The Weird, Grotesque Glory of an Insane Clown Posse Show at Rob Zombie’s Haunted House

What happens when freak-show guests are more experienced freaks than the hosts?

There is a wonderful line in the musical Passing Strange about the protagonist’s life being determined by a series of choices he made as a stoned teenager. I think about it sometimes when I think about both Insane Clown Posse and Rob Zombie—grown men and savvy businessmen whose aesthetics are defined by the scary-silly personas they developed as kids. These are men in their forties and, in Zombie’s case, early fifties, who are locked into being publicly known as “Shaggy 2 Dope,””Violent J,” and “Rob Zombie” for life. Zombie’s successful reinvention as a filmmaker afforded him an opportunity to shuck off a silly stage pseudonym and direct under his own name, but he instead doubled down on being an adult with the last name Zombie.

Against long odds, these curious pop icons have emerged as strangely resilient elder statesmen of musical horror. That’s partly attributable to Insane Clown Posse and Zombie’s gift not just for creating music but for building worlds, whether it’s Insane Clown Posse’s Dark Carnival mythology or the complementary universe of Zombie’s provocative horror movies. Yet underneath the lovingly depicted depravity lies an incongruous innocence. Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Rob Zombie all clearly never stopped being the weird, spooky kids who sincerely believed in the spirit of Halloween like Linus believes in the Great Pumpkin.

So it makes sense that when the people behind the Rob Zombie-designed Great American Nightmare haunted house in Villa Park, Illinois were looking for an act to perform between Zombie’s two shows on October 2 and 4, they chose Insane Clown Posse. On October 3 I took a forty dollar Uber ride from the north side of Chicago to the suburban no man’s land of Villa Park so that I could experience this magical fusion of clown and zombie myself.
The problem with pitching a freak show to Juggalos is that Juggalos are much more accomplished freaks than the professionals ostensibly entertaining them.
Twitter
In the process of writing You Don ‘ t Know Me But You Don ‘ t Like Me, my 2013 book about ostracized musical subcultures, I went from being a skeptic—who more or less lazily bought into the public conception of Insane Clown Posse as the worst of the worst—to an Insane Clown Posse fan. I ultimately came to love the casual ambition of its worldview and mythology, the weirdly inclusive vibe of its yearly “Gathering of the Juggalos” festival, and its goofy, wildly self-deprecating humor and sneaky pop appeal. . While Insane Clown Posse’s earnest message song “Miracles” may have been the source of universal mockery, most of the time, Insane Clown Posse is supposed to be funny. They are most assuredly in on the joke.

In true carny fashion, before any scares could even be attempted, a little hard-selling first had to occur. My group of four spook-seekers were offered an opportunity to take photographs of ourselves being terrified by one of the house’s low-rent ghouls. Thirty-five dollars for three large photos and several smaller ones. How could we refuse?

We were then instructed to place hoods over our heads as we felt our way through a blackened corridor. I semi-acquiesced to these belligerent fake monsters’ angry demands by putting the hood down over most of my face, but leaving enough uncovered so I could at least see the floor. This enraged the profane sass-mouths in ghoulish garb. “Put the WHOLE hood over your head, or the next door you enter will be the exit door!” a monster-for-pay yelled exasperatedly. Haunted houses are great because they combine fantastical fears of zombies, serial killers and monsters with the universal, more grounded fear of being thrill-killed by under-employed teenagers.

To make it to the next exhibit, we had to exit through a small, tight opening. So I pushed on and was finally allowed to remove my hood, at which point an unseen but very insistent voice yelled, “Exit through the vagina! Exit through the vagina!”

The employees at the American Nightmare were a strange combination of undead ghoul and amateur insult comedian—half Leatherface, half Don Rickles. Apparently the employee handbook that comes with snagging the plum role of Guy Insulting Strangers Despite Oozing Viscera From a Huge Gash in His Chest instructs spookateers to take full advantage of the rich comic possibilities endemic in hairlessness and aggressively questioning male patrons’ sexual orientation and gender. (Thus mocking comments about my baldness competed with even crueler comments about the nature and constitution of my genitalia.)

While the hooded component of the house relied on the cheap if eminently dependable shock of complete darkness for its effectiveness, the Great American Nightmare was pretty non-scary—likely because scare technology seemingly hasn’t advanced much beyond the tried-and-true “jump out and yell boo!” technique. At Great American Nightmare, however, it was often more like, “Crawl out of a disgustingly violent tableau and scream ‘Fuck you!'” Same principle, but a little more aggressive. Then came Captain Spaulding ‘ s 3-D Clown School, an attraction based on a beloved fixture of Zombie’s films that would only need a few minor tweaks to become Shaggy 2 Dope & Violent J ‘ s 3-D Clown School.

