If Halloween is about finding your dark side, then Yvonne Nagel has really embraced the spirit of the holiday.
For several years, the 38-year-old German office worker has performed at Movie Park Germany during the Halloween season. This time she is dressing up as Amanda Young from the Saw movie series, and her costume includes a 4.5kg (10lb) 'reverse bear trap' that she wears on her head.
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"The contrast between her job and her performance for Halloween couldn’t be greater."
I really don’t like splatter films, and I’m not keen on the “Saw” movies. But for this assignment, I had to watch a sequence from Saw I on YouTube.
I was researching a photo story about a Halloween performer named Yvonne Nagel. She wanted to act as Amanda Young, a character from the movie who wakes up in a room with a “reverse bear trap” around her mouth and the key to her escape in the stomach of her dead cellmate. Nice.
Yvonne is one of hundreds of people engaged by Movie Park Germany every year to run through the park and frighten visitors during the Halloween season. I met Yvonne, or “Amanda”, in person at the Movie Park; this is her fourth season as a Halloween performer there.
As well as shooting her Halloween display, I wanted to photograph her out of character, and she was excited about the idea. So we decided that I would visit her at the office where she works as a project manager for electronics company Lenovo-Medion AG in the German city of Essen.
When I arrived at the entrance of her company, I looked around and couldn’t see her. Then, from the distance, a business woman wearing a sombre black suit and high heels called my name. It was Yvonne. What a change. She looked just like you and me, casually dressed and with long, flowing hair and a likeable appearance.
We went to an exhibition room to take pictures. It was wonderful; the contrast between her job and her performance for Halloween couldn’t be greater.
Next, I visited her at home and Yvonne showed me the 4.5-kg (10lb) homemade metal bear trap, which she was going to wear on her head for over four hours that evening. A friend had built it in more than three days. Sipping a coffee, Yvonne told me that she has a great time changing her outfits and meeting the other performers. She has even more fun scaring people.
Five hours before her appearance, we arrived at the dressing room of Movie Park Germany and had dinner. Some of the other performers there knew me from the year before, and screamed my name and asked me to take new pictures. I told them that it was a pity, but Yvonne was my main subject this year.
In the dressing room, I watched their transformation. It was like a film set, and everybody figured out their own make-up using latex milk, cotton wool and blood. After half an hour, I really couldn’t recognise Yvonne. She needed around two hours to completely transform into ‘Amanda’. When she was finished, she looked unbelievable. And she had 4.5kg on her head.
As it got later, more performers arrived in the dressing room. Nice looking students, housewives in their mid-40s and pretty blonde girls transformed themselves into blood-smeared butchers, monsters, mummies and the undead.
At 6 p.m. the doors opened and all the monsters entered the park. Children were supposed to be over 12 to attend the performance, but some of them weren’t. Lots of them were screaming, and everybody was scared by the realness of the performance.
I followed ‘Amanda’ for more than an hour, and was surprised how far and fast she walked. She covered some 12km (7.5 miles) by the end of the evening, she told me later. Forget murderous monsters, I would have died after a night with that weight on my head!
(Writing by Ina Fassbender; Editing by Hannah Vinter)