Verite Opera, Paranormal Intelligence, Nostalgia for Paradise [all 1983].

Ahwesh: It was the summer of 1983, a very hot summer, when I was hanging out with this odd trilogy of people. There was my friend Roger, this very eccentric older guy who lived with his mother, didn’t have a phone. I’d write him a postcard and say, “I’d like to come film with you on Sunday,” and he would call me back from a pay phone.

His chess partner was a Black transvestite, Claudelle, whose boyfriend was in prison. Roger and Claudelle were a dynamic duo. I had gone over to film them playing chess at Claudelle’s house, so the scene of Verite Opera opens with Claudelle in her trashy apartment, cleaning up to get ready for me to be there. Then she puts on her costume, a blue evening gown and a turban, to play chess with Roger, this disheveled-looking, chubby, middle-aged guy. Roger was a member of MENSA, and always involved with these lonely hearts’ clubs, looking for an ideal mate with an IQ that corresponded to his. He would write to the women but never meet them. I shot a lot of footage of Roger’s attempts to find his high-IQ mate, but never made it into a film.

And finally, there was Margie Strosser, a soul-searching, articulate, concerned, naggie, feminist, aggravated-in-the-world person. Spikey red hair and tons of energy. I spent a summer with these three, and we shot a lot of film together. Basically I made three portrait films.

MacDonald: You titled it, I assume, after the Brakhage Pittsburgh Trilogy [The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Eyes, Deus Ex (all 1971)].

Ahwesh: No. [laughter] No! Are his Pittsburgh films actually called The Pittsburgh Trilogy?

MacDonald: They are.

Ahwesh: I’d forgotten that. Hmmm, I might have known that back then.

MacDonald: If you were rebelling against the Masters, it might be a logical choice. Your trilogy is about personal friends; the focus of Brakhage’s trilogy is social institutions.

Ahwesh: Yeah. Whatever. I might have known that and wanted my own Pittsburgh Trilogy. I had seen those films of course, so I probably did know that at the time.

I love those Brakhage films, but I think it was just that I had three films and they were about Pittsburgh.

That was a great summer for me. The films—what are they about? I don’t know—they’re not diary films, and they’re not documentaries, and they’re not narratives. “Portraits” seems inadequate, actually, though that’s the word I usually use.

It’s more like me doing conceptual exercises so that I can figure out what kind of relationship I have with the person, and what kind of relationship the camera has with the person, and how do you shoot positive and negative space and what is it about people that makes them interesting? To me these three people were amazing examples of humanity, and I really liked them all.

Maybe every maker has a film in which they’re trying to work out what they want to convey through filmmaking. In any case, the lessons I learned that summer shooting those films I’ve carried with me ever since.

When I shot The Deadman [1990] in 16mm, people said, “Oh, she knows how to shoot! She knows how to use a camera!” But I felt that I was doing the same thing with The Deadman that I had done in all the Super-8 films, except that people just couldn’t recognize it as style in Super-8. In The Deadman I was just applying all the things I had learned in Super-8 to a different camera. To me, my emotional connection to the action and the sense of three-dimensional space were exactly the same.

MacDonald: Were you a movie-goer as a child or an adolescent?

Ahwesh: I was not a movie-goer. I was horrified by most movies. I thought they had bad gender politics, bad cultural politics, and were a waste of time. I was a hard-core idealist as a youth. My relationship to music was much more profound and organic, which is still the case. Basically, movies came second to music, but I did abhor popular films.

MacDonald: Even early in your life?

Ahwesh: Yes. I only started to be able to watch film in college and only unconventional films. I remember going into Kelly Hall at Antioch to see my first experimental film, Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray [1961], and the week after that, Masculine Feminine [1966, Jean-Luc Godard], but these films I did not understand. I was tortured by them, and found them completely infuriating–but they stuck in my craw. I couldn’t figure them out, but couldn’t forget about them either.

Of course, allowing myself to be turned onto them was a large area of growth for me. I come from a working class background. My parents are small-town, fairly conservative, church-going people who never cared about art.

MacDonald: We’re very similar in this. I sat all sullen in a theater in Greencastle, Indiana, making loud comments about how the audience (for Fellini’s 8 1/2) was a bunch of phonies for pretending that this gibberish made sense. But that stuck too.

Ahwesh: [laughter] Yeah, you decide at some point that you just have to face it. I entered college as a pre-med student interested in genetics, but when I started seeing these films, everything just flipped over for me.

MacDonald: Did you have to struggle with all the art experiences?

Ahwesh: No. I had a particularly hard time with the movies. Hearing Ives was a totally familiar, joyful experience. I was seventeen and had never been exposed to anything experimental, but it was almost like I was waiting for this change. My last years in high school were miserable. I spent all my time by myself or with the other discontents, taking acid—we were all miserable people. We’d go to the football games to sit in the corner and yell at our classmates, “You’re a bunch of jerks!” We’d go because there was nothing else to do.

The summer I was seventeen, I was in the Antioch College library and I listened to Ives’ The Unanswered Question. It changed my life. I understood pastiche from Ives, homage and dissonance, three elements I value in my own work. But my adjustment to the movies came later.

Those years, from sixteen to nineteen, having to figure out how language functions, symbolism, how to be a philosophical person, how to make meaning and communicate it—those things all came together for me with art-making.

MacDonald: When did you go to New York?

Ahwesh: I left Pittsburgh to go to New York in 1982. I had been there the year before, for a one-person show at the Collective for Living Cinema, and I remember thinking, “Oh, I should just move here!” So I went back to Pittsburgh, worked for Romero a little while, then just took off.

MacDonald: No matter how much film I see, every once in awhile, I run flat into a wall again. I think I’ve seen what there is to see, that I know what I like, that I understand what I need to understand; and all of a sudden, along comes stuff I just don’t get. It makes me furious, because all of a sudden I’m stupid again, and at least for awhile, don’t know what to do about it.

Martina’s Playhouse [1989] and The Deadman [1990] are the first two of your films I remember seeing; I saw both long after they came out. Martina made me feel I was on the other side of a generation gap. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be doing with this film, what sort of pleasure I was supposed to take from it.

Ahwesh: That’s sort of cool.

MacDonald: I also feel that my feelings aren’t all that unusual, that lots of people feel the same–even if there are also lots of people, including many I respect, who do get it. I’m still struggling with Martina’s Playhouse. Of course, sometimes things come along and there’s nothing there, so you wait for awhile until it goes away. But this isn’t going away, so I figure it isn’t going away for a reason.
So who should I be to get what you mean to give?

Ahwesh: That’s not a fair question to ask a maker. Most artists don’t make things for a particular audience of people who are going to be “getting it.” The process is not that controlled.
But I can tell you what I did to make Martina’s Playhouse. I was working in complicity with the camera in a space somewhere between the stare of Warhol and the emotional intimacy of home-movies. It’s a terrain where most of my Super-8 movies are enacted. Formally, they’re very slippery movies.

