Smh. This is why we can't have nice things.
I wish there was something we could do to show our appreciation and support them.
I wish there was something we could do to show our appreciation and support them.
Howl-O-Scream 2019
- Thread starter Gavin
- Start date
Act like you feared for your life the next time they scare you. I can’t tell you how much it means to them when they know they absolutely got someone. That’s what makes their night and the job fun.
I'm sure scare actors get inadvertently hurt also. I haven't injured anyone but first year of Frostbite I was feeling my way around in a particularly dark area and turned right toward a scare cubby when I should have turned left. I had my hand extended to feel my way and stuck it right into a scare actor's mouth, probably as he/she was getting ready to yell frighteningly, or maybe just direct me. If course I was mortified, and definitely more for them than me.
Yes! Definitely have been doing this. I'm so glad to hear it makes a difference to them.
Yeah, we do love what we do which is why some of us return each year, but it is hard to talk the new crowd into staying for the next year, hell even the whole event! There is no changing that though, people will be people.
The park security do what they can with what they have, and the police we have on staff do take action when needed. Security can only react to what the situation is, they can't really prevent anything. We have a police presence in the park which can deter some of the guests from doing stuff to the actors, but really nothing stops an anger fueled, been waiting in a line since noon, drunken guest from whacking us in the face just because they can. (basically it is what it is, and we just have to literally roll with the punches)
I know they budget big projects into the year and that cannot/shouldn't be to blame when it comes to new product, but again I say to that, sometimes the park doesn't really need anything big or new to bring in the people. Yeah it's cool and all, but imo we don't need big and new every year, just good and polished. (to which we can still not pull that off... but we do try!)
To the argument that we as actors need time in the mazes/area's, repeating it makes it even more familiar and gives us a bit of breathing room for the newbies to come in and learn from people who were there last year. And we have plenty of time to familiarize ourselves with the area/maze before the product is launched. We do rehearse, however it is a short time and some new people need at least a weekend or two to get used to the pace and used to the atmosphere with guests.
I can't make up any excuses for lazy behavior at the start of the day (aside from those of us who work full time, go to school full time, and then come to the park for part time work at night all in the same day), but for the most part in the middle of the night we do tend to get beat so I do apologize if you catch us just "grunt" at you. The previous post is correct, we do not get breaks aside from the 30 lunch, and a lot of us get that break right at the start of the day. So lets say we start at 6, well some lunches start as early as 645 or 7 so you break and are back before 8pm and have until midnight to scream at people. That takes A LOT out of anyone. I mean yes, don't live in the theater of excuses, but tack on the fact of getting bullied almost that entire time too, anyone would want to just sit and grunt for a hot second to compose themselves. Veterans of the event try to work with people who do just sit and grunt the entire night, but most of the time each of us are left alone to our own devices, so no one has an eye on them the entire night so it's tough to keep track of. And, to be frank, to fill up those spaces with bodies, you tend to have to take on those kinds of actors who are going to just fill the space and barely react. At least there is a body there???
We hire all throughout the event to try and fill in what we need/can, but when it comes down to it you can't -make- anyone WANT to do this job. It is a nightmare that you barely get paid to do for people who continue to be ungrateful. The park can only provide so many incentives to get people to sign up, but if it is a "lack of anyone in the area" problem, you have to look towards the guests, not the park. BG is awesome at taking care of us when we need, but there is only so much.
Respectfully, I’m not sure if I totally buy that. In my experience, KD tends to have significantly fewer “grunt” actors than BGW. Surely there has to be a factor contributing to these low-effort scares other than laziness/fatigue alone? Do the two parks train their scare actors differently?
If you paid 15/hour for a weekend job you could probably find more employees. Need the cash for that? Upcharge
I'm with Joe on this.
I understand actor fatigue, but at the same time, this is more than a couple of grunts here and there. This is more entire houses where nobody is attempting to hide or reset, and they're grunting.
This is entire houses where nobody is making an effort to do much besides be visible. I should not have to pretend to be scared in a house just so somebody makes a low level effort of trying to scare me. (Which happens every single year at this point. I have to pretend to be scare of a house just to get a /grunt/ from these people. I should not have to put more effort in my acting than them.)
