Watson, a Kensington resident, is one of five friends who formed a company to create the scariest haunted house that Rockville has ever seen. The Warehouse: Project 4.1 will take up 37,000 square feet in a former Filene’s Basement on Rockville Pike and will be open on select days from Sept. 28 through Nov. 3. A full schedule is available at hallowinc.com.
What’s your haunted house all about? It’s a zombie-infested warehouse. We’re trying to contain these zombies that have been infected by a nuclear project gone wrong that was actually based on a real project that the U.S. government did in the ’50s in the Cold War. There are going to be morgue rooms, body bags hanging from the ceiling. There’s going to be some labs, pretty much a whole hospital wing; it’s a ton of space. We want to keep it a little under wraps because we want people to get excited about it.
How many zombies will there be? There will be 50 to 55 actors on staff. However, we’re going to get people to sign up for our “be a zombie for a night” promotion. So we’ll give people the option. That way we can get high school students involved.
How did you come up with this idea? A couple of us thought of it before we all came together. Then the four of us went to Busch Gardens for their big event called Howl-O-Scream. We really enjoyed it; we saw the huge lines there, and we were like, “We could really do this, and this could be a good business.” Then we went to haunted houses in the area, and we didn’t get scared. So we thought, “We could definitely do this much better.” Our whole premise was to make it scarier than any other haunted house we’ve ever been to.
– Liz Essley
