Over-the-top haunted houses; Treasure Island Music Festival; Wonder Woman

Everybody read comics in the 1940s. There aren't demographic studies, but they had circulations of a million copies for each issue, so there was a very large audience, and I think lots of people read them. They're fun the way kids literature is fun. There are giant space-traveling kangaroos, there are goofy jokes; they're meant to be enjoyable, goofy, kids literature, which also happens to be about teaching kids and adults that women are great and everybody should be a woman — whatever gender you are — and that submission is the way to go.

Marston believed that women were superior to men and that they should rule. And the reason that he felt they were superior, basically, was because women are better at submitting. So he sort of saw Wonder Woman as the prototype of the love leader who's going to teach men and women to be submissive. And the Wonder Woman comics are filled with images of people being tied up — there's a story about the Mole Men, who are these evil, blind, twisted creatures living underground, and they enslave women. And Wonder Woman goes down and teaches them all that what they need to do is have the women rule them. Then they all get their eyesight back; it's not subtle.

Well, Marston was always very aware of female readers and of female viewers, and he's very aware of lesbianism, right? Because there's every reason to believe he lived with a couple of lesbians. So when Marston presents sexualized images of women, they're not intended just for men, pretty much explicitly, both within the comics — there's lots of lesbian bondage play which is not especially sublimated — and in terms of who he thought his readership was. So the idea that attractive images of women and feminism don't go together would not be something that Marston would agree with at all, partly because he's aware of a lesbian audience.

In part, some of these things are just kind of bad luck. If Marvel* had liked Joss Whedon's script, we'd have a Wonder Woman movie already. Many people often talk about sexism, and I think that the big superhero companies are not used to marketing for or thinking about a female audience often, and so I think that they're sometimes reluctant to try superhero movies with women. And I think Wonder Woman also presents problems for interpretation, right? On the one hand she's a feminist icon; on the other hand, she's a sex symbol, and while that was not a problem for Marston, for many audiences today, reconciling that can be tricky.

Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights is like entering into your favorite TV show or movie. It's massive, it's epic — no one can afford to do the scale that they do. It's incredible. Knott's Scary Farm started theme park haunts, and now they're kind of like the summer camp of haunting. But with home haunts, there's such a variety of them. There's even a home haunt that's so extreme that I'm too afraid to go through it. I filmed it, but I can't go through it.

That's the most extreme home haunt in the world and it's one of the most extreme haunted houses of all time. They'll touch you, you might even get tackled, and they might even hold you down so they can force you to eat something you don't want to eat. 

"Blackout" became real popular after word came out that naked people were waterboarding you in a haunted house. And once that happened, everyone wanted to go [laughs].

You're walking into an interactive haunted house play and you become a character. I remember when I went there ... and we had to look for a key. They said, "Split up," and I thought, This is like the perfect horror film moment. I walk into this bathroom, I see an old lady bathing in a bathtub of blood, and I said, "I need a key." She turns around and looks at me with this really scary face, the door behind me slams shut, and someone grabs me and puts a knife to my throat and says, "You're going nowhere." And my friends are screaming and running away. I was held hostage for 15 minutes. At the end of the haunt I got together with my friends and I told them what happened to me. When they told me what happened to them, I started getting the chills. It was like we lived out our own horror film and were sitting around a campfire and sharing it. It was incredible!



That's why you need these independent haunts. People go there to see what they can take. They want to see if they can go through it without saying the safe word. What do you do when you're in the dark and some scary naked person's running after you that's about to do something to you? 

When a monster pops out, I've seen someone punch the monster right in the face. I was at Knotts Scary Farm's Scare School, where they train their monsters, and they warn [the trainees], "If you scare someone like that, you're going to get punched in the face." There's a right way and a wrong way to jump out at somebody. I've seen people crying. With one family I just filmed, the mother started speaking in Spanish and her daughter grabbed onto my shirt and wouldn't let go. Afterwards I asked what she was saying, and she said she had no idea that she was speaking in Spanish [laughs]. She just went right into Spanish, she got so scared.

I keep wondering, Is this a bubble that's one controversy away from bursting? Are we going to look back years from now and [say], Wow, 2014, that was the Wild West of haunting. If you get someone to sign a waiver, you can get away with murder [laughs]. But you know what? People online are demanding it, so as long as there's an audience that's demanding to be scared by the most extreme situations, there's going to be someone there to deliver.