‘Monster Inside’ Director Andrew Renzi dives deep into McKamey Manor

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the horror space, you’re likely well aware of McKamey Manor. Billed as the most extreme haunted house in America, it delights in torturing participants until they crack, either physically or mentally. Everyone signs a waiver, of course, but its line-blurring approach to scaring you brings up not only legal questions but moral ones.

In his documentary, Monster Inside: America’s Most Extreme Haunted House (streaming on Hulu), filmmaker Andrew Renzi hopes to answer those questions. He brings along a host of interview subjects, including several who’ve actually survived the haunt, and allows them to tell their own harrowing stories. In between interviews, Renzi peppers in real, raw footage straight from McKamey Manor. Many of the clips are tough to watch, depicting everything from waterboarding to being trapped inside a freezer.

Initially, Renzi approached Hulu about making a horror documentary, as he felt there was a gaping hole in the marketplace. “I loved the idea of trying to break convention a little bit and try to sneak into the genre space by way of a documentary,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands. Then, McKamey Manor stepped into the picture when Hulu introduced Renzi to a company called Lion TV, which had been developing a McKamey story. “I recognized that what better way to try to make one of the first horror documentaries by way of a story about people who want to live their own real-life horror film.”

Renzi then fell down a rabbit hole of research, and what he found was hair-raising. “I tend to be pretty understanding about extreme behavior and people that are seeking out experiences that might be slightly on the edge that people might not otherwise understand,” he says. “My first reaction to it was: I don’t think that this is real because the videos are so intense. They’re all in close-up and just so wildly, vividly intense that I thought to myself, ‘Okay, there’s some kind of production trick going on here or from a marketing perspective, or whatever that might be.’ When I started talking to people that went and did it, they told me, ‘No, no, everything you’re seeing is real here.’ I got really interested in why are people going to do this. And that’s really what was the launching point for me.”

In our conversation, Andrew Renzi dives deep into his work, what he learned in the process, his favorite found footage films, and why people seek out such extreme haunts.

Do you think MacKamey Manor really does go too far?

Yeah, for sure. I’m completely comfortable with people going into consensual situations for the sake of entertainment, or whatever you want to say, with the full understanding that like, ‘Okay, I’m a client, and you are the purveyor of this business, there’s going to be a contract here that’s going to say, if I feel like you’re going too far, then you’re going too far. And you got to stop.’ Where the difficulty with McKamey Manor kind of lies is the idea of consent is really gray. There’s not really a clear safe word. People talk about safe words being two paragraphs long, so you just can’t remember it. I watched countless videos where people are just like, ‘I want to stop,’ and it just doesn’t stop. That alone really makes me feel like there’s a problem with it. There’s not necessarily a problem with the concept, but there was definitely a problem with the execution.

That brings up the whole legality of something like this.

One thing I found out as I was going down the line is that he does make people sign a waiver. However, non-legally binding that waiver might be to a normal person traveling to a place like this, that waiver might as well be the most ironclad legal document that’s ever been written. Because you’re not a lawyer. You’re not necessarily equipped, either financially or just from a knowledge perspective, to know the law. You kind of just sort of take it at face value. I have a lot of sympathy for that. I understand that. Think about how often have people entered into a lease or bought a house or rented an apartment, and there’s the 500-page thing, and you don’t read the whole thing. I think that there was a little bit of that that went into this. I do have a strong understanding and sympathy for that – that idea where I think that people just maybe didn’t know what their recourse was.

You spoke with the founder Russ McKamey during the process. He ultimately decided not to participate, but what struck you most about him as a person?

I can’t pretend to say that I really know him. We spoke several times because my first goal was to do the film and have him be a part of it. I didn’t know enough about the story. I was much more interested in the people who were doing it and why they were doing it. So, I talked to Ross quite a bit before and during the process. He was a really nice guy, a charismatic guy. When we first started talking, he was very interested in telling his story – why he does it and his love for Halloween. I definitely recognized the difference between what Russ was doing when he started versus where it was when I got a hold of him. There’s a lot of a lot out there about how it used to really have a lot of pageantry, and it used to be really high production value. It used to be about Halloween, and there used to be actors. There used to be kids that would go, and it felt a little bit like the progression of the haunted house.

Then, it just sort of becomes like a backyard, torture boot camp thing. By the time I got to the story, he was already in that phase of things. There wasn’t quite enough for me to really know what still happens, you know what I mean? Here’s a guy that takes it to the internet and asks people to come to his house, and then kind of puts them through hell. Then, I didn’t really see the connection anymore to what it was that I was reading about online… about the origins of it all. And so that made me really curious – what happened here? Where did this go wrong?

That’s when I started meeting the people that were going and there was a real progression for McKamey Manor. There was this sort of romantic origin story of a guy who just really loved Halloween and wanted to put on a show for his community. Gradually, over time, it just got more and more violent. It also got more and more insular, and the people of the community started to get more and more scared. He just became isolated. That’s where the movie sort of lands – this might be the most dangerous that it’s ever been because he’s just kind of isolated, and there’s not really any oversight, and there’s not really any understanding of what’s possible now. Something wrong could happen.

Was it difficult to sift through all the real, raw footage?

