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Plight of the living dead

By Lyndsie Manusos

Published Oct. 28, 2008

For this Halloween edition of "Up All Night," MOVE shadowed Naomi Brubaker, a performer at the Necropolis Haunted House in Columbia, who showed us how to become a hillbilly cannibal for a night.

7 p.m.: I arrive at the Necropolis Haunted House an hour or so before it opens. The doors of the building are unlocked, and surprisingly, there is light coming out of it as opposed to the deep blackness that is expected of a haunted house.

7:05 p.m.: Necropolis owner Bill Schnell takes me into the house and through the fully lit and freaky maze into a small back room used for makeup. It's a cramped space and the back walls surrounded by old black rusting lockers. There are two stools where performers are being molded into their monster characters. When they step away from their stools, the difference is shocking. The makeup makes them unrecognizable.

Schnell introduces Naomi Brubaker. The welcome is warm, and she dives right into everything she knows about working at Necropolis and the character she plays.

Brubaker, a junior at Stephens College, started working at Necropolis her freshman year, tagging along with some friends one night and helping volunteer. After that first night, she says, "I was hooked." She has been working at Necropolis since then and the last two years she has been a paid actress.

When it comes to acting, Brubaker plays "Sissy," a hillbilly cannibal who terrorizes audiences with the rest of her hillbilly family. She plays off the parts of "Mama" and "Bubby," making one big happy family of sadistic cannibals.  Their personalities make it one of the most horrifying parts of the house and the most gruesome.

7:15 p.m.: Brubaker sits down to have her makeup done. On average, she says the process of putting on all her makeup takes 45 minutes. I watch as her face is painted white, black and red, and a ferocious jaw line forms on her face.

While this is all taking place, Brubaker speaks of her experiences in the house and the daily life of a monster performer in one of Missouri's most intense haunted houses.

"It's a big stress reliever, especially during the fall," she says, but she also explains that the effort required to play her character is as much physical as it is mental. She has to be on her toes to be able to scare from every angle and only has a moment's notice to size up her audience.

"I usually can hear them 30 to 40 seconds before they come in, depending on their screams," she says. Her preparation time is short. "It really is a lot of improv," she says. "You got to be able to think on your feet."

7:22 p.m.: I pause from talking to Brubaker as her makeup artist works around and on her mouth. In the meantime, another makeup artist, Brandy Lee Hatcher, a senior from Stephens College, explains that out of 50 staff members, about 30 of them need makeup, and with only two makeup artists tonight, each one works with half of the performers.

7:45 p.m.: Brubaker finishes her makeup and begins to suit up. Her costume consists of a ragged, ripped and bloody button-down white shirt, ragged pants and black shoes. The transformation is almost complete as she teases her brown hair so that it whips out in all directions. "Is there any blood back there?" she asks casually.

7:50 p.m.: Everything is set and Brubaker is hardly the same person I met just moments before. She leaves to go to the costume room to get a very important prop.

The room is like a museum unto itself, with a wall of masks and dozens of costumes. There is only one thing that catches her eye: her very own decently sized human intestine.

It's fake, but in the dark of the house, it's another thing to be disgusted by. She wraps it around her neck, but not before finding a bottle of Spray Blood and shooting a few spurts on her neck and arms.

In the next half hour, Brubaker takes me to her domain in Necropolis. Her room is in a bloodied kitchen where she stands on the table of a chopped-up corpse.  There's a stove with a hand and blood boiling over, and heads are strewn about the room, including inside the microwave. Swing music plays over an old radio. A dainty little sign on the wall that says "Home is Where the Heart Is" has blood spattered across it. I laugh at the crude humor of this room as Brubaker begins to stretch before the action starts.

8:30 p.m.: The lights turn off in Necropolis. I hide behind a wall with an opening to watch. Let the screaming begin.

Watching people arrive at the entrance into the kitchen, most of them stop dead in their tracks when they see Brubaker, crouching on her table and growling with the intestine wrapped around her neck. Cuss words are yelled out as they see her, and I even had the pleasure of watching one gentleman crouch down in preparation to crawl out of her reach. Screams echo throughout the room while Mama yells, "Get 'em Sissy! They look real tasty!"