MacDonald: Scary Movie—I think I do get. And if I get Scary Movie, I should get Martina’s Playhouse, right?

Ahwesh: Well, Martina’s Playhouse is much more complex. What you’re saying is that in Martina I’m not playing by the rules of experimental filmmaking you had come to expect. The work is not regulated by the formal devices of modernism–but what better way to address sexuality, girlhood, desire, and mothering than in a provocative home movie?

Formally my work is more like a younger generation’s work. Intellectually, I was formed by the Seventies. I come out of feminism and the anti-art sensibility of punk. I was in a Lacanian study group when I made Martina’s Playhouse. But formally, my structural models are more associative than those of other people who rely on structural modes.

MacDonald: When you told me you’re the same age as Su Friedrich, I was shocked—I think of you as a generation younger than Su.

Ahwesh: Actually, I’m a little older than Su. In Hide and Seek [1996] Su puts young girls in a narrative film where they’re playing with records and reproducing a Sixties girl party. In my movie, the vision machine [1997], I have adult women pretending to be girls, who smash the records and have a big fight and pour beer on the record player. It’s a very similar terrain, except that my imagistic and symbolic relation to experience is inverted. Su and I are friends and we think very similarly, except that my work shades one way and hers shades another.

MacDonald: Yours shades toward Jack Smith; hers, toward Frampton.

Ahwesh: Totally. I make a pastiche of many things. If I had to pick an experimental filmmaker whose philosophical method I borrow, it would be Jack Smith, although he’s one of the most irritating performers and filmmakers I’ve ever known. Just unbelievable. For years I did in Super-8 a lot of the things that he did. I would let people go on for hours and then turn the camera on, and they’d already be on the floor drunk and not able to function: “I thought we were gonna make a movie!” Or I would shoot all this stuff and just use the last roll. Or I’d rearrange the rolls in a way to make what I shot less coherent but more provocative.

Allowing something to erupt out of a nothingness–I love that. And that was already there in those first Pittsburgh films. Nothing was happening in Pittsburgh; we were just hanging around. “What can we do today?” “Let’s put on weird costumes and dance around. Let’s make a movie.” And things would just erupt out of seeming chaos. And films would get shot. Of course, editing was an entirely different part of the brain. As an editor, I was always interested in the things that were happening right in front of me that I didn’t recognize, but that I was involved in on some level.

In my personal relationships; I like people in transition. I’m most comfortable, I think, with people who are going through something—they’re having an ecstatic time, or a bad time, or a lot of things are happening and they’re overflowing with changes. I’m attracted to that.

MacDonald: In the case of Martina’s Playhouse, the incident that most people talk about is Martina “nursing” her mother. Did that just occur as they were playing? How much do you instigate the “eruptions” in your films?

Ahwesh: This is a question I get a lot, because when you make something that seems sort of unauthorized, or is not authoritarian, it’s hard to figure out who’s responsible and how, as a viewer, you should take it. In most movies, the plan of the producers is there, the directorial position of the filmmaker is there. Whereas with experimental film that’s the thing people can’t figure out. But all the material I’ve shot with Martina, and most of what I’ve shot with kids over the years—I’ve never had children–I could never have suggested in a million years. I don’t know that much about the behavior of kids, and I only know about the mother-daughter relationship as the daughter. The things happening in front of the camera were unknown to me, and I filmed them not really knowing precisely what I was filming. And that “nursing” footage sat on my shelf for two years, because I had no idea what to make of it or how to incorporate it.

MacDonald: I expect it’s pretty bizarre even for someone who’s had daughters.

Ahwesh: I’ve gotten a range of responses from people who have children, from “That happens all the time” to “You have destroyed the sacred sanctity of mother-daughter relationships!”

In my Super-8 movies I don’t stage things. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I like not knowing.

MacDonald: How do you know you’re going to be shooting? Do you say you’re coming over to film?

Ahwesh: Yes, I say, “I’m coming over to film.” And I usually do film, though sometimes it doesn’t come out. Also, I have relationships with certain people who turn on when I come over with the camera; or people who call me and say, “I have a story to tell, and I want you to come over with the camera.” I say, “I’ll be over in twenty minutes.” That used to happen a lot.

I guess those days are over for me, because I’m known as a filmmaker now; I’m not just Peggy-with-a-camera. And the people I hang out with are photo-aware. They know I’m going to make something and show it at some uptown museum and that’s a turn-off. It was different when I made a Super-8 film in Pittsburgh and showed the camera original at a party. The people who are attracted to me now are much more performative, and on the whole I’m much less interested.

 

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13 of Peggy Ahwesh’s 21 films
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The Deadman (1987)
‘Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting “the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-from orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor.’ — Jonathan Rosenbaum

 

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Philosophy in the Bedroom (1993)
‘In 1993, Peggy Ahwesh filmed her Super 8mm tribute to Marquis de Sade.’ — BOMB

Watch the first half here.
Watch the second half here.

 

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Strange Weather (1993)
‘Strange Weather is about a moment when the roar of the elements becomes an imperceptible din and all belief is suspended. Jan, a paranoid, upper-class pipedreamer; Centipede, a sexually tepid rockhound; and Patty, strung-out on fantasies of the good life, comprise a stuporous enclave, protecting themselves against elemental moral decay from without. But storm warnings on the tube augur a fearsome change. Shot in Pixelvision, Peggy Ahwesh’s tainted soap opera is by visual definition a small world. Minute details—a smoldering cigarette, the grout between tiles, particles of kitty litter—are rendered large but with anemic resolution as though the characters’ surroundings have prominence but no meaning. In Strange Weather, Florida is anything but a picture postcard.’ — Steve Seid

Watch the film here.

 

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The Scary Movie (1993)
‘The Scary Movie toys with the creaky machinery of horror while simultaneously articulating an understanding of childhood as a joyously ludic domain, one part Romantic innocence, one part grand guignol. As well, it reveals the violence of the genre – violence usually directed against women – to be a play of silly and thoroughly controvertible conventions. While Ahwesh clearly enjoys indulging in the tropes of the horror film, she also is distant enough from it to end her film with her heroines fully alive and unscarred.’ — Senses of Cinema

Watch the film here.