For sure. I have an archival producer named Christy Richards, and she’s worked with me on a few projects. Going into it, I just wanted to see if she wanted to be a part of it. That pitch was tough. It was going to be a tough year to have to watch this stuff every day. It was the same thing with my editor. We kind of all had to keep each other in check and just make sure everyone was feeling okay. I have a bit of a strong stomach for stuff like this just because, as a documentarian, you start to develop muscles over the years where you just sort of recognize that the camera is a bit of a distance. But when you’re talking about found footage, it changes things a little bit, because I had nothing to do with this. I don’t really know the story behind this. I don’t know if someone was really getting hurt here if it’s kind of part of the show. And so it is a little bit scary and a little harder to go down that road because there is that element. 

One thing about Ross that kind of makes him so successful and really does make it a complicated story is he’s a bit of a genius in terms of marketing. He’s done a really incredible job. If you Google the scariest haunt, he’s the guy, and I think that that’s not a coincidence. It’s because he’s done an incredible job of marketing himself. So you can’t deny the concept of… is this just really good marketing? Or is this all real? Is this something that needs to be kind of like looked at through a legal lens or through a more sensitive lens? So, it was hard to decipher that as I went.

With Dread Central, you mentioned that “traditional therapy might actually be more helpful.” Do you think that people are missing something in their lives, so they seek out something that’s dangerously visceral?

I think that that’s something that applies very universally to everybody, just in different ways. There’s a group of people that I met who might not necessarily be missing something, but definitely are trying to heal from something or trying to get stronger because of something that happened in their past, or trying to confront something that traumatized them. That was definitely a common thread for me. I can strongly relate to that, even if I’m not someone who then decides I want to go do the haunt. This behavior is so extreme that I think that it could be more hurtful than helpful for some, in some ways, if you’re in the wrong place doing it.

Between true crime and extreme haunts, we have a fascination with really dark subject matters. What does that say about us as human beings?

It says a couple of things. One of the things that I really wanted to be careful with with the film is that my goal was to have people not turn this on to say, ‘Look at how crazy these people are, what a bunch of nut jobs’ – but have people kind of understand that everyone’s just trying to heal or get stronger in their own way. And everyone’s trying to find ways in which to feel something or to be more interactive with the world or to push the boundaries a little bit. I liked the idea of people having a little more sensitivity to that, and recognizing that we all have our own thresholds. We all need to experience sensations in different ways. Why you would turn this on can really vary from person to person. 

I’m sure there’s a massive contingent of people that would watch this and just look at it from the outside looking in and say, ‘This is nuts.’ It’s in the same way that you might watch a story of a serial killer and be like, ‘I want to watch this because this is crazy. And I can’t relate to it in any way. But I’m really fascinated because it’s the darkest edge of humanity. I want to experience that because it’s not my everyday life.’ I think that there is a bit of that. But then I think for this one, there should also be a little bit of… these are real, normal people. These are people that are not outsiders, in my opinion. These are people who are just kind of seeking outsider behavior because they’re trying to figure something out. If we were all a little bit more sensitive to those kinds of concepts maybe we would have a little more empathy for what people are going through. 

I think about Brandon [Vance], specifically. This is a war veteran who has survivor’s guilt. These are the only experiences that he’s been able to find that made him able to connect to that and the way that he feels like you need to do. That is a real indication that we just needed to do better for people who might need help in that way. I had a lot of sensitivity to him for thinking that this was the only outlet for him. He’s not a freak because he does this. He’s dealing with something that we should all be really, really, really sensitive to.

Considering this has a found footage element, what are your favorite found footage films?

The horror genre has been dominated by found footage that’s fake. You know what I mean? It’s like… how can we create the idea of found footage and present it as though it’s a documentary? But we know it’s not real. The obvious one is ‘Blair Witch,’ which took the world by storm, and it had the feel of a documentary, but it wasn’t. You think about stories of exorcisms and you think about you know there’s definitely space for this in the documentary world. And I love the idea of people being able to tune into content during this kind of Halloween season, but not have to just rely on a writer that’s telling them what to like. They can actually see something that might be actually happening in the world. 

There’s a movie called ‘Cropsey’ that I love – that sort of was at the forefront of the documentary genre space years and years ago. It’s a really scary film about Staten Island. I love that one. But I’m hoping that this one kind of stands in its own space and can be its own thing and start to have people inspired to tell stories that are in that genre world… but are documentaries and nonfiction.

You spent a night in Haunted Hill View Manor. What was that experience like?

That was cool. It’s really weird. I’ve never done anything like that, and I have my crew with me and everything. It’s like a hospital that people think has a really high ghost energy. We didn’t see anything, but it was definitely creepy. And it was definitely scary to be there. It was a lot of fun to get into that mindset. It helped me make the film in a lot of ways because it put me into that feeling. When you watch this documentary, it does give you a bit of a feeling when you’re in discomfort – one of unease and creepiness. That’s what I felt when I was there. 

Would you ever do something like McKamey Manor yourself?

No, I wouldn’t do McKamey. I would consider doing something like Miasma, for sure. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing that I want to do. But I would I would consider it for sure. McKamey, though, to me feels like maybe I would have done it 10 years ago, or when it was a bit of a different thing. But right now, I’m not super interested in getting waterboarded just for no reason.

Through all the interviews you conducted, what did you learn the most? what did you take away from this project?

I learned about a part of our culture and of humanity that I probably didn’t know about before. The concept of wanting to be the star of your own horror film seems like a crazy concept. But when you really dig into it, it’s not. We’re all seeking our own thrills, and we all want to be the heroes of a story that feels insurmountable and feels unattainable. I love this idea of someone like Melissa [Everly] and Gabi [Hardiman], feeling like they can accomplish anything or conquer the world that they put themselves through such a horrible experience and survived it. I just think that that’s actually a really interesting way to look at strength and look at what we’re capable of.

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