An article concerning Halloween Horror Nights: Islands of Fear written by Nancy Imperiale from the Orlando Sentinel:
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Billboards for Halloween Horror Nights feature The Caretaker, a gruesome specter in a creepy Colonel Sanders get-up. He has a sickening pallor, a dangerous leer and eyes that can stop I-4 traffic.
But he's not real.
The real caretaker of Universal's annual fright fest is a mild-mannered former altar boy in a polo shirt, with a five o'clock shadow and brown hair that could use a trim.
He looks like your brother who stayed up too late, watching scary movies.
Which is basically the truth.
Weaned on werewolf and vampire flicks, T.J. Mannarino grew up creating shivers out of cardboard boxes, string and imagination.
Nearly every Halloween since second grade, he has been sawing away, building haunted houses in friends' basements, then at his own house, then school carnivals, then his fraternity. He learned how to prey on fears, how to make people jump or, even better, run screaming down the street.
He's still at it, only now he has a multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate behind him.
As director of art and design for Universal, Mannarino leads the "Scream Team" of workers who cover women with rats, trap innocents in mazes with mutants, and devise various other sick and twisted ways to make thousands of tourists so frightened they burst their fanny packs.
"Our biggest compliment," says the 37-year-old man, "is when people get so scared they can't move, and we have to get our operations team to physically go into the house and get them out."
Mannarino smiles. It is not a diabolical smile. It is the smile of a man who has just finished cutting the grass and has been offered a glass of lemonade.
It is the smile of a normal guy, of average height, who has a wife and a toddler and who likes to watch college football on weekends and enjoys the occasional backyard barbecue.
"By day, I'm just kind of a normal type of guy," he agrees.
Brrrr.
SCARY BEGINNING
Mannarino grew up watching the creature features that used to pop up on late-night television. They were one of the treasured consistencies for the son of a Navy doctor, whose childhood was spent packing and unpacking. The family moved 18 times.
But wherever he landed, there was usually a show, hosted by characters such as Count Shockula or Dr. Terror or Baron Von Wolfstein. They'd screen Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Blob.
Mannarino absorbed the classic horror flicks, not realizing the black-and-white B movies would become as important to his career success as his college degree.
It was around second-grade that he remembers building his first haunted house, in the basement of his neighbor's house in suburban Maryland.
He and his older brother, Francis, made cobwebs from silly string, hung sheets for ghosts, and cut axes out of cardboard.
"All the kids from the neighborhood would come by," Mannarino recalls. "We'd set it up for a weekend or two."
Over the years the houses became more and more intricate as he learned the tricks of the terror trade, moving from bowls of cold noodles for worms, to spooks that would move via invisible fishing line.
He worked in a haunted mansion run by the Jaycees. He dressed as a Confederate soldier when the homecoming dance fell on Halloween. And almost every Oct. 31, wherever he lived, he turned his home into a house of horrors.
"I still don't believe my parents. They were like 'Sure, do whatever you want,' " he says. "One year when I was in high school in Pensacola, we boarded up all the windows of our house with drywall and sprayed 'Condemned' on it and just kind of trashed the front of our house.
"We covered the living room furniture with sheets, and rigged the door to open when you knocked on it, and we were about 20 feet back, wearing cloaks," he fondly recalls. "When you walked in, we'd jump out. People were running screaming down the street."
Ah, those rosy childhood memories.
"Yes, my boys were forever doing up something," recalls Mannarino's mother, Joyce, 59, who lives in Pensacola. "I just always said that when they were through, they had to clean it up. . . . Everybody just loved to come to our house, to see what we'd do next. My husband got involved. They even dressed the dog up."
But the Halloween high jinks didn't stop with high school.
When Mannarino went to the University of Florida, he scoured Gainesville for a decent haunted house. He found none. So he turned his Kappa Sigma fraternity house into a 13-room chamber of chills.
"In two weeks, we got about 8,000 people through that house. We were just amazed! We covered all our costs and got great [media] coverage. The mayor even made a proclamation about us."
But when he graduated, Mannarino realized it would probably be his last haunted house. Time to go to work in the real world. Armed with an architecture degree, he moved to Orlando to work as a free-lance designer in the burgeoning local "Hollywood East" film and TV industry. He worked on several Nickelodeon game shows, including Double Dare, Legends of the Hidden Temple and Make the Grade.
