I spent Valentine’s Day on my back at Co-Prosperity getting waterboarded by a sassy little Cupid with a glittering beard and sumptuous breasts. There was a wet pillowcase over my head and a specimen cup in my mouth in a room that smelled of hot piss (my group and I had poured our urine into a fountain together). I was sitting knee-to-knee on a picnic bench with a man I’d only just met who looked like Rob Zombie. Both of our hands were behind our backs, and he was also getting waterboarded, along with two women sitting similarly on a neighboring bench. As soon as the pillowcases came off, one called safety and left unceremoniously.
That was the conclusion of the first scene of maybe eight in the avant haunted house organized by La Casa de Satanas, the raucous brainchild of artist Amelia de Rudder that blesses the city twice a year: on the most heart-wrenching night of the year (Valentine’s Day) and the most gut-churning (Halloween). Legend says that La Casa started as a reaction to a repressive alderperson. Now in its tenth year, the project continues as a free-spirited artistic collaboration and bizarre community trust exercise, and it enjoys a devoted cult following because of its varied and unusual scares as much as its campy spirit.
La Casa de Satanas
Through 11/4: Tue-Wed and Fri-Sat 7 PM; haunt industry night 11/1, “extreme experience” night 10/31 and 11/4; Co-Prosperity, 3219-21 S. Morgan, reservations and information lacasadesatanas.wixsite.com/satanas, 18+
De Rudder’s never been a haunted house enthusiast—she claims to only have been to one—but she loves scary stuff. A child of the 70s, de Rudder lived in Paris until she was eight, where her bohemian parents—a Belgian father and an American mother—threw Halloween parties populated by creatives: photographers, writers, models, and so on. At one party, before she came to the states to live with her Halloween-obsessed grandmother in Washington, she remembers a coffin filled entirely with ice that was populated by champagne bottles and a fresh pig’s head.
“Back in the day Halloween was a lot scarier,” she says. “And my family was always really about the spooky, the scary. My grandma would go all out with the decorating. We had to have the scariest house, the best candy. It was our unique thing.”
She moved to Chicago in the late 90s to attend SAIC. In 2010, her friend Yamil Rodriguez approached her. He was an instructor at Yollocalli Arts Reach, teaching installation and performance art, and his teenage class was putting together a haunted house. Did she know where to get several gallons of fake blood for cheap?
“I was like, ‘Oh, I got you. That’s easy. I got you.’”
She made the blood herself. (That kind of information swirls in de Rudder’s memory like an old family recipe.) Over the next few years, she helped Rodriguez with more theatrical elements, gradually glimpsing his haunted house process. He’d begin planning by asking the kids what scared them, and they’d recall moments from their lives, like being checked by gangbangers while walking home from school or encountering people experiencing homelessness who were having severe mental health crises late at night. From there, teacher and students worked together brainstorming ways of creatively exploring those fears in ways that felt safe and manageable, while retaining an element of surprise. Then on Halloween night, the class would host a free haunted house for the neighborhood.
“It was cute,” de Rudder says. “Very PG-13.”
According to de Rudder, in 2013, Rodriguez approached Alderperson Danny Solis’s office about routine matters related to the haunted house.
“I think my friend needed permits or sometimes Solis’s office would give him a, like, $200 or $500 stipend or something—chump change. But that particular year, the alderman said some committee—his ethics committee or something—had said they cannot condone giving any city funding or permits or something to a satanic holiday or group that can be viewed as satanic.” De Rudder reiterates: “For a PG-13 show made by kids that’s free on a really bad night for gang activity.”
De Rudder was livid. What kind of person is so threatened by haunted houses that they deny children a safe, fun activity on Halloween? She also had so many materials prepared, and she was on a mask-making binge. A few weeks before the holiday, she decided to spit on the alder’s decision by putting together the most brutal, disgusting haunted house she could create with a limited budget and no permits.
The first La Casa de Satanas was held after-hours in the now-defunct Pilsen coffee shop Nitecap Coffee. It was advertised via flyers on nearby streets in Pilsen and only open for Halloween. Despite a brisk, wet night, there was a line out the door. Scenes included a half-naked devil playing the harpsichord, a rape scene leading to a live birth, and bestiality with a goat corpse. After the house wrapped, the goat provided two meals for the cast and crew: one half going into a vindaloo, the other served over couscous.
Within days, people in de Rudder’s community were asking, “Are you going to do a show like this again?” Come Valentine’s Day, it happened once more at a new location. And then it just kept happening—usually for a weekend in February and a week in October. Though the house operates on as little money as possible, now she gets all the requisite paperwork. The biggest fee—and hardest part—is finding a space. This is its second time being hosted at Co-Prosperity.
La Casa is not for everyone. For starters, you have to be over 18 and sign a waiver. There are also “extreme” nights, which have involved things like rotting meat and tattooing.
“Always read the website and the waiver,” Jason McLaughlin laughs. “Know what you’re getting yourself into.”
McLaughlin has performed with La Casa since 2019. He recalls when the team decided to have fun with the fact that most people take what they’re signing for granted and don’t do their homework.
“Last Halloween, we had on our website for people to wear anti-facial-recognition makeup—you know, where you put blocks and stuff on your face to disguise yourself from cameras. That was an instruction we gave expecting people to not follow it. And oh boy, did they not follow it! Part of my performance was to take their phones and use their face ID to go into their social media and post as them while they were unable to stop me. . . . So yeah, definitely a pro tip for coming to Casa: read up on the show and get a sense of what to expect! If you don’t, I might be on your Facebook.”
