How you love to play with fear, as if it were fire. You inch up to the edges of cliffs, you go home with the bad kids after school, you ride roller coasters, you scream through chain-saw horror movies. An odd sort of play, but people pay money to believe they are under attack, doomed, damned, dead, and then they brag about how scared they were.
But it is fear -- the Markoff brothers know the booby traps that lurk in your fight-or-flight back brain, adrenal glands, all the synapses of simple survival, and right now, with Halloween approaching, they want to set them off.
"We definitely want to scare people," said Alex Markoff, 35, the middle of the three Markoff brothers, who for the last 14 years have been getting thousands of people, young and old, to pay $15 to $20 apiece to spend 20 dark minutes in Markoff's Haunted Forest in Dickerson, a tiny flick of a town in upper Montgomery County.
"But we don't want to traumatize people," he said. "We've had people pee their pants. We've literally had to carry people out." He glanced around a barn where the Markoffs were training their ghouls and walking dead and said: "Tone down the scare of your scene" if small children are getting too scared.
The Markoffs spend their lives in the fear business, in one way or another. The rest of the year they run an outdoor adventure camp called Calleva, provoking a different kind of fear with "extreme caving," kayaking, rock climbing and sleeping in the looming quiet of the deep, dark woods. Fear, yes, but screaming -- full-bore head-gripping screaming -- is not encouraged in the middle of a rock climb.
But it is the whole purpose of a walk through candlelit woods before Halloween.
How do the Markoffs do it? Why does it work?
First of all, there is no escort; you walk this path by yourself or with friends whose arms you can grab. Twigs snap.
"It doesn't matter who you're next to," 12-year-old Katie McFall is telling her friend Lauren, "as long as you have an arm."
"No," Lauren moans. "Nooo. Nooo."
Lauren has been watching the giant gates before them open and close. She's seen smoke billow out. She finds herself alarmed by the huge glowing eyes of the skull inside.
And then the bogus advice -- implying that the denizens of the Haunted Forest have their best interests at heart -- but somehow making everything worse.
A tall carny barker in a shredded satin jacket pulls this group of kids from John Poole Middle School in Poolesville into a tight, confessional huddle.
"For liability reasons," he begins ominously, he must warn them about two guys who, earlier this Friday night, got "100 feet past the entrance," then raced back out -- crying.
"Thank you," Katie tells him sharply. "That makes us feel better."
By the time he steps back to open the gate, Lauren has disappeared. She stands far to the side, arms crossed over her chest. Her imagination has done her in.
"Lauren!" Katie calls. "You have to you go."
"I'm not going."
"You've gotta go!" cry Katie and the others.
"I'm not going ."
People get scared before the walk has even started; they start to scream before they've even closed their car doors in a parking lot that is a just-mowed soybean field in what the Markoffs themselves call "the middle of nowhere." On weeknights, 800 people will come. Each weekend night: thousands.
So the boys and girls enter without Lauren. Diving into the smoke, they argue over who will open the skull's mouth, then stutter-step across the threshold and howl when a skeleton hisses.
"You just get used to screaming," Katie says.
And the screaming feels good. After all, this is the sport that transmutes fear to euphoria.
* * *
"We're into primal fears," said Cash Alderton, a 29-year-old who works most of the year with heavy machinery but who, every October, teams up with the eldest Markoff brother, Nick, to re-create the Haunted Forest. "We chase the primal fears of people."
Alderton and two of the Markoff brothers were walking, midday, along the trail. It was two weeks before opening night, and they were standing at the covered bridge, where a lightning storm will thunder, and a long-clawed, strobe-lit troll will "attack" as people try to cross the creek.
"We could do a wind tunnel," Matt Markoff said. "We could get one of the big blowers" that inflates moon bounces and stash it at the top of the bridge. It would push out a mean, heavy wind, and people would have to fight it and the troll while crossing the creek.
Or do it the other way, the others said. Put the blower at the bottom of the bridge, and get a movie projector to run a film of giant blades, spinning fast. You could point it at the far end of the tunnel and use the blower to push people toward the blades, then siphon them off at the very last minute.