But free-lance work eventually slowed down, and Mannarino applied to be a prop designer at Universal in 1996.
Within a year, thanks in large part to his twisted background, he was involved in prop and scenic design for all five of the park's haunted houses.
THE FEAR SPREADS
This is the first year that Halloween Horror Nights is being held at Islands of Adventure, rather than at Universal Studios. The new venue offered a larger scare space for Mannarino and his team.
The entire 110-acre park has become one giant haunted house, with six different kinds of scares on each of the park's "islands." Crazed maniacs roam the sidewalks, guests have to make their way through dark passages filled with creepy-crawlies, and special surprises, such as balls of flame blazing across the sky, are around every bend.
Universal won't reveal how much is spent on this event. But considering that Halloween Horror Nights is the largest and most complicated event the park puts on each year, typically pulling in 10,000 to 20,000 visitors a night, it's a good bet the budget is larger than the Jaycees get to work with.
This has all meant more work. And less sleep.
"When it comes to this time of year, the first week of September until we're open, we're here pretty much 24/7," says Mannarino, looking as tired as might be expected from working those hours.
It is the morning of the day before Halloween Horror Nights opens.
Last night was an employee preview, in which Scream Team members had fun tormenting their co-workers. Members stayed up afterward until the wee hours, comparing impressions.
They were pleased. They observed plenty of screams, often followed by relieved laughs. Some people jumped.
"Some people took it to the next level and ran down the street," Mannarino says, eyes gleaming. "We love those."
He is sitting behind a large desk in a corner office crammed with enough spooky objects to fill five haunted attics -- voodoo dolls, gargoyles, creatures with chainsaws, mummies, grotesque masks, and a silver-framed photograph of a baby in a pumpkin costume.
That's Madison Mannarino, now age 2. The year after the photo was taken, she was a ladybug.
Her dad says he has no desire to outfit Madison in a Freddy Krueger costume, and that's probably a good thing because his wife, Martha, is "by far the biggest scaredy-cat."
"She will walk with me through the attraction, but I have to tell her where every scare is. She stands behind me and uses me as a human shield."
Martha Mannarino, 37, agrees that she's "a chicken." But she argues that her husband isn't driven by a love of horror or gore -- he's mostly interested in provoking reactions in people.
"He's got this boyish exitement," she says. "He's the same way about Christmas. He loves to decorate the house and then watch the little kids come up and get excited."
Mannarino, however, may be one of the few Christmas fans who has Psychos and Madmen on his bookshelf for easy reference. He also has books such as American Ruins ("There's great stuff in here about condemned buildings!"), Graven Images, Lost Liners and, of course, Hitchcock.
DEVIL'S IN THE DETAIL
Mannarino is standing in a house where something has gone horribly wrong. He looks pleased.
It is "Screamhouse," a haunted maze designed to resemble a burned-out mortuary, ironically sitting in what is by day the park's sweet and innocent Seuss Landing. Mannarino is in the funeral parlor, with its peeling wallpaper, a suspiciously closed casket and the smell of rotting flowers.
That unlovely fragrance comes from a glass vial of Rotting Flower Scent Mannarino keeps in a plastic basket in his office. He also has jars of Musty Mildew, Burning Electric, Dirt and many more, all custom-created by a New York perfumery to add another level of reality to the scary spaces.
"To have this level of detail is critical for us," Mannarino says. "Our goal is to take you out of reality and put you in this imaginary world and give you that second of disbelief -- 'Am I really in a funeral parlor?'
"Then you see something move in the corner and you think, for that second, maybe it really could be some strange, disfigured monster."
But some things, he says, are just too horrific to make realistic.
"We feel that some things are just not in good taste. We know there's a certain level of decency, an unwritten level."
Yet, over his shoulder in the bowels of Screamhouse is something unmentionable, and another unspeakable sight is to his left. In fact, there are so many unprintables everywhere, hanging from the ceiling, stapled to the walls, stuffed into the refrigerator, dripping on the Victorian tables, that the best way to describe the house would be to say it's indescribable.
So what, exactly, would be considered indecent?
"Well," Mannarino says, looking innocent, "it's on a case-by-case basis."
Article Link[]
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2002-10-16-0210150334-story,amp.html