 

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The Color of Love (1994)
‘The pornographic film is narratively framed by a vampiric, necrophile motif that supports the affect of the morose, decadent, and elegiac: there is fake blood, a dagger, and a heavy red curtain. We need only recall Paul Willemen’s association of the “cinephiliac moment” with “overtones of necrophilia, of relating to something that is dead past, but alive in memory.”24 The dead (or sleeping?) man never revives himself and becomes a prop for the sexual activities between two women. The trope of death precedes the film’s death by disintegration, and the dead man functions allegorically, the “dead object” of porn and heterosexual masculinity. Yet he has to be present, stagily symbolic, to mediate the enactment of “lesbian” sex. He is playing dead, and the women are playing lesbians. This is part of the generic, tacit convention of pornography, and one that this pornographic film, typical and atypical at once, is enacting. Significantly, the fragment that Ahwesh has chosen to comprise the film offers no erection—the man’s penis remains flaccid through the film— and no “money shot,” two staples of the generic phallic “coherence” of commercial pornography.’ — Elena Gorfinkel

 

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The Vision Machine (1997)
‘The girls-only party scenes in THE VISION MACHINE have both the ruddy look of overexposed home movies and the richly burnished texture of Renaissance paintings cracking under their veneer. A riff on Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (Ahwesh, with Keith Sanborn’s collaboration, inscribes the lyrics of ‘Wild Thing’ on a warped video version of a roto-relief) and on Bunuel’s Viridiana (here the lowlifes invading the manor are women artists), THE VISION MACHINE is an inspired depiction of girls dressing up and acting out, pleased as punch to have taken over the screen.’ — Amy Taubin, The Village Voice

Watch the film here.

 

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Nocturne (1998)
‘Nocturne was largely shot in grainy black-and-white 16mm, a format that lends the film the look of a zero-budget knock-off of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, with its jagged naked tree branches against white skies and black powerlines stretching across gray, featureless Pennsylvania fields and roadsides. It’s a desolate landscape familiar from American pastoral horror films, but what familiarity we may have is further destabilized by sequences shot with a consumer-grade Pixelvision camera, which suggest that what we’re watching is a home movie, unauthorized and unmoored from any cinematic tradition.’ — Not Coming

Watch the film here.

 

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73 Suspect Words (2000)
’73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person’s obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber’s manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.’ — EAI

Watch the film here.

 

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Heaven’s Gate (2000)
‘With Heaven’s Gate, Ahwesh employs a strategy similar to that used in 73 Suspect Words: against a blank screen, a metronomic procession of single words unfolds, gradually building into a cool, minimal portrait of the apocalyptic paranoia that runs through the American social body. While 73 Suspect Words appropriated text from the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, aka the “Unabomber,” Heaven’s Gate takes up words from the Web site of the cult organization of that name, whose beliefs in extraterrestrial contact led to their 1997 mass suicide.’ — EAI

Watch the film here.

 

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She Puppet (2001)
‘When it comes to experimental narratives, some ideas sound so terrible that it could by no means work, yet upon delivery and full realization it is something magical. This is the case with Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet which is merely a compilation of video footage from Tomb Raider video games spliced together in a non-linear way with voice overs from various feminist literature and poems. Yet simplicity by no means encapsulates what She Puppet becomes, Ahwesh’s work is profoundly reflective on the nature of humanity and the person hood of woman in relation to an existential existence and an indifferent world. It realizes the cinematic possibilities of video games by exploiting the glitches and hidden corners of the game in a way that transcends its initial purpose, without completely detaching the game from its original meaning. Furthermore, Ahwesh revises the entire nature of Tomb Raider by removing most of the sound and music from the film, a notable psychological element to video games. As I have noted many times prior, I adore found footage filmmaking and it is clear that She Puppet is one such film, yet its method of finding footage is uniquely its own and as such serves as a brilliant piece of extremely unconventional filmmaking.’ — Cinemalacrum

Watch the film here.

 

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The Star Eaters (2003)
‘The Star Eaters (2003, 24 minutes) An inconclusive treatise on women and gambling. The allure of risk taking and excessive behavior, play acting and a penchant for failure combine in this fairy-tale set in the abject landscape of decay and abandonment that was once glamorous Atlantic City. A sentimental education at the seashore off-season. Featuring performances by Jackie Smith, Alex Auder, Aaron Diskind and Ricardo Dominguez. Quotations by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and from the book Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss by Frederick and Steven Barthelme.’ — PA

Watch the film here.

 

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The Third Body (2007)
‘An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with appropriated videos of virtual reality demonstrations, among them a human hand shadowed by a computer-generated rendering, medical robots conducting a virtual surgery, and people dressed in bulky headgear navigating virtual spaces. As the title suggests, cyberspace adds to the Genesis legend a third possibility, a virtual existence that challenges natural and social definitions of gender and morality. Ahwesh writes, “The tropes of the garden, the originary moment of self knowledge and gendered awareness of the body (what is traditionally called sin) is mimicked in the early experiments with virtual reality. The metaphors used in our cutting edge future are restagings of our cultural memory of the garden. Wonderment regarding the self in space, boundaries of the body at the edge of consciousness and the inside and outside skin of perceptual knowledge.”‘ — EAI

Watch the film here.

 

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Bethlehem (2009)
‘Interior and exterior spaces are transformed into mystical places in Peggy Ahwesh‘s lyrical meditation of an experimental short film, Bethlehem. While the film is mostly about general states of being, she does manage to tie in two actual Bethlehems: The most famous one in Jerusalem and the other one in mid-east Pennsylvania, which is Ahwesh’s home state. Ahwesh also alternates between inside and outside spaces, as well as between populated locations and people-less ones, giving all the same mythic quality through, obviously, the lyrical score, but also how the mostly non-moving camera soaks in its subjects through obtuse angles and framing. Many shots, particularly of Ahwesh’s human subjects, are from below or in intense close-up, granting them an element of grandeur even though they are occupying fairly mundane spaces. While the film has an epic quality to it, Ahwesh describes it as having a very personal basis.’ — Mike Everleth

Watch the film here.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Very happy to give a second life to this post from a handful-plus years ago starring the films of the singular American filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh. I hope everybody’s lives and Halloweens are proceeding apace. Mine are.

* (Halloween countdown post #9/rerun)

 

How did dark rides get started?

George LaCross: The forerunner to a single-rail dark ride was an “old mill,” a boat ride that went through a tunnel. When the old mills started cropping up around 1900, they were the first type of ride where you’d sit in a vehicle—a boat passing along a narrow channel—and see scenes or figures, called “stunts” in the industry. Some parks wanted these rides to be scary; others wanted them to be a trip through history, or a cruise around the world, that type of thing. These used mannequins—I think they were made out of wax, actually—to show the signing of the Declaration of Independence or Columbus landing on American soil. Some had dark areas for smooching, which is which why they got the nickname, “Tunnels of Love.”

Old-mill rides were very expensive because you had to have a tunnel with some type of a canal system, and then a wooden water wheel continuously spinning to push the water through it. And they were difficult to maintain. You had to constantly look for leaks in the wooden canal and patch them up during the off-season. I can’t even imagine what a nightmare it must’ve been re-boarding that stuff. Now, the ones that are still around have been converted to concrete canals, which are treated with special chemicals so they don’t leak. Back in the day, only the parks that were doing really well could afford to have old mills.

In the late 1920s, Tumbling Dam Amusement Park in Bridgeton, New Jersey, was struggling. The two owners, Leon Cassidy and Marvin Rempfer, desperately wanted to add some type of a dark attraction. And they were considering an old mill, but that was cost-prohibitive for them. Cassidy and Rempfer decided to build something on their own that wouldn’t involve the cost of putting in a wooden tunnel, something that used electricity.

