US show offers different kind of Halloween creepy

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - While millions of excited children this week celebrated Halloween by going trick-or-treating or dressing up as zombies, one United States theatre offered a distinctly more adults-only, dress-down experience.

Billed as "extreme theatre," the Blackout Haunted House invites paying customers to walk alone, in the dark, into a series of scenarios that are certainly creepy, but not in a traditional ghosts'n'monsters horror way.

"Do you have asthma, b****? Epilepsy? Answer, son of a b****!" yelled one of the actors who puts on the edgy show - some of them apparently near-naked - pointing a light directly into the eyes of a disoriented visitor.

If the answer is "No," the customer - including this reporter - is pushed into a totally darkened room and, while desperately searching for the slightest source of light, is touched and pinched by hands that come and go.