The business of terrifying the masses

HORROR fetishists, people who like a good scare and the merely curious are in for a chilling experience at Cork’s first scare house, The Nightmare Realm, at Navigation House on Albert Quay.

Open to the public for the past few weeks, the organisers promise a particularly scary experience for Halloween. The interior of the building, formerly Cork City Council’s planning and development department, is shrouded in smoke pumped from a smoke machine.

The tour of the two storey house is quite scary. You are led into a series of dark rooms on the different floors that are occupied by everything from a filthy urchin sobbing beside her cot to a mad professor-type carrying out strange experiments to control contagious disease in his laser-lit laboratory. It’s part Frankenstein and part Victorian lunatic asylum. There are some 20 actors employed in this chamber of horrors, wearing hideous prosthetic masks. They have a habit of sneaking up on you before shrieking manically, making you wish you had never ventured inside this inhospitable house.