As for their own back-brain wiring when it comes to fear, neither Matt nor Nick watches horror films, but they're both scared of snakes. "They don't have arms and legs," Matt said. "They shouldn't be able to move. They're the Devil." Nick has a way of imagining nature's terrors. He said, "There's nothing more scary in the woods than having a tree fall down on you."
Last year he rigged up a 30-foot tree and a guy chain-sawing it down. When groups neared him, the tree plummeted toward their heads before stopping. It was universally terrifying, which made it a huge success and a disaster all at the same time. Everyone froze, or backed away, or dived headfirst off the trail.
"It was a huge backup," Matt said, shaking his head. "You have to make scares that keep people moving."
You also can't use too much blood: Blood gets old fast and gives people a chance to desensitize.
The trick is to use the special effects lurking inside the audience's brains.
"If you give them gore, that's their fear," Matt said. "We're gonna get you anticipating what you're scared of, and then we're gonna get you. The Haunted Forest is a lot of implementing people's own natural fears."
And we have a lot of them. Fears of looking foolish. Of not being in control. Of falling. Of failing.
Which is why Nick Markoff, 37, who's in charge of dreaming up and building anew the trail's scenes each year, says the forest's very best scares are the very simplest ones.
"My favorite place," he said, "isn't a scene. It's being behind a candle at eye-level, and my head would be right there." He gestured to a dark spot. "And you snort right in their ear, and you just get 'em, and they love it."
Candles, he said, not only create atmosphere, but they also lull people into momentary lapses of security -- the better to reach in and really terrify them. People tend to believe that, with the candle's glow, they can see. But the flickering flame succeeds mostly in mesmerizing people -- "People always stare at the candles," Nick said -- and blinding them to everything but that little cone of light.
Matt grinned. "We play with the shadows, man," he said.
"You see what we make you see," Alderton said.
Nick added, "It seems like the more light you give them, the darker things seem."
* * *
There's a crashed plane lit by an army jeep's headlights, and two soldiers lurching along the ground, gurgling, "Help!" There's a cemetery, a village of cannibals and skulls on fence posts, the sort of horrors that a lot of kids will spot as stage sets. More unsettling, perhaps, is a shack that contains nothing but darkness. The Poolesville kids will have to feel their way through -- without knowing what they're touching, without seeing what's about to touch them. It makes you imagine worse horrors than anything the Markoffs can devise.
"Can you go first?" Katie asks the tall, older boy next to her, Marty Micheals.
"I already went first," he answers. " You go."
"The point of coming here," says an impatient Cameron Dickerson, "is to get scared." The 12-year-old adds, sotto voce, as though intellectual distance will help quell the rising panic, "I learned all about it in science."
If the Markoffs have done their jobs right, adrenaline is flogging hearts to a gallop and hyper-pumping lungs. Fear -- in its purest, deepest form -- is flooding fresh blood and oxygen to muscles, which are tensing up, preparing for fight or flight. Senses sharpen, colors brighten -- adrenaline is a drug, it gets people high. The amygdala, the brain's almond-shaped fear center, lights up like a sabotaged ammo dump.
The screaming continues up and down the trail. Clutched between two bigger boys, one girl from the Poolesville group is pulled from scene to scene. At one point, she hears a loud snap, feels something against her legs, and drops to the ground, pulling the boys down with her. "Ohhh!" she shouts, kicking her feet. "Oh! Oh!"
"It was just a bunch of sticks," another boy says, and yanks the branch off the trail. At the Apocalypse Now village, she howls, "DON'T HURT ME!" By the chain-saw shack, amid the blare and smell of exhaust fumes, she's warbling, "No! No! Nooooo!"
"Okay," one of the boys exhales, when the chain saws fade behind them. "That is bad. I got scared."
Then there's an overturned bus full of shaking mummies.
The kids now are scared enough that they default to the ultimate human tactic -- getting together, doing something, which happens to be stomping their feet, as if, somehow, this will save them. This makes no sense. It makes all the sense in the world.
"Stomp your feet!" the kids shout in unison. They stomp. The mummies shake and shiver, but the kids keep it up.
Then they race past fireballs and sledgehammers, and through smoke to the end.
They cheer.
Katie says: "It feels like an accomplishment ."