Tickets must be purchased in advance through La Casa’s website (no walk-ins), not only so groups of up to four can reserve a time slot together but also to manage guests’ expectations. Against a glitching background of what looks like a vintage pig costume head laughing in a silent movie, the website for this season’s scare warns: “This experimental haunted house is no joke, yeah, there’s a safe word and a waiver. That’s because it’s fully Immersive and you will be touched, exposed to grimy gross things, get dirty, maybe wear a helmet, be exposed to very graphic adult content and did I mention TRIGGERS . . . gasp.”
So-called “extreme” haunts are hardly new, but their appeal and scope vary. One of the most famous is McKamey Manor in Lawrence County, Tennessee, which requires both a 40-page waiver and doctor approval. While killing time on Valentine’s Day, I asked people in the waiting area what brought them to La Casa. Several described themselves as members of the “haunt community,” scouring haunt forums and even traveling the country to find new or unusual scares and people to share them with. One detailed accessing an invite-only haunt where he had to provide an inventory of past breakups and what was most painful about them so his walk-through could be customized based on that.
“It was cathartic,” he said, though he couldn’t explain why. “You’d have to experience it to understand.”
He described another where he had to prearrange what level of torture he was willing to subject himself to (low-voltage electrical wands vs. real tasers, for instance). He used words like “fun” and “self-reflection” to describe what he got out of these experiences. The man who looked like Rob Zombie warned me to never visit McKamey—a name I first learned that night but which came up in several different conversations. When asked why, he stared into the distance for a minute before replying, “Just don’t.” This year, Hulu released a documentary about the abusive man who created the cruel destination called Monster Inside: America’s Most Extreme Haunted House.
There are always risks when trafficking in experiences that push physical and psychological limits to extremes, but de Rudder prides herself on the playful qualities at the heart of La Casa—and the intimacy and trust she cultivates with her accomplices. Props are homemade and showcase imagination over realism. For cast and crew, she relies on a rotating core group of six to 13 people, depending on her space and participating artists’ availability. They come to her through her network and describe it as a passion project they look forward to. Proceeds from ticket sales are split evenly among everyone to create an atmosphere of shared buy-in, and working together repeatedly allows them to build on successes and incorporate past wisdom. For instance, actors become more comfortable developing darker scenes, drawing boundaries with guests, and recognizing when visitors are getting too distressed. When in doubt, they ask, “Do you need to call safety?”
Filmmaker Holden McClain came to the project because they were concerned about roommates who were previously involved.
“They kept coming home at night covered in fake blood,” they say. “And they’d describe stuff like spinning people on crosses. I was like, ‘What the hell, are they doing witch rituals? Are my roommates in danger?!’ I went down to figure out what was going on, but when I got there I was like, ‘Oh wait, ha ha, these are my kind of people.’”
McClain, a shy and soft-spoken individual who began performing at de Rudder’s encouragement, has been helping put together La Casa haunts for five years.
“For me, it’s been such—I don’t know, like taking my power back, honestly. My entire life—the rest of the year between shows—gets put into how I perform. I’m a very small, femme-presenting person. I get harassed a lot day to day and just feel like I lose a lot of power through interactions and stuff throughout the year. To be able to kind of take that back in my own way and exactly how I want to do it is very gratifying to me. And if people don’t want to be there for it, they don’t have to.”
“The first one was so sensationalist,” de Rudder recalls. “Too serious.”
Now she tries to be more mischievous or conceptual. Brainstorming begins months in advance, and she collaborates with her cast and crew to create haunts that subvert familiar tropes and play off of real-world anxieties, similar to what Rodriguez would do with his students. Each house has a theme. When I went for Valentine’s Day, it was called Open Your Heart and featured moments of emotional and physical vulnerability as well as vulnerability of conscience. At one point, you had to tell the truth—and trust your group recognized you were telling the truth—or suffer consequences.
It was sexy and scary—but most of all, it was strange. Or just bizarre, like someone crouched in the dark mining for minerals to make iPhones. I fished for keys to a lover’s heart in a color-changing pool rippled by low-frequency sound vibrations. A person with a Mario mustache wore a cone bra so extraordinary it could impale someone. I got sandwiched between nude bodies with nipples and hair in places I’d never imagined. Many parts made me . . . laugh.
“I feel like you can tell people are about to call safety in one of two ways,” de Rudder explains. “They kind of shut down and go quiet and close their eyes—like really scrunch up their faces. Or they laugh. I think laughter can be a very human response to lots of things, including discomfort. But if you’re laughing at something that is very taboo—very not OK, societally speaking or just humanly speaking or globally or whatever—if you’re laughing at something you shouldn’t be laughing at, that’s so much more of a burn than laughing or being afraid of something that is just external. That laughter literally makes you part of what makes this disgusting. So that causes some self-reflection: Where is the laughter coming from?”
This Halloween’s haunt is called Ur Fucking Hysterical. Each scene is guided by the idea of hysteria. How was hysteria defined in clinical settings? Why were certain people more often diagnosed with it than others? What causes mass hysteria? Why are funny things sometimes called “hysterical?”
De Rudder says, “I feel like laughing and being terrified go hand in hand, like horror and love go hand in hand. It’s just peanut butter and jelly to me.”