Day 25: The Devil’s Attic in Louisville, Kentucky

Tyler Proffet: What's going on everybody? Tyler here with thescarefactor.com. We are here with Jason from the Devil’s Attic down here in Louisville, KY. How's it going, Jason?

Jason Besemann: It's going good, man. We're just getting cranking our second weekend open, so we're ready to scare the hell out of some people.

Tyler Proffet: For, those that haven't been here before, what is the Devil’s Attic?

Jason Besemann: It's a combination of classic Halloween monsters, and then we also incorporate some traditional horror films, some nontraditional, in a very theatrical style setting. We've been doing it for 13 seasons, so we keep on cranking. So magic number 13 this year. 

Tyler Proffet: Awesome. So, tell us about your location and your building. Give us kind of the macro stats and that sort of thing that you got going on.

Jason Besemann: So, we located 647 W Hill St in Louisville, and the building itself was built 1914, so it's well over 100 years old. I've had a few little creepy things going on down in there when I'm building late at night, sometimes a few doors here and there swing open by themselves and close, and a few little voices here and there, especially in the Exorcist room, maybe it has to do with the Ouija board in there, but I don't know. Anyways, it's a creepy old building that we've completely gutted and renovated, and built onto over the years, changing scenes here and there and now it's become the collection of the Devil's soul at the Devil’s Attic.

Tyler Proffet: In the past you guys have done some kind of extreme nights and stuff too. Are you doing that for this year also?

Jason Besemann: We have, we did Chaos for several years, we're not doing that anymore. We've toyed around with some other specialty nights, but this year we're just going straight with our show and focusing on it. We've done that the last couple of years, and just focused on making our show batter, making it a little bit more state-of-the-art in some instances, concentrating on our costuming, and our acting as well. So, that's kind of where we focused our time and effort. Previously we had what you mentioned, what we called Chaos nights, and those are full contact nights. We may bring those back in the future, but right now it's not on the books.

Tyler Proffet: So, tell us about some of the state-of-the-art upgrades that you're alluding to.

Jason Besemann: Well, we did some last year. We added some new pneumatic props in there, and we use our pneumatic props as distractions and not scares. We've always been very heavily actor-based, theatrical style haunt. So that alludes to that. We've done some upgrades to our throne room, we've redone that throne room specifically, and we've upgraded a lot of our props. We love Ghostride Props Productions, they do some really good work. Midnight Studio Effects, they have a lot of that in there, and of course Gore Galore, all of those folks, Distortions Unlimited as well. So, we've kind of upgraded some of those areas, as well as costuming, once again being very heavily based actor and actress haunt, we've made it an effort in the last two years to really take that costuming to a new level to make sure that our guests are immersed in each in each scene.

Tyler Proffet: Awesome, but with some of the classic and not-so-classic monsters that you've got inside, what inspires you to choose what you do select and put inside there?

Jason Besemann: A lot of it stems from a childhood passion for mostly heavy goth, hammer-style vampires, and we've got a huge expansion we're planning for next year that's going to fall into that category. We're going to keep it a secret, but it's going to be a pretty significant change to the haunt. We did a lot last year, we try to do one year on, one year off. We don't tip technically to ever take off, we always do something different, but next year is going to be a very hammer-style, gothy area that we're going to add really excited about. A

Jason Besemann: s far as other classic monsters, there are a lot of horror movies that we have in there that are not mainstream. You know, the human centipede is one that kind of sticks out. Of course, we do have stuff like The Exorcist in there well as well, and another kind of off-the-cuff one is the movie Maniac. So, we do some things that are nontraditional, but we integrate them in a way that if you don't know what the movies are, it's still a really good scare, and it's still a creepy room.

Tyler Proffet: Well, where can folks learn more about the Devil’s Attic?

Jason Besemann: So, they can go to thedevilsattic.com. We're also on Facebook, we're also on Instagram, we just started a TikTok account, and we're also on Twitter if people still use that. So anywhere on social media you should be able to find us.

Tyler Proffet: Sounds great, Jason. Thanks for letting us talk to you and I hope you guys have a great season.