Again if it was a couple of times in houses, I'd just chalk it up to actor fatigue. All houses have good and bad days. However when it's park wide, and it seems to be every weekend. That's not actor fatigue. It's not being trained properly or laziness.
I understand actor fatigue, but at the same time, this is more than a couple of grunts here and there. This is more entire houses where nobody is attempting to hide or reset, and they're grunting.
This is entire houses where nobody is making an effort to do much besides be visible. I should not have to pretend to be scared in a house just so somebody makes a low level effort of trying to scare me. (Which happens every single year at this point. I have to pretend to be scare of a house just to get a /grunt/ from these people. I should not have to put more effort in my acting than them.)
Again if it was a couple of times in houses, I'd just chalk it up to actor fatigue. All houses have good and bad days. However when it's park wide, and it seems to be every weekend. That's not actor fatigue. It's not being trained properly or laziness.
I also saw lots of bats hanging in Rhinefeld for Vampire Point in addition to the usual window boards.
Not really, and there isn't much training to be had? Like it isn't a 5 week course on how to approach, be loud and escape. It is a simple job and some people can do it effectively and some can't. The people who show up can be lead in the right direction but if there is also no consequences of doing poorly then why do well?(Especially when every other guest throws a drink on you, or catcalls you, or sexually assaults you, literally sits next to you and makes fun of you for 30 minutes, or just straight up knuckles you in the face.) Not saying BG would necessarily avoid firing someone in the case of keeping the body, but when so many complaints are "where are all the actors," you have to pick your poison. Either you hire them all and hope they do well/try to train, or hand pick the goodies and have an empty park. Like I said, you can't -make- people sign up for this, further you can't make anyone good at it.
Not to like, sound dickish... but I highly doubt that an -Entire- house/area is full of lazy people. Try to take into consideration who is walking through with you, behind you, in front of you. Are there a lot of teenagers ruining it for the actors right before you get there? Are there angry parents rambling on how their kids shouldn't be scared? Is there an old couple walking through? We as the actors also take all of that into consideration. We have had scares with older people going in and needing the escort out for health reasons, and parents can KILL and ENTIRE maze blasting each actor that tries to get them because their kid is crying. On top of that, break times means less people so I could see that being an only time the whole area is dead/grunts, since the good ones are on break and the lazy ones are stuck in the area with no one to help them. I mean, I'm not trying to say you are completely wrong and there is no way a house or zone could be that dead, but really if the majority is then there is probably something you aren't seeing going on. But I am truly sorry if that ruins/has ruined the experience for anyone. All we can do is take constructive criticism and work with it, pobody's nerfect.
IMHO if this was a separate ticket event, we could possibly pull that off. No offense to the pass holders, but those are tickets that could be sold, and that is money that could (theoretically I guess) go directly to the event next year. I've been on the side of separating HOS and including CT for passholders since day one. That way it cuts down on kids/children, gets others to be able to experience the park since we hit capacity (or close to it) a LOT, and it could give us time to shut down for a bit in Sept and be able to transform the park fully and in good timing and have ample time to rehearse and get ready. That is a big one, the way they get the decor up is with giant machines/tractors that can only be in operation once the park is closed, and usually that is late at night when no one can see or safely operate some of the machines. I also believe as a whole, the park has too much product throughout the year and do not hold good times to switch over from each event thus making us all behind the entire event. Beerfest is RIGHT before HOS and there is so much that goes down behind the scenes to swap product, so really if we maybe took a break from so much going on Summer wise, it would free up some time to decorate.
So a few points:
1: I don't think BGW will ever go to a separate ticket for HOS. It is too financially lucrative this way. BGW makes so much money from food and merchandise. They would lose that money by charging for the event. Attendance would go down. BGT was able to get away with doing this because it was already a standard practice by Disney and Universal to charge for these events. If BGW began charging it would just push are to KD for Haunt.
2. Yes a lot of the work happens at nigh when the park is closed but spoiler alert that happens already. The park does that for Food and Wine, Summer Nights, Bier Fest, HOS and CT. Cutting down on events during the summer won't help with this as much as you think. All of the mazes are located in areas where the park could work on then year round. They could easily have equipment in the all year. The problem with most of these is they don't spend the time maintaing then throughout the year. Instead they let them sit for 10 months and then fix and repair them right before the event starts. The only exception is Pompeii. They wouldn't be able to have heavy equipment during operating hours.
