Remember how your little sister used to stand behind the refrigerator door, waiting for you to close it so she could claw her hands, jump high and yell "boo" at you in her most monsterly voice?
We have a good guess what she's up to each September and October if she's a resident of Southern California. That's when a number of our local theme parks transform -- or transmogrify, more like it -- their rides and plazas and entrances into a heavily themed Halloween wonderland packed with ghouls and blinking lights and fog machines and dreary noises.
But the parks can't simply ring up the mythical town of Ghoulville to staff these major undertakings; they need humans, or "humannnnns" if you prefer to read it in a zombie-like movie-scary voice.
That's where the annual July auditions come in.
Mid-summer is the time when the parks beef up their screamy staff lists. Given the hundreds of people hired, and all of the vampire/werewolf/ghost costumes needed, and the creative make-up, and the onboarding meetings, well, July works.
Even monsters need onboarding, of course.
So who's hiring? Knott's Scary Farm will hold its Buena Park tryouts on Saturday, July 19. Aspiring scaries'll need to be 18 or over with "a desire to scare." There are some other to-knows, and you should have some of your early fall free, so read all before donning that audition-worthy scowl.
The Scene
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Universal Studios Hollywood is looking for "(e)nergetic male and female performers to portray various types of monsters throughout Halloween Horror Nights 2014" through Thursday, July 17. Two of the announced mazes? "The Walking Dead" and "From Dusk til Dawn." You could be in the French aristocracy creepy street scene, too; it's a big event with oodles of eerie actors in every corner of the park.
But if vampire dancing is your thing -- and high fives if so, because that is wonderfully specific and creative -- stay tuned: Aug. 1 is your Halloween Horror Nights audition date. Details.
