As this helpful illustration shows, the current entrance is situated dead ahead, within the double doors. It seems the old entrance was just past the bus shelter, through the imposing stone archway on the left. If you pay close attention when hanging about around there (it's now a fire exit - and as a result, a common route for actors leading out the easily terrified once they reach the Ghosts of York section), you can make out the remnants of decorations indicative of the old entrance. There's a hidden sign bearing the legend 'Enter at Your Peril' in bloody red letters, as well as an extremely impressive grim reaper, pitched at an enormous size and bearing down from the ceiling with Draculean fangs and bared talons.
This curiosity aside, the current entrance is a wondrous creation. Once through the doors, visitors are ushered up an imposing wooden staircase flanked by decaying castle architecture. It's every cliched Hollywood Dungeon distilled into one glorious whole; evenly pitched between the monolithic majesty of Universal's Tower of London, the depressive squalor of The Black Sleep and the colourful pulp sensationalism of The Terror by Roger Corman. Just within the doors is the caged figure of an axe-wielding executioner, accompanied by a headless victim kneeling at the block. In one of the Dungeon's many attractive water features, blood gushes from the victim's neck with insatiable gusto for the entire eight hours of the attraction's opening. A hidden smoke machine means that the vignette is usually wreathed in cost-effective atmosphere; a nice little effect when picked up by the wind outside. There's also the bonus of a hidden censor that causes the display to intermittently shoot water at the guests. This can be a little infuriating for even the staff - no matter how many times I pass the damn thing, and no matter how many objects I hurl past it in a vain effort to trigger it before I pass, I still can't figure out a formula for avoiding its severe drenching effects. Just opposite is the carefully themed door that affords safe passage to our underground staff room, from which ghouls in varying states of disrepair emerge at all hours. Seeing as there's no connecting passage between the staff room and the attraction's interior, actors have no option but to walk around the building to access their positions - which at least offers an all-too-rare exposure to the undyingly precious commodity of sunlight - in full view of the queuing guests. This can be fun at times, irritating at others. It very much depends on the crowd and your particular mood. In peak times (and summer is certainly one of 'em), there's usually one actor (bedecked in monk-like raiments and sporting a skull on a stick) stationed at the entrance to entertain the crowd and supply vital information - guidance for anxious parents and children, historical background, our extortionate ticket prices, and so forth. However, that doesn't exempt poor, innocent, undeserving you from public interaction when trying to walk past the crowd as inconspicuously as possible - no mean feat when you're dripping every which way in your flouncy, blood-spattered shirt and period breeches. I can't improvise for toffee, so I tend to growl in some guttural, baleful tone if confronted, and then bolt as quickly as possible. Just this week, fellow Dungeonites took it upon themselves to bellow 'ALL HAIL THE LEGEND!' at me as I crossed to the secret entrance, forcing me to break into an embarrassed dash as they cheered, hollered and broke into Munchkin-style song. Humiliating each other within controlled boundaries is a daily custom at the Dungeon - a constant trial and sometime amusement...
Once up the staircase, there was until very recently a lovely vignette of a man being branded, resplendent in blazing orange, with chains and shackles throwing shadows on the walls behind. It's vanished recently, so it's probably being repaired - it's simply too good an image to be disposed of completely. There's also an elaborate figure of Queen Elizabeth I, wrapped in one of her signature dresses and staring at guests from a raised platform. This was originally part of a special exhibit on wicked women through the ages, which, among others, featured the warrior queen Boadicea (still there last summer, spear aloft and face a horror) and Anne Robinson (a figure loaned out from The London Dungeon - and apparently kept here by popular demand). Elizabeth alone remains. She used to have a sinister black raven perched on her shoulder, a probable nod to the Tower of London's lasting fixation on them, so it's a shame that this too has disappeared. Guests next reach the cash desk, stacked with the inevitable souvenir booklets and glow sticks (one of the most frustrating items in all creation... for a number of reasons I'll go into later), as well as a photo spot featuring an axe and severed head for guests to hold, the stocks for further adventuring, and, in the background, a wonderful skeleton wreathed with cobwebs. Certainly high on my list of Dungeon props I would most like to own. Another skeleton hovers above the cash desk, at once tangled up in and wielding a threatening hangman's noose. Skeletons are my earliest memory of my fascination with horror. Slight creepiness aside, there's something so aesthetically pleasing about them. None of the messy human nonsense - sleek emblems of high design; automatons even, near-robotic in appearance. By this criteria, it was probably equally likely at one time that I'd want to be a doctor, but it seems that less profitable dabblings in English lay ahead.