So they took a “dodgem” car, also known as a bumper car—probably right off of their fleet—and modified the bottom of it to fit on a single-rail track. Then they ran this track through an older building that wasn’t being used. After a little tweaking, they got the dodgem to go around curves and so forth. I’m not sure exactly what they put in there, whatever they could come up with at the time, but they ended up with the very first dark ride, which they opened in 1928.

They ran a contest to name it, and the little girl who won called it Firefly, but they decided that might imply a fire danger, because they had electricity running through a wooden building. One of the first patrons came out of the dark ride, which had a lot of curves in it, and said, “Wow, I felt like I was twisted around like a pretzel.” So they changed the name to Pretzel.

And the earliest dark rides only had sound effects?

LaCross: Yes. These rides were all in pitch darkness. Pretzel patented many of the first sound effects, which were actually floor devices. You’d go over a lever on the track, and it would strike a cymbal, creating a sound like glass breaking. When the car would run over another lever, a container holding a bunch of ball bearings would get tipped up, and it’d sound like trash barrels tipping over. They had a string of bells hooked up, and they would just make a big clang when you went over that lever, which sounded like you were derailing.

Some of the earliest visual stunts they had—and some of them are still in operation—were motorless effects, lifted by the weight of the car. The sound effects weren’t necessarily right near these figures; those were usually positioned in the dark so you couldn’t see them. You’d be riding along in the Pretzel car in the dark, you’d hit a relay switch for the light, and then a lever for the figure itself. A small incandescent spotlight just focused on that black box would light up, and the cable would lift, say, a skull out of the bottom of the box.

For example, in the stunt called the “Jersey Devil,” you see what appears to be an empty box, and then the weight of the car forces a papier-mâché demon head to pop up inside it. For “Al E. Gator,” a lever on the track would tip a papier-mâché alligator on roller skates, and he’d lunge out at the riders. Some early stunts had limited gear motors, animating a head or hands going from side to side. Those would just go on, move for a few seconds, and then go back off again.

I read one of the earliest Pretzel stunts was just thread that hit your face.

LaCross: That was really innovative. It seems so simple, but Bill Cassidy—the second owner of Pretzel, the son of Leon—told us before he passed away that that was one of the gimmicks that he was most proud of. It was just a spool of thread. It would hang from a rafter in the ceiling, and it would rub up against people’s faces and creep them out. It’s supposed to be cobwebs, I guess, but it wasn’t an actual web. It was just a string, but you couldn’t see it. You weren’t expecting it. That got a real rise out people back then. It seems to me that just about every dark ride I rode in the 1960s had that. If it didn’t come factory-installed, I’m sure the park owners themselves would tack it up.

How did dark rides evolve over the years?

LaCross: First, they started making magnetic switches that they could put in the track to trigger stunts, and these were less likely to break than the mechanical levers. The most recent triggers used in dark rides are photo sensors called electric eyes. Some are set off by the motion of the car, but some are even more sophisticated, using light from reflectors on the car so the stunts are set off at the exact right time.

For sound effects, Pretzel had the noisemakers, but then some companies started producing 78-speed records that were just recordings of screams. You got a whole stack of them, and when one was done playing, the record player would drop down another one, so that you heard continuous screaming. When the eight-track came out, dark rides switched to one-track cassettes called “sound repeaters.” It would just be a small amount of tape that played the sound of a ghost or whatever that would coincide with the stunt itself and then stop at a particular point. And it would automatically be rewound for the next car that came by. The problem with those cassettes is that, again, if you’re continually playing a tape, stop-and-go, stop-and-go, it breaks. Plus, the atmospheric temperature had to be right. If it got too hot, the playback machinery would go crazy and start playing the sounds at high speed. Since then, those tapes have been replaced with digital cards.

How did the proliferation of television after World War II affect dark rides?

LaCross: I think TV enhanced the popularity of dark rides. The Spook-A-Rama operators in Coney Island, New York, did their own version of some of the old Universal monsters like Frankenstein, the Wolfman, and the Mummy, in addition to what was originally installed. That’s because in the late 1950s Universal gave TV stations permission to start showing some of their monster movies from the 1930s and ’40s. And Bill Tracy’s stuff was often inspired by old movies featuring villains and damsels in distress and the like.

Dark rides would keep up with the times. When the horror film called “The Tingler” came out in 1959, the Coney Island ride operators built a creature like that movie’s monster themselves and advertised it would be inside Spook-A-Rama. Around 1968, when Adam West used to play Batman in the campy TV series, the owner dressed up a male mannequin as Batman, and put him in the ride. Then he put a sign out that said, “See Batman!”

Why don’t we see as many of these old dark rides today?

LaCross: There was one pivotal moment in 1984, when a walk-through dark attraction called Haunted Castle caught fire at the Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, New Jersey, and eight teenagers, who were trapped inside, died. Most parks had perfectly safe funhouses, walk-through scary houses, and single-rail dark rides, but after this fire, park owners grew so afraid of something happening. All kinds of new restrictions were put on these things; from then on, they always had to have sprinkler systems, smoke alarms, and emergency exits.

In the past, many dark rides did end up burning down because they didn’t have sprinkler systems. For the most part, the fire started at another attraction and just happened to sweep into them. Some dark rides did catch fire themselves. There was one situation where one of the ride operators tried to circumvent the fuse by putting a penny into it, and that caused the fire in the control panel and set a big blaze off.

But I don’t think the tragedy was reflective of most operating dark rides and funhouses in the 1980s. Yet a lot of parks did purge their rides shortly after. At this point, that tragedy seems pretty much forgotten. All of the operating dark rides that I know of have sprinkler systems, partially because these rides are so valuable now and they’re such attention-grabbers. Not only do the park owners want to protect their patrons in case a fire breaks out when the ride is operating, but they want to make sure that it’s protected when it’s not in operation, because the vintage ones can’t be replaced.

The older devices have been retrofitted with new insulated wiring and motors, which are pretty much fireproof. That doesn’t take away from the age and charm of the stunt. It does put a little bit of a bogus slant on the ride when you see that emergency exit sign in the darkness. But they have to do it. You never can tell what might happen. If the rides didn’t have those, they wouldn’t be operating. — from Collectors Weekly

 

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Hell n Back (1955 – 1963)
Asbury Park, NJ

‘This ride was located near where the Palace office and bathroom hallway was in the later years, inside the older building. After the Palace expansion of the 1950’s, this ride (in a newer rehash) ran way back, into the newer building to where the Wax Museum was, and right under the Fun House, on a long, straight run, all uphill! The ride’s facade featured some large “Ghosts” as well as the ” Funny, Fat Devil” poking a guy into a fiery death! There was also a rented Old King Cole “Laffing Man” that lead to even more “Ballyhoo” on the outside! It also had giant “Ghost” that waved into the air. There were large, animated “Heads with Fishbowl Eyes” that were made from defunct Donkey Ride parts. Some of the stunts included: A creepy “Witch” that was suspended by a wire, a “Guy and Coffin”, and lastly, a “Giant Octopus”, the last prop, that was to be used in later Dark Rides as well.’

