London-based event company Chillsauce has announced Birmingham Overnight Werewolf Hunting, a new experience package that may interest Werewolf News readers in the UK… particularly those with a penchant for paintball guns and falling down in the dark.
For £149 per person, you and seven (or more) friends can spend six hours living out your “werewolf attack nightmares” in the woods outside Droitwich, Worcestershire. Werewolf News reader Yang kindly emailed me a link to a PR Newswire release explaining what, exactly, participants are getting themselves into:
This potentially life-changing night requires a minimum group size of 8 people, arriving for 8pm and then continuing until dawn. Hunters will be prepared with safety training, kitted out with werewolf repellent clothing, undergo a crash course in basic military training and receive a briefing on weapons training. Before the hunters begin, they will set up preventative trip wires and explosive booby traps around the camp to protect against the imminent attack.
Hunters will then embark on their werewolf hunting mission almost physically shaking with fear in the knowledge that at some point in the night their fortified group position will be attacked by these beasts. The aim is to hold off the threat and secure the silver bullets to defeat the werewolves. The session will run through the night and end at approximately 2:00am. Military style accommodation with bunks is available where they can rest until the safe light of day.
Chillsauce can stock your bunk with £10 Stag Packs, so you and your pals can drink lager and eat “assorted snacks” until your fiancée picks you up at dawn and takes you home for a shower, a nap, and brunch with her parents at 11.
I think this is a bad idea, and not because I like to play “werewolf rights advocate” on Twitter. Chillsauce runs a lot of events, many of which involve wearing tactical pants, holding a paintball gun and looking forward to beer, so I’m sure they have the event logistics well in hand. They wouldn’t be able to afford that nice web site and that London office if they didn’t know what they were doing. The problem lies with the “werewolves”.
It’s hard enough to make a werewolf look realistic and properly threatening in a five-second movie FX shot! An in-person encounter, regardless of lighting conditions and adrenaline jitters, is going to be much harder to pull off with any realism, let alone the realism people are going to expect when they’ve chipped in for a $2,000 USD “experience”. Two dudes in costume shop masks probably aren’t going to cut it, but anything more elaborate than that is just going to get trashed by tree branches and whatever acrobatics are necessary while breaching a perimeter.
Chillsauce might be better off re-purposing their extra paintball guns and paramilitary trainers into a zombie-themed event, like this one. Zombie makeup is easier to “do” than werewolf makeup, and will actually look better the more its wearer mangles it while crashing through bushes in the dark. Plus, zombies tend to attack in groups and waves, which sounds like it would be a lot more fun to defend against than one or two focussed werewolf onslaughts.
As usual, I’m probably overthinking this, but when it comes to werewolf stuff, that’s… kind of my deal!