The atmosphere intensifies tenfold with the entrance into the first show: Clifford's Tower. It's probably the tamest and least ambitious of the current Dungeon shows, but that may just be me speaking as a jaded old cynic, forever annoyed that there's no real place for an actor in there. Visitors enter into an extremely dark wooden corridor - the deepest recesses of a heavily fortified Yorkshire castle. It can get very claustrophobic in there. The sole illumination is provided by flame. It can be seen licking away at the walls, peeping in at every chink and corner, the wood quite black by contrast. There are five or six different means by which the illusion of a blazing inferno is created. There are your standard spotlights mingling red, orange and yellow, a number of burning torches hanging from the walls, and an especially eye-catching device that produces a violent, strobe-like flickering. Most impressive of all is a turret window that provides a view of a sheet of flame. This is a very simple effect - quite literally a sheet, albeit one appropriately fanned and lit - but surprisingly effective. The earliest use of this particular effect in a dark attraction was Pirates of the Caribbean (not the film - the far superior theme park ride... now forever besmirched by the addition of an animatronic Johnny Depp). The story goes that Uncle Walt invited a select colloquy of guests to tour the attraction ahead of the grand opening. As Karl Bacon recalls:
I remember the head of the fire department coming through the lower doors way down there, and he looked up there and saw it and said 'You can't have fire in here!' As he got closer he saw that it was done with colored plastic. He was going to shut them down!
If you'll forgive the pun, this is surefire testament to the effect's powers of persuasion. Many of the Dungeon's special effects are deeply indebted to the wonderful world of Imagineering, so I imagine I'll be referring to Disney attractions quite a bit more as I roll on with my pontifications.
One detail that I used to adore about this window view was subtle enough to be easily missed. If you looked out far enough, you could make out a charred, skeletal corpse, lying prostrate in agony at the base of the fire. Very reminiscent of those interminable scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean of skeletons in various Holbeinesque poses - playing cards, drinking wine, lying in four-poster beds and other sainted nonsense. The corpse has shifted location - now it lies in the corner, pinned beneath the feet of a monk, who hisses prophecies of relentless doom at his captives and does much to increase the tension. In my opinion, this is one of the Dungeon's most effective (not to mention economical) new features. I've been told that The Edinburgh Dungeon opens with the infamous court-room scene, the script slightly rewritten to include references to the multitude of horrors that visitors are yet to experience. It's a truth rarely acknowledged in tourist attractions, but their primary mission is to be good theatre. With this low-key generation of suspense, Edinburgh has the beginnings of an overarching dramatic structure to tie together what risks dissolving into a series of fairly impressive but unrelated vignettes. With the introduction of the monk, The York Dungeon has gone some way towards duplicating this, as well as providing a genuine show to elegantly wallpaper over the Tower's function as a glorified waiting room prior to the first actor-led show. So we hear about The Great Plague (cheery accusations from the monk that one among the audience will soon infect the others), Guy Fawkes (the classic Dungeon description of being hung, drawn and quartered, conveyed in graphic, mouth-watering detail), the Viking invaders (Erik Bloodaxe gets so many grand introductions in the Dungeon that it's disappointing when you meet him, but the name more than warrants it) and witch-burning (clearly a sign that the Dungeon plans on keeping its newest horror for years to come... despite the slight technological dilemmas). Most importantly, we get an intelligible explanation of the history of Clifford's Tower for probably the first time since the feature's 2001 introduction. It is the plaque situated at the foot of the Tower itself - a mere two minute walk from the Dungeon premises - that puts it most succinctly:
On the night of Friday 16 March 1190 some 150 Jews and Jewesses of York, having sought protection in the Royal Castle on this site from a mob incited by Richard Malebisse and others, chose to die at each other's hands rather than renounce their faith.