 

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Dante’s Inferno (1983 – 2006)
Coney Island

‘Dante’s Inferno was decorated with a purple Cerberus in each tower, a werewolf out of one window, and skeleton warriors in another, its exterior’s centerpiece was a large devil holding a victim in his hand that is connecting to the tongue of an upside-down, lolling eyed creature, and a pitchfork in the other. The ride’s exterior resembled a castle, and its open area was decorated in graffiti style artwork includes Medusa’s severed head held by a Grim Reaper, as well as a mad scientist and several dragons. The passenger rode in a bumper car-like device and was sent through a maze of dark hallways. Most of the interior imagery was behind glass cases, including a dead woman rising off a table, a shaking mummy case, two gorillas, a werewolf popping out from behind foliage, skeletons, and various other horrors, in particular, scenes of a violent and gruesome nature such as a circular saw dismemberment and a man bound on all four limbs begging for help. Suspense was built by relatively long passages of nothing but darkness, strobes that simulate lightning, and sound effects, such as screaming, though some of these were lined with small, impish wall tiles. Little direct influence of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy was to be found, though this was not always the case. The ride seems to have had no particular theme. Across from the first gorilla was an unlit display showing a man with a crown opening a window, which appears irrelevant to a horror-themed ride. The ride had elements similar to a roller coaster, including hard-whipping turns and, midway through the ride, coming outside and being pulled down a steep slope before being plummeted through another set of doors to more horrors. Early in the ride, one specter was lowered before the tracks, but otherwise there was glass (or in the case of the begging man, mesh) between the rider and the various scares. Unlike either the Ghost Hole or the Spook-a-Rama, the other Coney Island dark rides, nothing came directly at the rider, or threatens to do so. The ride lasted one minute and forty-five seconds. The admission price was $5.00 at the time Astroland closed.’

 

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Earthquake: The Ride (1965 – 1984)
Cedar Point

‘Earthquake, the ride. Earthquake the ride opened in 1965. This ride was a dark ride based off of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It was in operation before moving to Cedar Point at Freedomland U.S.A. The ride was in operation through the 1984 season.’

 

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Land of the Giants (1938 – 1965)
Staten Island

 

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Lumalusion (1979 – 2009)
State Fair of Texas

‘Everything was built in-house except for the 16 dark ride fiberglass car bodies, which were made from a Hush-Puppy car body mold that he acquired. Even the building itself was designed and built in-house. The building’s footprint was smaller than a typical Bill Tracy 2-story dark ride. Tracy’s buildings were approximately 70′ x 80′, where Lumalusion was 55′ x 60′ and included restrooms and shower facilities for the park employees. The smaller building created the need for the ramps to be steeper than in Tracy’s 2-story dark rides. This created an interesting challenge as the typical Hush-Puppy car’s motors were not strong enough to negotiate these steeper inclines. A custom built chassis had to be constructed with a more powerful motor for the drive system of the ride car. Specially built safeties were also installed that shut all of the cars down if any two of them got too close together. The interior was filled with optical and light based illusions. The facade was built completely on a level section of ground. Once finished, a crane lifted it into place on the completed building. After working almost 100 hours per week from January through June of 1979, Lumalusion officially opened on July 4, 1979. The ride has been a favorite at the State Fair of Texas and has remained almost completely unchanged since it opened more than 30 years ago. Lumalusion is a familiar “face”, but is also a unique, durable, and well-built ride in its own right that deserves its own place in dark ride history. This ride is a lasting tribute to the influence that Bill Tracy had on the dark ride industry and is expected to entertain guests at Fair Park for years to come.’

 

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The Witches Forest (1930 – ?)
Hunt’s Pier, NJ

‘Very little is known about this dark attraction. The photo of the ride was taken for Hunt’s Ocean Pier’s 1938 brochure.’

 

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Golden Nugget Mine Ride (1957 – 1985)
Hunt’s Pier, NJ

‘Designed by John Allen and constructed by Hunt’s Pier staff, the Golden Nugget was a custom built enclosed coaster and Hunt’s premier ride for the 1960 season. A runaway mine car will whisk you through a western frontier complete with cowboys and Indians. Once up the lift hill, you would be taken on a short jaunt atop the structure where you could view an old prospector panning for gold… a covered wagon and the boot hill graveyard just before being dropped down the bottomless shaft! As you fly through the interior you would encounter miners and skeletons…giant bats and buzzards…even the classic near head-on collision with another mine car. Additional visual effects included toppling barrels, collapsing mineshafts, trick waterfall, and a roll through a spinning barrel of golden nuggets.’

 

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Dinosaur Den (1963 – 1969)
Holyoke, Massachusetts

‘As far as my memory can recall, the circuit began with the car curving to the right and slamming through a set of heavy wood doors. The car immediately turned to the left and after a few yards slammed through a set of heavy wood doors. The car immediately turned left and after a few yards slammed through another set of doors with a tiger painted on them. The car would then turn sharply right 90 degrees and begin heading uphill. The first stunt was on the right. The car swung again to the right, about 90 degrees, passing an emergency exit and continuing uphill. Another stunt was on the left. Another right turn, about 90 degrees, was met with the next prop on the right. The car would then turn 180 degrees to the left. Another stunt would be on the right. Then after turning 180 degrees to the right and passing a stunt to the left, the car leveled off. It would slam through a set of doors, then another set, travel out onto the overhang, pass by a stunt of a cave type person at the center of the overhang, swing around to the left 180 degrees past a Tiger stunt and then slam back through another set of doors. After passing through yet another set of doors, the car began its decent. It passed by a stunt on the left, turned to the right about 180 degrees, passed a stunt on the left and then swung around 180 degrees to the left. Another stunt was on the right, as was an emergency exit down a set of stairs. The car would turn 90 degrees left and pass by an enormous stunt on the right. It was about 20 feet long and dropped down through the floor. Then the car swung 180 degrees to the left, passed by a stunt on the left and leveled off. A 90-degree right turn revealed a stunt on the right. The car was then traveling at the far right end of the building. Then another 90-degree turn to the right was met with another set of doors. After passing through them, the car was traveling in a sort of tunnel. Looking to the left, you could see the station and the midway. looking to the right, you’d see an animated stunt. Originally, it was a caveman dunking a cavewomen into a big pot. The last operational stunt was a Frankenstein, which bobbed up and down behind a stone wall. After passing that prop, the car collided with another set of doors, turned left 180 degrees, went through more doors and back across the tunnel area, only this time a little closer to the station. More doors were hit! The car took a sharp turn to the right into the final set of doors and then back into the station.’