3. Part of the reason that HOS is so much work is because the park is also spending considerable time placing some CT decorations down first.
4. Even before Summer nights and Bier Fest Entertainment was unable to have HOS set up in time. It seems the issue isn't with the events but with entertainments process when it comes to setting them up. When I worked there they were notorious for procrastinating everything until right before an event and then rushing to finish. I'd be surprised if that has changed.
1: I don't think BGW will ever go to a separate ticket for HOS. It is too financially lucrative this way. BGW makes so much money from food and merchandise. They would lose that money by charging for the event. Attendance would go down. BGT was able to get away with doing this because it was already a standard practice by Disney and Universal to charge for these events. If BGW began charging it would just push are to KD for Haunt.
2. Yes a lot of the work happens at nigh when the park is closed but spoiler alert that happens already. The park does that for Food and Wine, Summer Nights, Bier Fest, HOS and CT. Cutting down on events during the summer won't help with this as much as you think. All of the mazes are located in areas where the park could work on then year round. They could easily have equipment in the all year. The problem with most of these is they don't spend the time maintaing then throughout the year. Instead they let them sit for 10 months and then fix and repair them right before the event starts. The only exception is Pompeii. They wouldn't be able to have heavy equipment during operating hours.
3. Part of the reason that HOS is so much work is because the park is also spending considerable time placing some CT decorations down first.
4. Even before Summer nights and Bier Fest Entertainment was unable to have HOS set up in time. It seems the issue isn't with the events but with entertainments process when it comes to setting them up. When I worked there they were notorious for procrastinating everything until right before an event and then rushing to finish. I'd be surprised if that has changed.
That right there is also a big thing. There's no incentive at BGW to even remotely try harder. And that's on the park. From my understanding Cedar Fair parks have a small reward system in place to help encourage your actors to actually do something. Like any job out there, there has to be an incentive (Besides money) to put forth more effort, and it has to be more than a pat on the back. Your normal pay rate isn't enough, that pay rate is for the average amount of work. If you're going above and beyond there has to be a reason to try other than you just having to work harder because that's just who you are as a person.
But that being said,
No not everyone in a house or scarezone is bad at their jobs. The problem is, is those people aren't capable of pulling the entire weight of the rest of the house/scarezone. And they shouldn't have to be. And honestly in the case of scarezones, its more of a lack of anywhere for them to go. No props on the ground to use. I've had a good few run ins with actors in the scarezones, but usually its all character acting than scares.
However, I've been to this event more times than I can count and there is an extremely noticeable trend where basically every single house or scarezone is way under performing. Where they can't even hit the basics. I pay attention to where I get in line at. I try to keep an eye on who's around me in line specifically to try and better place myself to just get the bare minimum. I will let people jump ahead of me to get to a better somewhat better spot. But that doesn't solve the problem. I know bad things can happen in houses that happened like 10-20 minutes before I got there, the issue with that is is the entire house acts that way. I've done run thrus of houses where I'm basically alone in an otherwise pretty empty house, I make enough noise to let the actors know "Hey somebody's coming! get ready!" and I've walked in on actors just standing around having a chat. I've gone through rooms where the actors is VERY CLEARLY VISIBLE, in these run thrus and they don't try. That's the perfect time to try and stalk and intimidate somebody. I'm alone, and there's nobody behind me.
I know this is a very personal thing for you, and I very much don't mean for you to take this personally, but like there's really no excuse for the way the actors have been behaving in houses at this point. This has been a years long trend, since at least 2011 at the earliest. The only thing that can be done is the park puts in like a reward system for the actors, and gets on them for just standing there. I got better scare attempts from Hunt Club Farm from a guy in an inflatable morphsuit who jumped up from their curled up position on the ground, stood in a starfish pose and aggressively shook the suit at me, this happened in a literal cornfield, none of it made sense. And that... really should not be happening considering how much more it is to go to BGW than it is to go to Hunt Club, not to mention the expectation level difference between the two events.
have seen photos today from in the park with Werewolves up in the Wild Reserve. Can’t remember the last time I saw those up for HOS
Oh damn. I’m actually kind of stoked that the werewolves are back. They always felt so “Howl-O-Scream” to me.