Haute house of horrors

The cockroaches were custom bred. The hallways are painted black. And the jarring sound of a pendulum scraping against metal is available on cue.

Will jumpy stuff like this bring the requisite scare factor to Haunted Poe, the ambitious new literary and theatrical reworking, by alt-theater company Brat Productions, of the traditional Halloween haunted-house fright fest?

Or will the psychologically agitating and twistedly violent narratives of Edgar Allan Poe contained in the building's 13 chambers turn out to be more chillingly creepy than any blood-soaked, chain-saw-wielding maniac who might jump out at you in a less haute haunted house (like, say, the Fright Factory located in the same converted South Philly warehouse)?

This is a question whose answer may tell you more about yourself than you care to know.

In any case, Haunted Poe will be staged at 38 Jackson St. (bear right at the Risqué gentlemen's club) through Nov. 1, directed by Madi Distefano and with sets by Brad Helm - who, as set designer and technical director for Eastern State Penitentiary's Terror Behind the Walls, has some pretty unassailable scare chops.

"It has a lot to do with what you find scary," said Michael Alltop, artistic director of Brat Productions, who conceived the idea of using the haunted-house meme as the basis for a theatrical work based on Poe, and visited nine haunted houses last year as part of his research.

"We definitely want to bring the scare, the visceral response an audience can have. But it's not all about the terror.

"The overall theme has to do with the psychological and scary stories of Poe," Alltop said. "There are no aliens. There are artistic choices that bring more of a theater perspective. There's an elegance to Haunted Poe."

Still, Brat's creative overseers are hoping the production will appeal to teenagers and adults looking for a different kind of Halloween factory of fear, which would fit with Brat's stated mission of moving theater "beyond the proscenium" and exposing it to a wider audience.

"It's really difficult to balance theater and haunted house - they're such very different mediums," said director Distefano, who helped create the work with Helm from Alltop's idea. They brought in dramaturg Greg Giovanni to complete the script.

"Intellectually, it's sort of a high-brow art form and a low-brow entertainment medium," she said. "That's something that Brat often tries to do, to serve our mission of creating a new generation of theatergoers."

Timed admissions will allow small groups to move through the haunted warehouse, stopping in the 13 rooms for scenes lasting about four minutes apiece, each based on a Poe greatest hit or two - The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Masque of the Red Death, and, fleetingly but memorably, The Pit and the Pendulum.

On view are disturbing alter-ego optical effects in mirrors, an avant-garde film version of The Tell-Tale Heart, a mini-operetta set in a graveyard featuring some of Poe's spooky ladies (Annabel Lee, Ligeia, Berenice, and Morella) and Poe's library, among other scenes.

About 300 people can make their way through the 10,000-square-foot space in an evening, with timed tickets every half hour. The artists perform their pieces 22 times a night, with sound and special effects cued by actors and run by laptops - very different from the pull-a-big-switch effects of the conventional haunted attraction.

The show is recommended for ages 13 and up (rated PG13, like any good horror show), and organizers are hoping for a varied crowd that includes both teenagers - who flock to haunted houses but not always to theater, even dark, punky theater - and theatergoers who might not otherwise indulge in a haunted house.

Helm, the Eastern State terror guy, calls it "75 percent theater, 25 percent haunted house" and says the budget, which is edging up toward six figures, represents a huge leap in scope for Brat. (The project has been funded in large part by a Philadelphia Theater Initiative Grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.)

So will the production prove edgy enough for Brat yet scary enough to pass as a haunted attraction? Will it be definitively Poe enough to compete with a lot of other Poe activities this season, including a four-day academic conference taking place at the Philadelphia Hyatt Regency at Penn's Landing and an elaborate enactment in Baltimore on Sunday of the funeral Poe never had, emceed by John Astin, best known as Gomez Addams on TV's The Addams Family?

And, in the end, is Poe punk enough for Brat, which once did performances of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano for 24 hours straight, hour after hour after hour?

"If ever there was a literary rock star of the 19th century, it was Poe," Distefano said. "He had this really tragic, tragic life, a tormented soul who watched everyone who died before him. All of that darkness in his life comes out in his writing. He was one of the first writers to create an unreliable narrator. So truth is warped and distorted.

"Most definitely, he lived the down and dirty life, moving from town to town, selling everything to make ends meet, crying out to comrades to raise money for them so they can feed themselves. That's not punk rock," she concluded, "but it's definitely not what we think of when we think of the writers we study in English class."

In addition to Helm for the sets, the production tapped a lot of other homegrown Philadelphia haunted talent - magician Matt Holtzclaw, who helped create several illusions for the show; lighting whiz John Stephen Hoey, who has done lighting for the New York City and Pennsylvania Ballets; Philly Poe expert obsessive Edward Pettit; mirror mosaic magic garden maven Isaiah Zagar; sound and music composer Michael Kiley, founder of the band the Mural and the Mint.

And let's not overlook the Insectarium in Northeast Philly, source of the cockroaches ("We only had a contract for 1,000, but we're getting more," said Alltop. They paid $500 for them.)

It was Helm's job to unload the cockroaches from five-gallon drums (they were lodged in cardboard tubes) and into the glass tank that will line a wall of The Pit and the Pendulum corridor. "You have to chill them down," he said. "We try to get them down to 35, 36 degrees so they're a little more lethargic."

Michael Alltop cannot help but divulge, during a technical rehearsal, this bit of fright contained within the walls of the warehouse, though he is quick to assure that the cockroaches will remain behind glass - unlike the actors, who will be interactive, if not necessarily in a pretend-to-try-to-kill-you kind of way. It will be more, shall we say, seductive.

"The touching is more interactive, more 'Come join us in the scene, come dance with us,' as opposed to 'We're going to chop your hand off,' " said Alltop. "It's not a homicidal maniac, it's a dancer. The kind of touching done is to draw you in, not scare you."