Czech Horror Story: Fear House to Open in Prague

The blood-splashed trailer for a new theme bar/adrenaline-attraction in Old Town owes a creative debt to the television series “American Horror Story.” Creepy children crouch in a corner feasting on handfuls of black gore, a confused baby walks around at random and a bald, lipstick-smeared queen, straight out of season five “Hotel,” flashes on the screen.

But if Fear House Prague is a riff on AHS, its secondary title would more aptly be “Butcher Shop” (or possibly “My Hapsburg Nightmare”). Either way, the owners have crafted a story that is part fact, part fiction and, for those who can’t get enough of escape rooms, mazes, and the like, all pants-wetting thrill.

As the website says:

We’re not so sure just how deranged he was, but indeed a butcher, Jan Vodička, owned a large house (nowadays no. 699) on the street in the 15th century.

The Fear House backstory also encompasses twisted 20th-century tales including one about the Black Knights of the SS who supposedly conducted horrific experiments on children in the building’s vast dungeon in the 1930s.

Here, according to the “occult specialists” who surveyed the 600m2 cellar prior to the Fear House opening, luminescent objects and strange temperature changes were recorded.

The first scare room in Central Europe, the Fear House experience employs a cast of actors who serve up scares as well as bartenders who, thankfully, serve up cocktails amid a basement bar with tombstone-motif stools and Ouija boards on the tables.