 

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The Scary House (1961 – 2004)
Balboa Beach, CA

 

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The Ghost Hole (1989 – 1999)
Ocean City, Maryland

‘The Ghost Hole, a portable darkride that was a staple at Trimper Rides & Amusements for many years, offered a two-minute ride full of popup-style stunts and graffiti-style artwork destined to make any summer visitors turn their heads. Ghost Hole, formerly named “Geister Hohle”, was a German darkride that sat on Trimper’s side street beside the Matterhorn for nearly a decade. The stunts were quite primitive in nature when Ghost Hole sat on Trimper property, and consisted mainly of popup stunts using transistorized sirens and loud buzzers to scare the unsuspecting patrons during their two-minute adventure. Even though the ride was portable, the Trimpers still made the ride a pleasant one, filling the gaps with worthwhile stunts while making a constant effort to purchase new props every few years to keep the content fresh. The maintenance door that was entered when opening or closing the attraction was located on the front-center of the ride and was locked from the outside. The main entrance and exit of the ride, although clearly accessible to anyone walking by off-hours, was locked from the inside using deadbolts and steel bars.’

Outside

Inside

 

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Laff In the Dark (1934 – 1992)
Rye, New York

‘In 1934, Harry Traver advertised Laff at a cost of around $18,000.00 which included a building, 12 cars, stunts made of plywood, steel track, and a front and building that measured 93 feet wide, 40 feet high and 60 feet deep The earliest known façade at Playland’s Laff in the Dark hosted animated elephant and alligator heads as well as a few plywood clowns. Inside the ride lurked the Traver/Chamber two-dimensional plywood stunts common in all the Laffs they created. The Trahanas family purchased the ride in 1963. Nick Trahanas’s father was no stranger to the amusement park business, having operated a candy confection business in Asbury Park, NJ. Shortly after the elder Mr. Trahanas purchased Rye’s Laff in the Dark, the stunt sequence was as follows: An original plywood Popeye, then the Man in a Coffin. Then a classic Spider and Web. Towards the back wall was a stunt that is remembered fondly by enthusiasts, the Running Rats Along a Beam stunt! The ride had a turn inward that led to an old African Native Man with Spear scene. Next up, was yet another fondly remembered prop, the ClassicTraver/ Chambers Fighting Cats. The Devil was next, followed by a Coffin That Rocked Open. A Man in Jail scene followed, and then came an old Dragon’s Head. Towards the front right-hand turn was a Skeleton that flew out at you. Next were a Gorilla and then a Witch, with outstretched hands. Onward you would go through the Spinning Barrel. Frankenstein, a figure built by Mr. Trahanas’s father, was at the end of the barrel. Around the turn inward was yet another sadly-missed Traver/Chambers classic: The Kicking Mule stunt, constructed of sheet metal and wood. All the old stunts were enhanced with the sounds of classic sirens, buzzers and bells. The ride cars were originally single- seaters, but were later converted by the Trahanas family to two-seaters.’

 

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House of Shock (1992 – 2014)
New Orleans

‘House of Shock had thrilled visitors for 22 years when co-founder Ross Karpelman announced that 2014 would be the last season for the institution. Despite the popularity of the devilish fall destination, profit margins were always pretty slim, Karpelman explained. Too slim when the weather was unkind to the partially outdoor amusement. In 2012, Hurricane Isaac wrecked the two-story outdoor stage where the House of Shock’s explosive pre-tour performances take place, requiring a laborious restoration. Then, Halloween night 2013 was a rain-out.’

Pre-show

Test ride with the lights on

 

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Hells Poppin (1958 – 1962)
Muskogee, OK

 

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Haunted Hotel (1978 – 2006)
Myrtle Beach, FL

‘The Haunted Hotel was the best dark ride in the entire region, and the only haunted house ride– all other haunted houses are walk-throughs. This ride was destroyed along with other fixed structures in the park during Feb.-March 2007, after operating for the last time on the Sept. 30, 2006 “Last Ride” event. Burroughs & Chapin was unable to sell this ride, so the fate of the props, and effects is not known. During its last season of operation, it had many maintenance problems- when I rode it in August, and at the Last Ride, many of the effects weren’t working, different ones each time. The Haunted Hotel was originally the “Haunted Inn”, built in 1978 by Funni-Frite of Pickerington (Columbus), OH, which made props for many haunted houses across the country. Funni-Frite started in the early 1960s as a contractor to Philadelphia Toboggan Company, to produce gags and effects for their funhouses. They also built portable rides for carnivals, constructing almost 500 before they closed in 1999. Funni-Frite is no longer in business; the company and its assets were sold at auction on January 15, 2000.’

 

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Flight to Mars (1968 – 1994)
Texas State Fair

‘If you were a kid around here between the late 1960s and mid-1990s, those three words conjure a very specific image. It’s not a rocket, but a face, an alien with a fedora, eye patch and missing teeth, its bottom jaw rising and lowering, silently laughing at those foolish enough to come near. The gargoyle hung from the facade of the Flight to Mars ride, a creaky, campy fright show that became a rite of passage for a generation. By the time you finally mustered the courage to buy a ticket, you probably were too old to be scared. More than a decade ago, Flight to Mars was sold and dismantled.’ While the ride is gone, the phrase lives on. A local arts group adopted the name Flight to Mars, and for his solo band, so did Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready.’

 

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The Spook (1960 – 1967)
Coney Island

‘The rider was pulled around in a car resembling an old wooden barrel. These barrels looked like connected cars, but separate from each other at the beginning of the ride, so the rider had to go in alone, passing paintings that change imagery, and a skeleton before the car itself forces the doors open. Inside, the ride was one large, poorly lit room. Some of the old views included zombies, the face of an ogre composed of light bulbs, a demon slashing an axe toward the rider, a man in a straitjacket being electrically shocked, heads popping out of barrels, and a gruesome man being killed in an electric chair. On the way out of the ride, stringy objects hang from the ceiling that provided an extra fright. The ride ran over ten minutes and was billed as the longest ride on Coney Island, and the longest spook ride in the world.’

