I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure what I expected from the Strip Club Haunted House, having not attended any of its four prior years, but it was definitely a fun experience. As a lover of Halloween and former paid haunter at many haunted houses over the years, I am always up for a new haunting experience. And, who doesn’t love a little nudity added to their scares? For the inside take on the club component, I invited a longtime Portland dancer friend, who had also never gotten the chance to visit the attraction. We went the Monday before Halloween, to dodge the crowds.
For those not in the know, the Strip Club Haunted House is a collaboration between DJ Dick Hennessy and Spyce, one that’s been operating during the scare season every year since 2015, providing a mix of terror and tantalizing glimpses of flesh (rotten and otherwise).
The 2019 edition of the event was themed around horror movies— mostly those of the ‘80s, with each room dedicated to a different one, such as Camp Crystal Lake from Friday The 13th. The costuming and room decor were generally top-notch, with excellent makeup by Shashonna Knecht and Lyndsey Wiltshire, plus plenty of blind angles and surprise entrances for jump scares. The best portions of the haunting featured the dancers as predators, waiting to prey on our minds, bodies, souls and wallets (bring cash for tipping, it is a club). Our personal favorites were the cenobite- filled torture dungeon from Hellraiser and the Exorcist bedroom sequence. The Hellraiser dungeon featured phenomenal makeup, with a pair of topless and disfigured cenobite ladies, plus a male demonic entity who had a look more reminiscent of GWAR’s Oderus Urungus than anything from the Barker films, making for an interesting twist on the design choices. Although chained to the walls and ceiling, the ladies had ample reach in their bindings to engage with us directly, as they kept us detained for a brief series of innuendo-filled taunting and touching.
The Exorcist bedroom—presided over by a shouting priest and demonically possessed Regan—contained what turned out to be the only explicitly sexual section of the evening, as Regan was vigorously masturbating with a crucifix dildo. The priest cleverly worked this into his exhortations, including a warning about devilish squirting, as he splashed some "holy water" in our direction, which gave us a good laugh.
On that note, although there was some amount of casual toplessness, there was actually less nudity than I would have expected, with many of the characters fully clothed—which did nothing to detract from the fun, but might disappoint those hungering for more skin. Luckily, the exit deposits you onto the main floor of Spyce, with plenty of dancers ready to cater to all your exotic needs. That said, there were also several moments that lived up to the strip club portion of the name, including a dancer giving a lap dance to a mostly decomposed corpse. Also, possibly our favorite haunting room, hidden behind a purposely hard-to-open door, which rewarded the force needed to open it by leading to the "strip club dressing room," for us to be screamed at by a uniformed security guard and an angry dancer, telling us that we had wandered out of the attraction, which may have been the cleverest scare of the night.
As I mentioned above, it is worth noting that this is a haunted house where contact by the haunters is allowed, with several of the dancers reaching out and grabbing us as we passed for both scares and touching us for intensity, such as the chattering cenobite who got her teeth right up on our faces, while her compatriot—in the guise of Hellraiser’s Angelique—waxed poetic on the torments and temptations awaiting us.
All in all, Strip Club Haunted House is a fun mix of sexy and scary, aimed at an adult crowd with a taste for guts, gore and gals. I recommend the event and will definitely make an effort to see it next year. So should you! Just make sure to bring plenty of dollars for tipping and your jumpiest friend for some extra fun.
