Volume 2, No. 20. October 25, 2002
Horrible
grammar
Dead meat. Flatliner.
Pinball. Swamp juice. Gruesome.
These words carry meanings well known to most English-speaking people, but in
the vocabulary of haunters they have definitions altogether different than that
found in your typical Merriam Webster’s or even your dictionary of slang.
That last word, for example, “gruesome,” is a noun, not an adjective.
All professions develop their own idioms and acronyms (as a journalist I often
“start with the lede and work to 30”), and the people who spend their
Octobers dressed up as ghouls and monsters and other scare-characters at haunted
attractions and amusement parks are no different.
In promoting its 30th annual Knott’s Scary Farm, Susan Tierney, director
of public relations at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, included
a glossary of “MonsterSpeak” in her press packet, the “actual
working vocabulary used by the 1,000 monsters at Knott’s Scary Farm.”
“I resurrected it from several years ago,” she said. “Over the
years (the monsters) have developed this lingo all their own that describes
different types of guests or different things they’ve developed over the
years.” Like a “slider,” a monster who slides across the ground
on his or her knees to scare a guest below eye level. Daring sliders will try
to accomplish a “lifshin,” a dangerous slide, and try to avoid a “heath,”
a botched slide.
Other terms are obvious. “Shaker” is a noise maker, “scare zone”
is a themed area with a concentration of monsters. The area is usually filled
with “swamp juice,” i.e. fog. Here you will find “mookies”
(a first-year monster, or rookie) and various “gruesomes” (a monster
with no specific name or identity).
Some of the vocabulary applies to guests. A “flatliner” is a guest
who cannot be visibly scared. Those are a challenge; more annoying are the “dead
meat,” the monster groupies who spend the entire night following a group
of monsters. One of the thrills of being a monster is to accomplish a “free
scare,” when you scare a guest unintentionally. A planned device is to
team up with other characters in a “monster hug,” when a group of
monsters merely surround a nervous guest, or in a “pinball.” That
is exactly as it sounds, where the guest resembles a pinball bouncing from one
scare to another as monsters continuously step into the guest’s path of
escape.
Tierney’s glossary does not gloss over the hardships these monsters endure
in the course of the monthlong Knott’s Scary Farm. “MED,” for
example, is a “monster eating disorder” which usually happens to characters
while wearing full facial latex prosthetics. Then there is the “Haunt widow,”
a term that has a counterpart in most professional dialects: a monster’s
spouse or significant other during October.
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