 

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The Haunted House (1962 – 1988)
Ocean City, Maryland

‘Your coffin crashes through two sets of double-doors, bringing you face-to-face with a giant rat perched on a tree stump. As you approach, he leaps at you, squeaking with the help of a self-contained transistorized siren. To your left is the first of many banisters; this one lined with gyrating skulls bearing spider legs. Entering another set of double doors, you’re headed down one of Tracy’s famous crooked chambers. Tracy’s use of off-center framing and a deceptive illustration at the chamber’s end gives you the forced perspective of infinity. Adding further credibility to the gimmick, an unseen ramp tips your car to the side as the digital sound bite of creaking timbers plays on. Next, you’re sucked into a vortex – actually a bridge running straight through a rotating barrel lined with day-glo patterns. No ramps needed here. Apparently the vortex also has impacted one of the house’s rooms, as a quick turn to right reveals a woman awakening to find her whole bedroom turned upside down. All the room’s furnishings are mounted to the ceiling, including an end table with a lamp. It’s that lamp that clicks on to illuminate the bedroom and the terrified woman. Leaving the bedroom, your car makes a short descent to the right, passing one of Tracy’s most bizarre stunts: Two disfigured clowns leaning over a birthday cake with a severed head in the icing. Next on the left is arguably Tracy’s most famous, yet controversial stunt, the Saw Mill where a female victim strapped to a conveyor belt is sliced in half by a table saw. Heard are the spinning of the saw and the final scream of the victim as she reaches the jagged blade. If you look back you’ll see the table tip backwards, returning the victim to her point of origin. It’s also interesting to note here that the sound for this stunt, like many others, was furnished by Tracy on a sound cartridge repeater in 1962. Next up, literally, is Tracy’s famous Swamp Ghost, which floats overhead. Below are plywood cutout gravestones on hinges, strategically placed in the path of your car so you knock them to the side. A plunge through double doors brings you into a room of neatly stacked barrels. Or are they? Just before you exit the room, a stack collapses, barely missing you as you escape into Tracy’s Wave Room: A ride over extended bump ramps with day-glo painted “waves” on either side. Those afflicted by seasickness best close their eyes here. Leaving the high seas, you’re confronted by a vampire woman as well as the apparent owner of the house, Frankenstein’s Monster. He rises from his chair, warning you to “Get out of my house!” Neither are Tracy stunts but both provide an excellent transition. You take the monster’s advice as your car exits to the daylight of the second-story balcony.’

 

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Le Moulin de le Sorcerier (1969 – 2005)
Montreal

 

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Mystery Ride (1960 – 1963)
Holyoke, Massachusetts

‘In 1960, renovations began on Laff in the Dark. An upper level was created. Six new cars were purchased. The transmissions of the new cars were modified to allow a swift and sure climb to the top. Each car had a differential gear in the rear axle and a lot of torque. They came with what appeared to be a colorful primitive ritual mask molded into their front in fiberglass. The ride was themed as an African jungle and called Mystery Ride.The letters on the building were placed on motorized shafts and rocked back and forth. Below the letters was the upper level, which featured a brief U-turn over the loading station. On each side of that were two odd figures with large ears and noses and gum-stick bodies that rocked back and forth. Below that was the station. On the walls next to the entrance and the exit doors were six brightly-painted masks, all different and sporting hideous grins.The masks also rocked back and forth. The clash of colors, the stylized paintings of jungle foliage and animals, the constant movement all over the building – it was a tour-de-force for Spadola and a feast for the eyes. For the interior, Spadola created a wide variety of three-dimensional fantastical scenes, from Hell.’

 

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The Tornado (1960 – 2003)
Lake George, New York

‘The Tornado tells a story. Upon entering, you’re in the tranquillity of farm country, then it gets darker and you hear the swirling winds of an approaching tornado. To your left is a farm family nervously looking ahead to the menacing twister that’s spinning in the foreground. None of these sets are behind chicken wire and the car brings you close enough to study them in detail. Next, you’re headed for the “eye” of the tornado – a rotating disk painted in day glow colors. But before you drive into ground zero, your car weaves down a country road towards some angry-faced trees. It’s here that hidden fans provide the feel of strong winds and the sound effects are much louder. Next, you approach a stack of moonshine that looks like it’s ready to collapse on you. My guess is that it did at one time. Then, you’re driving towards a farmhouse where you see an elderly lady holding on for dear life to a fragment of her porch and a terrified husband and wife whose bedroom is being swept up by the tornado. To your left is a twirling outhouse, and if you look closely, you’ll see someone inside it. Overhead is a still, life-sized cow and some chickens, all suspended by wires. You then find yourself in a chicken coup, but the chickens are motionless. Finally, you witness the aftermath of the storm: shattered debris along the roadside. And just before you exit, there’s a horse in a stable. The horse’s jaw has hinges, indicative that it used to speak – perhaps a conclusive statement. But it’s silent now, giving you a somewhat anti-climatic ride ending.’

 

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Phantasmagoria (1972 – 2006)
Tulsa, Oklahoma

‘While many of today’s haunted house rides are geared towards younger patrons, Phantasmagoria is geared towards teenaged riders and adults accustomed to hardcore horror films with its lack of restraint concerning gore. In one portion of the ride there was once a naked woman to tantalize the male riders. However, when the bare bottomed vixen spun around, she revealed that the front half of her body had been skinned down to muscle and bone. The ride is dark, but not without novelties. A waterfall pouring over the track appears to threaten riders with being drenched, but shuts off as the car passes underneath. In one pitch black room, the riders are teased by apparent nothingness, but are startled when a bullhorn blares and headlights reveal the front end of an actual bus, driven by a rotting corpse.’

 

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Boot Hill (1964 – 1977)
West View Park, PA

‘Rare view of defunct Bill Tracey designed walk through, “Boot Hill” of the vanished “West View” amusement Park, P.A. Check out the “Steer Head” and Horns atop, a common prop of Tracey’s.’

 

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Maelstrom (1988 – 2014)
Orlando

‘Maelstrom was a dark ride attraction located in the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. Designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, the ride opened on July 5, 1988, in the Norway Pavilion of the park’s World Showcase section. Riders departed from a dock traveling by boat, which turned a corner into a dark tunnel and up the flume’s lift hill. A voice tells riders that those who seek the spirit of Norway face peril and adventure, but more often find beauty and charm. Arriving at the top of the hill, a lit face of the Germanic god Odin hovered above. Riders passed through scenes of seafarers and maritime villages depicting a mythological version of Norway’s Viking days. Entering a marsh, the boat would come face to face with audio-animatronic depictions of Dökkálfar and Ljósálfar from Norse mythology. The trolls, angered by the trespassing boat, cast a spell onto riders as the vehicle began to move backward rapidly, accelerated by hidden conveyor belts underneath the water’s surface. The boats floated briskly past scenes of polar bears and living trees, before coming to a stop on the edge of another waterfall, exposing the Norway pavilion’s main thoroughfare. The backwards edge of the boat peeked out through the facade as the track pivoted to let the vehicle travel forward again. Correctly oriented, the boats plunged forward down a 28-foot (8.5 m) flume into a stormy depiction of the North Sea. After passing very close to an oil rig, the ride came to an abrupt end in a calm harbor of a small village, where the narrator announced, “Norway’s spirit has always been, and will always be adventure.” As guests exited the ride, they had the option of watching a 5-minute tourism film, “The Spirit of Norway”, which highlighted various attractions in Norway including skiing, hiking, and Kjerag mountain.’

