As part of our exhibition Duty of Care, we present Florian Habicht‘s documentary Spookers (2017).

Habicht went behind the scenes at Spookers, a horror theme park located in a former psychiatric institution in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Its staff of outsiders dress as scary clowns and zombie brides to terrify visitors in the notoriously haunted premises.

For these employees, Spookers has become an unlikely sanctuary where they can be themselves, allowing them to open up about their mental health and sexual identities. Behind the buckets of fake blood lies a compassionate therapeutic community, ironically fulfilling the site’s original mission, perhaps with greater efficacy.