“We need someone to check out the Shokot House at Eastwood,” my editor told me.  I volunteered to do it because my last encounter with a horror house was back in grade school at a school fair.  I remember it not being scary at all—not after I saw that the scary ghoul running after us was wearing Spartan slippers under his white sheet while clutching a plastic tub of Johnson’s baby powder as a portable smoke machine (Bonus: The horror house smelled like a freshly bathed baby).

So when I dropped by at Eastwood’s Citywalk 2 where the mini Shokot House was temporarily situated, I was cool about it.  After all, it looked like a small enclosed shop, and it was right smack in the middle of a mall, and a mall filled with shiny pretty things could never be scary.

The Shokot House is a nod to the wildly successful film “Zombadings Vol. 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington,” which cemented the gay zombie’s place in pop culture.  Every year, Eastwood erects a horror house for Halloween, and this year, it dedicated the theme to Remington and his shokot gang, complete with a special midnight re-screening of the film during the Shokot House’s opening night.

I asked our representative from Eastwood if she would be touring the house with us, but she demurred and said she was too scared to go back; once was more than enough.  I started to get nervous, and when I found out that the silver-painted human statues found around Eastwood ditched their stationary posts around the mall to become scary Zombadings, I suddenly felt genuinely frightened. Those SOBs always scared the bejesus out of me, and knowing they were inside lurking made me want to turn tail and forget the whole thing.

It did not help that you were greeted by a narrow, pitch-dark corridor upon entering the Shokot House.  In fact,  as I cased the place, I realized that there was no wiggle room to defend yourself against actors who surprise people for a living, and this only served to heighten my claustrophobia and paranoia—not a good combination at all.

I am not even ashamed to say that I completely chickened out of the whole experience.  First, I “generously” let a group of friends go ahead of us under the guise of wanting to take photos of a “barkada experiencing the horrors of the Shokot House,” which backfired on me because the group got so spooked, screamed and nearly crushed me in an attempt to get away from whatever scared them.  When that didn’t work, I blamed everything on the photographer.  We won’t be able to take good photos in the dark, I said, so could we just turn on the few dim bulbs on the ceiling so we could take proper photos, and maybe have the scarers come out of their hiding places and pose a bit?  For the story, you know.

And that is how I wiggled out of the Shokot Horror House experience.  On the plus side, you don’t get any spoilers, because I seriously don’t know what will happen.  I only know that it frightened me so much that I did not even make it past the entrance.

If you happen to be braver than me, the Shokot Horror House will run till Oct. 31, 5-11 p.m.  Check it out at Eastwood Citywalk 2 near Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.