Serial killers provide the frights at New York haunted house

NEW YORK (AFP) - Modern theater often involves some degree of interaction between actors and the audience. But paying money to be chased by a blood-soaked lunatic?

New York's Halloween season this year features Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House in which the public wanders from room to room, perusing gory sights.

Set up in a theater in Manhattan's Lower East Side, Killers is less a traditional haunted house than a walk down the grimmest byways of American criminal history.

Actors lurking in dark corners of the installation play a Who's Who of mass murderers. Milwaukee CannibalJeffrey Dahmer's there. Ed Gein, who robbed graves and made himself a "woman suit", inspiring the movies "Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, inhabits another room. Nearby, there's psychopathic clown John Wayne Gacy.