The problem with pitching a freak show to Juggalos is that, with their clown make-up and ghoulish, self-created personas, Juggalos are generally much more accomplished freaks than the professionals ostensibly entertaining/terrifying them. Their make-up is better, they’ve put more thought into their characters, and they embrace being a freak as a central component of their existence, and not as seasonal part-time labor. When I saw a fat man in underwear surrounded by a pair of women in skimpy Day-Glo attire in a gaudy neon backlight wonderland, I realized this wouldn’t be an unusual tableau at the Gathering of the Juggalos—except that there the fat guy would be twice as obese and an albino and he would never charge people to gawk at him. It wouldn’t be sporting.

Rob Zombie is a smart man, and a man who’s clearly thought about the political aspects of violence in entertainment (he’s a vegan, for chrissakes) and how it both reflects and comments upon real-world bloodshed. There’s a deep strain of social commentary in Zombie’s films. But it’s harder to express ideas in a realm of pure gothic spectacle like a haunted house, where his ideas are most likely executed by poorly compensated teenagers who got into character by toking up in the parking lot.

A sign bragged we were in “DuPage County’s Largest Sports & Expo center,” and boy, did it ever feel like DuPage County’s Largest Sports & Expo center.

And, of course, you’re not supposed to think in a haunted house. You are actively discouraged from thinking, from pondering the connotations of the fake bloodbath in front of you, and instead encouraged to feel just a single intense emotion—fear. Still, it’s difficult to be told to put a hood over your head and not think about the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib. And even in this fictional context, it’s distressing to see so many women faux-abused; the essence of so much horror comes down to monstrous men doing horrible things to sexy women, but when one of the countless women being fake-tortured by a leering creep desperately implored visitors to help her and the leering creep leeringly insisted no one would, my mind immediately went to Kitty Genovese.

But before I could think too hard about things the haunted house probably did not want me thinking about, the haunted house was over, and the concert part of the evening began. Behind the performers was a giant rendering of the hideous Mighty Missing Link, the title character from the duo’s last two albums, and Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, accompanied by sinister clown hype-men in clown suits festooned with the group’s Hatchet Man logo, proceeded to instantly transform a sluggish show in a grim industrial venue (a sign in the space bragged that we were currently in “DuPage County’s Largest Sports & Expo center,” and boy did it ever feel like DuPage County’s Largest Sports & Expo center) into a roaring spectacle.

The venue was only half full, but even that ended up working in Insane Clown Posse’s favor. The sparsely populated high school gym-style bleachers cleared out almost completely as the entire crowd surged to the front of the stage both so that they could get the best possible view—and be sprayed with Faygo, the off-brand soda that is central to the group’s mythology and is officially, unofficially, the official beverage of discriminating Juggalos everywhere. Insane Clown Posse shows resemble old-time vaudeville or live variety shows more than typical concerts, and they even have commercials in the form of regular “Faygo breaks” where clown hype men spray the audience with Faygo while a demented Faygo jingle from somewhere in the gothic past plays.

At any Insane Clown Posse event, damn near every song is a sing-along, although at the Great American Nightmare show, the energy level was so high that the songs became more like shout-alongs.

In recordings, songs from Insane Clown Posse’s almost perversely positive, cheerful, and childlike new album The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (an album so sincere in its earnest endorsement of faith that it feels almost like Christian rap at times) like “Juggalo Party,” “Get Clowned,” and “I Fucked a Cop” sound a little like tepid rehashes of previous anthems with suspiciously similar titles. (Not surprisingly, the words “Clown” and “Juggalo” reappear over and over again in Insane Clown Posse song titles.) Onstage, however, these new songs roared to life and fit in perfectly with chestnuts from the Insane Clown Posse back catalogue. Insane Clown Posse’s music is built for live performance, not bedroom headphone listening. It’s about profane, foul-mouthed celebration, not subtlety or sophistication. Like Zombie, they’re showmen above all else.

Insane Clown Posse ended the show with “Bang! Pow! Boom!,” a rousing fixture of their live performances (at the Gathering they often made the chorus gloriously literal by pairing it with a fireworks display) that finds delirious joy in the prospect of total oblivion. Then the crowd, ecstatic to have been a part of this simpatico semi-collaboration between oddly ingratiating icons of tongue-in-cheek spookery, left, leaving the floors of DuPage County’s largest Sports & Expo center behind them covered in a soupy, sticky combination of confetti, empty bottles, and dried Faygo.