A considerable amount of Jewish citizens were killed by the fire that the crowd started as siege degenerated into blood-lust, but the greater number died as suicides. Despite the plaque's cheerily low estimate, some have placed the death total as high as five hundred. The Tower was later rebuilt with stones taken from a Tadcaster quarry. These were soon observed to release a suspicious red liquid - an incident that got far too many locals hissing inane superstition about the ghostly blood of restless Jews. In reality, the liquid was produced by the release of small deposits of iron oxide in the stone. Rather than commemorate this idiotic footnote, unworthy of even The Amityville Horror, the Dungeon replicates the inferno. Unlike almost every other event the Dungeon covers, there's not a shred of exploitative fun or self-knowing, cynical irony to be found in it. Frankly, I'm amazed that they went ahead and built it. Maybe my hope that the Dungeon will someday house an exhibit based on Bedern (the York school in which the mad headmaster murdered his pupils and stashed the bodies in a cupboard) isn't quite so improbable. Or maybe the Clifford's Tower section is a product of its time: nine years is a virtual life-age in the realm of the politically correct. In fact, the feature can be argued as an emblem of a time when the Dungeon really did aim to be thought-provoking in exposing the atrocities of the past. Then again, you could also argue that it's just in very bad taste. Yet we receive no complaints about it. Clearly it's a little upstaged by the bad taste yet to come...
The special effects wizardry by which the monk tirelessly delivers and redelivers his fifteen minutes of doom is worthy of comment. As I said a bit earlier, this is one of the Dungeon's few sections not to feature an actor, not that you'd guess this from certain remarks that you hear from the public. Some insist the monk is a real person (usually followed with a comment to the effect of 'the eyes - THEY BE FOLLOWIN' ME!'); others that the head is a hologram, which is vague to say the least and assumes too much of our capabilities; best of the bunch (and always from young children) is 'the head is real - but the body is fake!' Yes. Come to The York Dungeon. Home of the world's first fully functioning disembodied head. Catch him next season with the RSC in Hamlet, alternating as Yorick in Hamlet and post-execution Buckingham in Richard III. The effect is actually no more than a blank, featureless bust onto which the footage of an actor is projected. This is another deception that originated with those tricksy Imagineering folk, who first set it to use in The Haunted Mansion in 1969. The illusion was apparently discovered almost by accident - the happy result of some unstructured play with a statue of an American President and a film reel of actor Hans Conreid impersonating the Magic Mirror. The near-mythic legacy of The Haunted Mansion has led to some memorable pop folklore in America. Among them is Madame Leota, a medium trapped in her own crystal ball, and the unlikely fusion of the remarkable face of Leota Toombs and the chilling voice of Eleanor Audley (harbinger of childhood nightmares the world over with her roles as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty):
Even better are the Mansion's crowd-pleasing Singing Busts. In the lead is the almighty Thurl Ravenscroft, who not only sung the show-stopping 'You're a Mean One, Mr Grinch' for the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (Boris Karloff narrated, as well as voicing the immortal green nasty), but gained eternal glory as the never less than grrr-rrr-rrreat voice of Tony the Tiger in innumerable Frosties adverts. Far better than the kid who replaced him, I'm sure you'll agree:
The only downside to this effect is that it precludes the lashings and lashings of smoke that originally made Clifford's Tower that bit more frightening as the first of the Dungeon experiences. So despite the blazing fire, despite the power of all that sound and fury, Clifford's Tower is surprisingly bereft of, well, smoke. Swamp the chamber in a foggy soup and the projector's location is instantly revealed by the telltale streaks of light gushing from the ceiling. I suppose that internal projection is the solution, but apart from being ludicrously expensive, relying on fiber-optics and whatnot, it does tend to make characters look as though their faces are inside out. However, this limitation certainly didn't stop the management piping in gallons of smoke when the figure was in its original location - standing at the docks of a plague-ridden city, dispensing choice witticisms such as 'ALL OF YOU WILL DIE!' (always a popular line in the staff room, where it was quite audible at all times) in the person of a different actor entirely. That always seemed a softer projection than the crisp, digital image that we now have, but that might well have been the smoke working its reductive magic. It's fitting that I end this installment on the topic of The Great Plague, because that's precisely where I'll be picking up next time. And since there'll be a non-projected, flesh-and-blood actor about, I might even get round to discussing some dramatic articles. So: less indulgence of my insane fetish for ghost trains and more nearly on-topic blodgery! Hurrah!
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