 

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Castle of Terror (1963 – 1978)
Rocky Point, Rhode Island

‘The architectural lines are somewhat distorted, as if the castle had gone through a meltdown. Patrons were left wondering “Was it due perhaps, to whatever was contained inside this Castle of Terror? Had some sinister presence, lurking within, caused the divergence?” This only added to the allure, as all the creepy adornments on this façade gave the riders plenty to consider while waiting in line. A stairway to nowhere ascended from the second floor balcony and was lost behind the dimly lit spires that rose over one of the two “pop-outs” over the midway. Years later, while taking a final tour of this dark ride with the lights on, it was plain to see that this ride was more than just your everyday plywood and papier-mâché creation. Cement and plaster coated metal construction netting was used to form the various turrets and passages – no painted plywood bally for this castle. This allowed the building designers to segue from the rigid, blocked structure you see at first glance to the creepy, cave-like openings that seemed to swallow the unsuspecting into the castle’s darkest recesses. When you added it all up, it was something out of your wildest dreams – or nightmares. All the excess on the exterior couldn’t be worth a 5-cent ride ticket if the Castle of Terror was anything less than – terrifying! Fear not, because the minute your little electric car takes that first jolt into darkness, the sensory overload begins. And those ride cars were works of art unto themselves. Each of the ten or so vehicles sported their own smaller artist’s rendering of the castle’s interior scenes, carefully painted with close attention to detail. For instance, the white car featured the graveyard scene in detail on its back; the red car depicted the Mad Scientist in his laboratory. Of course, the Giant Bat, Count Dracula, and the Spider were all given their own renderings on these multi-colored vehicles. While some dark rides may have themed their cars to the occasion, with a Mardi Gras motif or a padded coffin on wheels, these cars were true originals unique to this attraction. Once inside your vehicle, you found all the key features of a classic dark ride here; quick ninety-degree turns, plenty of wooden “crash” doors, black lights and day-glo paint galore. After barreling through the first series of plywood doors and an angry encounter with Dracula slamming his coffin door, you are yanked up the first chain-lift hill in the Castle’s center room. Though there may have been double-decker dark rides before the Castle of Terror, no other dark ride consisted of two chain-lift hills to take riders both up and down multiple levels. Also located in the castle’s center room is a detailed mural of a sinister hilltop castle, surrounded by scores of bats and other assorted winged creatures.’

 

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Ghost Ship (1966 – 1969)
Pittsburgh

‘The facade for the roof for the ride featured a giant wrecked sailing ship washed ashore upon the rocks. A hideous skeleton of some large crab monster with a huge human skull for a head sat over the signage for the ride while its ugly face rocked back and forth. Underneath, the whole front of the dance hall building was transformed into a nightmarish underwater graveyard for lost ships. Passengers boarded their two person ship-shaped vehicles on the left side of the platform.Just to the right of the boarding area, a raised sloping platform sat in the middle of the loading/unloading area. Two cave like openings, the left side slightly higher than the right, flanked each side of the sloping platform. From time to time, a large wheeled dinghy would appear out of the left cave and roll down the platform and enter the right cave. Riding within the battered boat would be a hideous skeleton-like figure resembling the Grim Reaper giving waiting passengers and passersby alike a hint of what was in store for adventurous riders. After boarding their vehicle, passengers waited for the ride operator to dispatch them into the Ghost Ship’s winding dark labyrinth. Ghost ShipYou knew it was your turn when a loud buzzer sounded off in conjunction with the operator’s signal light above the tunnel entrance. As the car jerked forward, it moved rather rapidly for a dark ride vehicle and had a strange chain driven motor sound to it. The car made a quick right turn throwing passengers together to enter the tunnel. Once inside, the cars went up a slight inclined ramp and “bashed” through two sets of black doors to enter the building. After your eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, you noticed that you were in a long mine shaft with eerily glowing green supports. The mine shaft appeared to go on forever as your car sped rapidly down the long corridor. Then suddenly, the car made an abrupt right turn and crashed through the mine wall (another set of double doors). Now, you were in the first of two revolving barrel rooms. The motion of the barrel around the track was quite dizzying and convincing.Immediately at the end of the barrel was the first animated scene, an old, evil looking fisherman or pirate sitting at a long banquet table about to eat some rather unappetizing looking food. What was unusual about this scene was that the whole scene rocked back and forth like Kennywood’s famed Noah’s Ark attraction. The lights within the banquet scene suddenly went out with a large banging noise as the car made a quick left turn into the captain’s quarters of a ship. In earlier years, only large crates and a treasure chest opening and closing were located here. In later years, a large animated polar bear was located here as if ready to pounce on passersby (anything can happen in a traditional amusement park dark ride it seems!). Ghost ShipWithin this room, the cars made a quick right handed U-turn and then sped down a series of dark winding passageways. Another left handed U-turn, and a hideous lobster man appeared from no where.A quick right handed U-turn, and there was an outhouse with a skeleton sitting inside. He pulled the door closed as the lights went out again and the car followed another long dark hallway. At the end of the hallway, a hideous ghoul appeared to be floating towards the car straight towards you, but an abrupt right turn brought the car out of harm’s way. Again, the car crashes through a set of doors, and up over the door frame of the next set of doors was a skeleton with a paint brush and pail. The whole platform that he was sitting on suddenly rolled over as you passed underneath and the paint can’s contents of fluorescent red paint appeared to be spilling out right on top of you! (Actually, it was just a red painted piece of canvas attached within the can that fell out to make it appear that the paint can was spilling.) Through the next set of doors, the cars found their way into a red, horizontally striped room. The red stripes on the walls, however, were on conveyor belts moving slowly downward which created the illusion that your car was rising in elevation. Another well done illusion by the ride’s designers. Another left handed U-turn placed the car into the second spinning barrel room, offering more dizzying illusions just after the moving wall room. Ghost ShipAt the end of the barrel, the next scene was aboard the deck of a ship at sea. A poor, unfortunate pirate was haplessly lashed to the ship’s wheel, spinning in the same direction as the spinning barrel you were in which helped amplify the spinning illusion. As you approached the pirate when you exited the barrel, another right handed U-turn occurred and you were approaching what appeared to be the tentacles of a giant octopus underwater.As you came closer, the creature’s monstrously deformed head appeared with a strange noise, and then the car whisked away in a quick left turn into an underwater graveyard room. Skeletons of dead fish hung from the ceiling and were painted on the room’s walls while bubbling sounds echoed around you. A treasure chest sat on the sea floor where it was being guarded by some sea creature in the far corner of the room. The car made a left turn along the edge of the room as you entered the strobe lit mirror maze. This short, curved mirrored hallway ended very abruptly. At the end of the hallway, two skeletons in a row boat were rocking back and forth among the rocks. Another abrupt right turn, and you were face to face with a large dragon which blew its hot breath at you. Ghost ShipFinally, another right turn and the car was headed down another hallway, this time with cracks of light ahead. You could make out what appeared to be the final doors and the exit to the ride. But separating you from the doors was a huge wall of water pouring down from the ceiling. Just when you thought that you would end up soaking wet before you got off the ride, the waterfall magically stopped, and only a few drops of water landed upon you as you crashed through the final set of doors and back onto Kennywood’s midway.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Here’s a Halloween timed oldie for you concerning two of my favorite topics — the Dark Ride and the Defunct. Enjoy, I hope.