Guts

By Jack Parker

The three of us stood chanting “hail Satan” above the disemboweled girl when she announced she wasn’t feeling well and had to go home. Haunted attractions could be grueling work, and she was a newbie, so I didn’t blame her. The endurance of a theater kid is a skill that has to be built up over time and not everyone has it, so we sent her on her way.

While we waited for our backup girl we took a break for dinner. We set up shop in a small corner of the school hallway, where we presented the tableau of a Satanic ritual. I sat on one side eating a burger while Eric and Penelope (real names withheld) sat on the other, holding hands and generally being an obnoxiously happy couple. For the record, I think that all happy couples are obnoxious, but I found them especially so because I had a massive crush on Penelope and I thought Eric was kind of a useless scrub.  Many of the thoughts and feelings I held in tenth grade have now been eroded, after years of perspective, but I still think Eric was kind of a useless scrub and Penelope should’ve been with me instead. Not everyone matures with age.

Penelope was an ethereal redhead with a penchant for witty commentary and a love for theater. Eric was a less glamorous spectacle who had a very English sense of reserve and snobbery, though he was from Alabama. They were the kind of couple whose incongruity angers me to a certain extent—much like Tom Holland and Zendaya—but they were into each other, and I realize it’s only the basest, most childish parts of my psyche that still hold animosity towards them. But I’m getting off-track here. I promised a tale of Satanic disembowelment.

When the second girl arrived, we explained the situation to her. She would lie across two chairs pushed together, then we would place a Tupperware container of fake intestines on her stomach, drape a white sheet with a slit over it, and pull them out while she screamed. The recipe for the fake intestines was something I had learned from my drama teacher and the man who organized the haunted house, Mr. Foust, who to the best of my knowledge, had never sold his soul to the devil. It was a very simple recipe: you had to make a huge batch of oatmeal, dye it red, and then funnel the oatmeal into sausage casings. The result was a pretty nasty set of fake guts. 

I’d always had a love for theatrical gore, and that fall, I was especially bloodthirsty. I had recently attended a horror convention featuring legendary makeup artist Tom Savini and I wanted to apply his splatter-film effects to our high-school hell house. However, after just about thirty minutes, our second girl also became ill. She was more experienced in the world of theater, so this surprised me, but such things happen. We relieved her of her duties and brought in a third girl, who turned out to be a true professional. She was about the size of a toothpick but she could scream bloody murder like no one’s business. We were finally getting our act together, when a new disaster struck.

Censorship has been the bane of many great artists, from Michelangelo to Joyce to Hitchock, and I am no different. Mr. Foust came in to tell us that certain parents had complained about the contents of our performance and that we had to change it. Now, the graphic disembowelment of a screaming victim was not the problem; it was that we kept using the phrase “hail Satan.” Apparently, it was not an appropriate phrase for a small town highschool in the Bible Belt. Once we agreed to switch out the phrase with the more innocuous “hail the dark lord,” we were able to keep maiming and mangling as much as we wanted.

We kept on with our PG-13 slaughterhouse for a while longer until our third victim said she too was feeling nauseous. That’s when I knew something was up. This could not be a coincidence. I wondered if the fake intestines were too gross for the performers. We didn’t have any more girls to call as back up, and there were only about twenty minutes left in the haunted house anyway before we started to clean up. So I put the intestines away and just ditched the whole sacrifice part. Instead, we chanted creepy incantations as though we were celebrating a Black Mass. 

When it was all over, Eric and Penelope left together and my only date was the box of innards I had to carry home. I put them in a minifridge I had in the basement and promptly forgot about them. A few months later, my parents noticed a nasty smell coming from the basement. No points for guessing what that smell was. The stench of decomposing stomach lining was so strong that we had to throw the whole fridge away.

It turned out I had been right about the intestines making the girls sick, but not because they were too gory; it was the material. I now know that if you want to make fake guts, you need to use vegan sausage casings because if you use ones made from actual pig intestines, they will start to rot and smell awful. But as a young, oblivious kid getting into gore effects for the first time, I’d just bought the first ones I saw, which were made from real hogs. And if you sit for a couple of hours with a container of rotting pig meat on your stomach, you might just start to feel a little sick. 

By every objective measure, the night of the haunted house was a failure. But I had fun. I don’t look back on that night thinking about what a pathetic loser I was. Sure, I was a pathetic loser, but that doesn’t matter. High school theater departments are made for pathetic losers. We disemboweled girls for entertainment, and we were laughing the whole time. If I were to do it all over again, I’d use vegan sausage casings and save everyone some nausea, but part of the fun of being alive is making mistakes. If everything had gone perfectly, well, that wouldn’t be much of a story, would it?