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Trick & Treat box
In Make: Vol98, Las Vegas magician and escape room builder, Bizzaro, shared one of his favorite builds — a box full of spring-loaded snakes. The details of the project are found in the magazine.
Bizzaro joined us on Make: Live last month and he talked about developing an interest in magic as a kid. He demonstrated his “jump-scare” box and explained how it works.
“DO go into the house!”
By Kevin Toyama
Make: Boo(!)ks Editor
Here are actual sentences that my older sister said last month: “Yeah, Dad rented Children of the Corn for us because the title had the word children in it. He thought it was a kids movie.” She was referring to one of the first VHS movies we watched at home. Oh, also, I WAS IN THE FIFTH GRADE.
Now, she doesn’t totally get off the hook because I’m pretty sure she snuck us in to see Scanners at our little neighborhood cinema even before that, but I bring all this up because I have a complicated relationship with scary movies. I loved sci-fi and fantasy as a kid, and horror had similar concepts that were just pushed toward a darker edge. Campy special effects and ridiculous plots made mainstream horror movies fun! Then sometime in the early 2000s, those silly scares turned into trauma (I’m looking at you, Saw and Hostel).
Still, teenage me has fond memories of yelling in (semi-) mock terror during the clown scene in Poltergeist, and realizing the questionable appropriateness of renting Hellraiser II to watch at a friend’s house as her parents came home mid-movie. So when I saw an ad for the ’80s-themed horror show Slashed: Return to Hellville in San Francisco, I felt a familiar itch that needed a scratch.
You can almost smell the Drakkar. . . . (Image courtesy of David Mochizuki)
The Terror Vault website describes Slashed as an “immersive horror experience . . . as you become trapped inside a living 1980s slasher movie,” and after attending last weekend, I can enthusiastically report that this spectacle really does make you feel like you’re part of the story! Think of all the tropes from classics like Friday the 13th and Halloween, and you’ll feel them throughout the production. But just how do you capture the synth music and mullet aesthetic of a bygone era?
“The entire show is built from the ground up, every single piece that you see is built by somebody,” said Terror Vault Creative Director David Flower, who along with fellow Gen X-er Joshua Grannell produce the annual Terror Vault show. “We have more than a hundred actors, but also around thirty fabricators and designers who build our production from the ground up.”
One such fabricator is Aaron Seymour, who actually performed in previous Terror Vault productions. “Aaron’s an actor, but also a cabinet maker. So this year we commissioned him to build an entire video store as one of our sets,” said Flower. “And our lead makeup designer Jason Henricks — he once competed on Face Off [the SyFy network game show where prosthetic makeup artists compete]. He sculpted the killer’s mask from an original design and created the mold, poured latex, and painted around twenty-five of those masks for all the killer’s scare actors.”
Slashed antagonist Darren does not seem happy about his late fees. (Photo by Jenna Gable and Camillo Kearns)
I wasn’t allowed to take pictures during the Slashed show, but cameras were allowed in the peripheral areas like the Wainwright Family Carnival, which feature displays and interactive installations, and the Fang Bang bar. Although each group’s main show lasts an hour, you can come early and stay afterwards to hang out and explore. Best of all, there’s an infectious, giddy excitement that fosters community amongst all the thrill seekers who come to share this adventure.
I am very, very uncomfortable in this photo. (Image courtesy of David Mochizuki)
“The performers in those areas interact with guests and make it fun and sort of prep you for the experience,” said Flower. “They’re more adjacent to the main story line and are mostly improv actors, so they’re like the party starters.” Indeed, it’s almost like warm-up acts that get audiences in the mood for the main attraction, helping to suspend disbelief by blurring the line with reality. Just like the Slashed show itself, it’s all in good fun and both the performers and attendees were having a great time when I was there.
Wearing the red glowing necklace signals you’re up for “bonus” interactions. (Image courtesy of David Mochizuki)
Now, let’s be clear: Slashed is not for little kids (even fifth-grade Children of the Corn fans). But if you’re an adult who enjoys fun scares or ’80s retro camp, Slashed is a great way to indulge your Halloween spirit through the end of October. And there’s even special post-Halloween behind-the-scenes tours on November 7 and 8 where they’ll reveal the craftsmanship and trickery behind the props, sets, and special effects.
This guy was a little mad that he wasn’t invited to be in the group photo. (Image courtesy of the Terror Vault)
And that, dear readers, is where my journey back to ’80s horror safely fades to black.
(Or does it?)
I’m (ahem) dying to go back. . . . (Image courtesy of David Mochizuki)
The complete opposite of vibe-coding
The New York Times ran an obituary for Margaret Hamilton , a young mathematician at MIT in 1960s who took a side job to work with computers. She eventually led a team that created the code for computers on board the Apollo space craft. The NYT story was accompanied by an iconic 1969 NASA photo of Hamilton standing next to the printouts of code she and her team had written. The stack is as tall as she is — 5’4”.
The Smithsonian writes about Hamilton:
As a leading computer scientist at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, she was critical to the six successful lunar landings between 1969 and 1972.
Responsible for the Apollo flight software design, Hamilton and her team developed the guidance and navigation system for the spacecraft and wrote the code that brought astronauts into space and safely back home again. Every decision was documented. Every line of code explained.
What was also fascinating was how this code was physically stored for the in-flight computers, which had only 72 kilobytes of memory.
She became known as the “rope mother,” because of the unusual way code was stored on the in-flight computers, in an era before the wide use of silicon chips.
Programs were written in binary arithmetic, a series of 1s and 0s. The digits were stored using copper wires woven around tiny doughnut-shaped material called cores. A wire passing through a core was read as a 1 and a wire that bypassed a core was a 0. The long assemblages of cores and threaded wire were called ropes.
The ropes were woven by women capable of fine hand work, many of whom had worked in New England textile mills. Ms. Hamilton, who was responsible for getting everything right, was the “rope mother.”
The New York Times obituary said she is “credited with popularizing the term ‘software engineering’ to describe the complexity of the work her team did, thus elevating software coding to a status equal to hardware design.”
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