PLAYHOUSE OF THE DAMNED
"Walk In The Dark”
by Richard Nathan
The spotlight is up on our host, GUS THE GHOUL.
GUS THE GHOUL
Around Halloween, a lot of enterprising people
set up “haunted house” attractions.
For twenty
bucks or so, a kid can stumble around in the dark
where maniacs scream at him.
Then the kid can
go home, tell his parents what he spent his
money on, and have them scream at him for free.
Our next story is about a Halloween “haunted
house” attraction. It’s
called, “A Walk In The
Dark.”
Gus exits. Lights come up on the
lobby of a Halloween attraction.
CHARLES, who sells the tickets, greets two potential customers who have just
entered, HENRY and his wife LISA.
All three are downstage left.
CHARLES
Welcome to A Walk In The Dark
HENRY
How much?
CHARLES
That depends. How much fear
do you think you can
stand?
HENRY
It’s not the fear I’m worried about.
It’s the boredom!
LISA
Henry!
HENRY
Well, it’s true! Every
Halloween we go to another one
of these things, and every year it’s the same.
You pay
good money to go through some dark maze where you
walk past some poorly designed sets that are supposed
to be scary, but it’s so damned dark that half the time
you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be, and every
know and then some idiot teenager making minimum
wage jumps out at you and shouts, and it sort of looks
like he’s got some king of makeup on, but – again – it’s
so damn dark you can’t tell what the hell he’s
supposed to be – a ghoul or a drag queen.
And I get
tired of wasting my money when they don’t even make an
effort to do anything that’s actually scary.
CHARLES
We offer three prices: Ten
Dollars for mild, twenty
dollars for scary, and thirty dollars for blood-curdling
stop-you-heart terrifying!
HENRY
Oh please!
LISA
Henry!
CHARLES
The last one comes with our money back guarantee.
We’ll give you back the entire thirty dollars if you
tell us you weren’t frightened.
LISA
We’ll take two thirty dollar tickets.
HENRY
Lisa! He’s not going to give
us our money back.
CHARLES
Here is our written guarantee.
Charles hands Henry a printed form.
Henry looks at it.
LISA
Henry, please! Halloween
only comes once a year.
HENRY
Okay. Here’s your sixty
bucks.
Henry takes out his wallet, opens it and pays Charles the sixty dollars.
Then he puts the wallet and the written guarantee in his pocket.
CHARLES
Thank you. Just walk along
the pathway behind you.
I guarantee you’ll find it to be everything I
promised.
The lights go out. Charles exits.
Henry and Lisa start to stumble across the stage.
Occasionally the lights flash up and then flash out.
TEENAGERS in bad makeup run on, shout, and run off.
It’s everything Charles described.
Bad sound effects, bad makeup, and it’s difficult to see anything.
HENRY
Damn it! I knew it!
It’s exactly like every other
rip-off “haunted house” we’ve ever been through.
What a waste of….
A ZOMBIE stumbles in and kills Lisa as the lights flash on and off.
Use whatever stage effects you’d like, but make it genuinely frightening.
It would be best if there was a lot of stage blood.
The zombie exits as Lisa dies.
The lights come up. Henry
rushes to Lisa.
HENRY
Lisa? Lisa!
Henry kneels beside her and feels for her pulse.
There is none. All the
lights go out. Henry screams in the
dark.
HENRY
Hey! Hey!!!
All the lights come back up full.
Lisa’s body is gone. Charles stands
beside Henry.
HENRY
Where’s Lisa? Where’s my
wife???
CHARLES
The zombie got her!
Henry rises and grabs Charles by his shirt front.
HENRY
I’m not kidding!
CHARLES
Neither am I.
HENRY
Is she okay?
CHARLES
It depends. Do you think
dead is okay? I do,
but you might disagree.
HENRY
Stop it! Okay, you had your
fun. I admit, that
was scary.
CHARLES
I told you it would be.
HENRY
I want to see Lisa!
CHARLES
Are you sure? She’s rather
nasty!
HENRY
Bring her out here!
CHARLES
She should be ready in another minute or so.
HENRY
You mean, after you clean off the fake blood.
CHARLES
No, I mean after she’s resurrected as a flesh-
eating zombie.
Lisa stumbles in. She’s been
converted into a zombie. The
actress playing Lisa should have some sort of red syrup (non-staining) in her
mouth.
HENRY
Lisa?
Lisa grabs Henry and bites him on the throat, letting the red colored liquid
she’s had in her mouth out, so that it appears blood is streaming from his
throat. Henry falls dead to the
floor and Lisa goes down with him, continuing to chew on his throat.
Charles takes out a cell phone, and calls someone.
Charles speaks into the cell phone:
CHARLES
Bring in the zombie juice.
We’ve got another
one.
Blackout!
A spotlight picks up Gus (as Charles,
Henry and Lisa exit).
GUS
You might be wondering what they do with all of those
zombies. You must remember,
zombies don’t last very
long. Once they start to
smell, it’s hard to get the
customers in, as we know so well her at the Playhouse
of the Damned.
© 2007 by Richard Nathan. All rights reserved
The author grants all internet users the right to print these scripts for their own, personal, non-commercial use. No other use may be made without the author's permission. Without limiting the foregoing, the plays may not be staged without the author's express permission.
Send e-mail to the author at Richard-Nathan@att.net.