Why Must Every Haunted House Feature a Disgusting Bathroom?

Time to ask the hard questions of our seasonal walk-thru attractions.

I am a lifetime lover of walk-thru haunted houses.

From the first one I ever attended in 1994, run by our town’s local Red Cross out of a vacant Sunglass Hut, to my most recent visit to the immersive spectacle of Knott’s Scary Farm, I have limitless affection for the artistry and scrappiness of non-IP haunts, regardless of scale or budget.

Hell, the single most frightening moment I’ve had in one was at the charmingly lo-fi Toluca Lake Pumpkin Festival, where a solitary scaractor in an otherwise unattended maze periodically crashed two cymbals together. Did it make dramaturgical sense? Of course not. Did it cause me to levitate 17 inches off the ground? Absolutely.

You don’t become a connoisseur of these seasonal attractions without noticing some recurring haunted household features:

There is almost always a nightmare kitchen where you’ll find ghoulish food often with a wink: an octopus emerging from a stockpot. Various limbs in a fridge left ludicrously ajar. A chef presenting you a head on a platter.

What’s scarier? The cannibal or the lack of counter space?

There’s also typically a creepy nursery replete with beastly stuffed animals, possessed dolls and a disemboweled nanny sitting next to a prop gramophone playing warped lullabies. At some point, a diminutive performer, dressed as a demonic toddler, will burst from a lacily curtained bassinet.

Guess which one has a BFA.

Then there’ll be a dusty attic filled with draped mannequins and pancake make-up’d specters.

A basement torture chamber.

A backyard cemetery.

All these standard horror set-ups have come to the cultural forefront organically, playing into our most innate human fears. The dark. The dead. The unknown.

So then explain to me why, more and more, regardless of theme, setting or location, every single haunted house, from Orlando to Anaheim, from Salem to San Francisco, MUST include a bathroom absolutely smeared with human feces?

How can anyone, dead or otherwise, live this way?

I swear to you. It doesn’t matter if the haunt you’re attending is set inside a giant pumpkin or on a space station in the year 9000, at some point, you will inexplicably enter a tile-floored water closet absolutely BEDECKED with brown.

Are we to assume this prisoner ate his cellmate, evacuated the bones in his toilet and then smeared “The coffee” on the wall in his own excreta before perishing himself?

Since when did “bodily waste” become a foregone inevitability in a haunted house? Ghosts famously have no bowels. Zombies lack the frontal lobe to use a toilet. Cannibals eat people, but surely they flush. There’s almost no horror trope I can think of that would logically result in a bathroom being thoroughly demolished by deuce.

Who is making these creative decisions? What demand are they trying to fulfill? Why, when attending an event in honor of the harvest and its corresponding mystical line between life and death, must I also endure the piped-in smell of artificial dung?

Assumedly based on a standard restroom at Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Moreover, who are the poor souls relegated to working in these cursed lavatories? Where do they fall in the hierarchy of scaractors? Is this the bottom rung? Is it a form of hazing? Are they being punished? Do they wish they were one of the attic specters or a werewolf occasionally popping out from a doghouse in the backyard? Who is advocating for them?

A slightly more understated incarnation. But still, this woman has clearly 2’d in the sink and is now vomiting in the toilet. Enough!

I don’t say all this to be a prude, or overly squeamish. I understand the potential that scatological humor has to release some tension after a haunt’s more high-octane scares. But we’re not talking about a few well-timed farts or disarmingly clever manure puns. We’re talking about a poltergeist approaching me, hands covered in Nutella asking “Wanna lick?”

Well I don’t want a lick, poop wraith. And I think you know that.

To provide some more positive action for this criticism, I recommend finding a new angle on bathroom frights. We have so many cultural touchstones to draw from! Psycho, Ghoulies, Arachnophobia, What Lies Beneath, Nightmare on Elm Street. Take your pick! Let’s give the toilet a rest give some other hygienic appliances a chance to shine: the tub, the shower, the medicine cabinet, the sink!

And if we absolutely must go scatalogical, at least give me a backstory! A ghostly outhouse occupied by the souls of campers who fell in. An undead plumber killed in a septic explosion. He sucks out people’s souls with a plunger. You can call him John Latrine.

Wait. That’s kind of good. I think we’ve got something here. Mr Knotts? Mrs. LA Haunted Hayride? Dr. Horror Nights? Gimme a call and let’s brainstorm.