Summer camps can help visitors cultivate new friendships, confidence, resiliency, and survival skills. Camp Coffin Creek is no different, except for the bloodthirsty slashers and brain-hungry zombies.
“We created a 12-hour camping horror survival experience where campers get to experience what it would be like to be in a real 1980s slasher, with killings that are completely random,” said Matthieu Gagnier, the owner, designer, and creative director of Nightmare Rising. “You don’t know who’s going to get attacked. You don’t know when you will get attacked. You’re getting picked off one by one slowly until the last person remains.”
Camp Coffin Creek is the latest addition to Nightmare Rising’s expansive, immersive horror and scream park programming, typically held on 400 dark acres at the SC Village Paintball and Airsoft Park in Chino. The event is happening Aug. 21, 22, 28, and 29, inviting horror enthusiasts to a unique overnight haunt where guests will play traditional outdoor games with a spin, such as blood tag, hide-and-seek, and stab-stab goose. They’ll be able to make s’mores and watch scary camp movies while five undercover slashers cut their way through the guests.
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“I got bored with the traditional haunts that all the theme parks and corporate haunts do, where you walk through, and nothing happens except people jump out at you on a single path walk-through,” Gagnier said. “I wanted and knew that there was a way to create something scarier, more intense, and realistic.”
Campers are also dared to survive three other haunted attractions happening throughout the event including, Zombie Survival Flight: where players wear a flag belt while zombies try to take them off and infect them; Zombie Survival Fight: where players are issued faux weapons and placed under the command of a squad leader to eliminate the undead without be touched; and Terror in the Woods: where coyotes circle in the darkness and cannibal hillbillies are on the hunt for campers.
“I’ve turned what is considered a haunt into a game and morphed it into this survival competition,” Gagnier said. “That’s the kind of stuff we do, and my company’s mission statement is to change the way people experience haunts by giving them a sense of urgency and a sense that their decisions will affect their outcome.”
The slashers will blend in with 30 actors who will be among the guests and carry fake knives with retractable blades that spray campers with ink and mark them on their shirts, which will be given to them upon entrance. If the slashers catch them, they are eliminated from the final camper competition, which runs until morning.
However, eliminated guests will still be allowed to participate in other competitions and enjoy the event. The winner of the final camper competition will receive a season pass to return to any of Nightmare Rising’s attractions anytime they’re open.
“It’s a way of almost playing kind of like an adult version of tag, and it’s very intense,” Gagnier said. “The campers can run away and hide, but with the number of actors and the number of slashers I have out there, it’s going to come down to one person who is going to make it through dawn.”
Those looking to sign up for summer camp may have noticed that the website has two waivers that need to be completed to participate in the event that’s deemed an “extreme haunt,” because, unlike the majority of other haunt events, the actors at Camp Coffin Creek can and will put their hands on the guests.
Gagnier said the waiver is a fear factor in itself and assures those looking at the over-the-top waiver have nothing to worry about. He has been doing home haunts since he was a kid and has gained lots of experience working several different positions at haunts at Knott’s Berry Farm, Castle Park, and other independent ones in California. His daughters also grew up in haunts, and his eldest will participate as a slasher at Camp Coffin Creek.
The other actors are also vetted and people he has met over the years working in the industry. Some of them work at other haunts, including Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, Knott’s Scary Farm, Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor and Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood.
“Our training process is extreme, but our actors are so well trained that most of our guests don’t even know that they got touched,” he said. “At our haunt, at any point in time, if it becomes too much for the campers, all they have to do is raise both hands in the air and say ‘mercy,’ and immediately the world changes. As soon as they raise their hands and say mercy, the actors stop becoming monsters and gently help them out of the attraction, or they’ll back away and let them be.”
Nightmare Rising’s next event is in October and is dubbed Pandemic Z, featuring six simultaneous storylines in which military personnel, zombie hunters, and terrified survivors must work together to survive an infected population. Until then, Camp Coffin Creek gives horror enthusiasts an early preview of a different style of haunts.
“We just want everybody to have a phenomenal immersive horror experience without actually needing therapy or going to the hospital afterward,” Gagnier said. “We’re not trying to traumatize anybody, but we want to show them what it would be like if you were really in one of these films and fighting to survive the night.”
Camp Coffin Creek
When: 7 p.m.-7 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 21; Sunday, Aug. 22; Saturday, Aug. 28; and Sunday, Aug. 29.
Where: SC Village Paintball & Airsoft Park, 8900 McCarty Road, Chino.
Tickets: $140 per camper; $240 for two campers; $440 for four campers; and $200 per VIP guest. Each admission ticket includes a tent rental to accommodate each camper.
Information: nightmarerisinghaunt.com.