Imagine you’re walking around an amusement park in October while it’s Halloween themed. The air is crisp, you’ve got a giant pretzel, you’re strolling with friends to get in line for the roller coaster. Out of the corner of your eye, you see tall man dressed in all black with skeletal face paint walking towards you.
Suddenly, he leaps to the ground on all fours, and against everything you’ve known in your life about how human beings ambulate, he slides across the pavement on his hands and knees, coasting right up beside you at an incredible speed.
Depending on who you are and your level of awareness of the “haunt sliders” of Hersheypark, this fast encounter leaves you either terrified or terrifyingly horny.
Since 2021, Hershey’s amusement park has employed a group of haunt sliders from a crew that calls itself the “Decayed Brigade” for its Dark Nights Halloween event that runs in September and October.
Videos of Fryboy and his lookalike Archer, and others have racked up millions of views and created a dedicated fan base who travel from around the world just to see the creepy, sexy, slidey guys they saw on TikTok.
And their online popularity is good for Hershey’s bottom line.
“The comment section [on TikTok] is a treasure trove of insight into their popularity. I mean, we have seen people saying, ‘I am coming from Europe. I’m coming from Australia. I had no idea Hersheypark existed, but now, because this was served to me on TikTok, I’m aware,'” said Quinn Bryner, a spokesperson for Hersheypark.
Hersheypark
“We have people who have bought our season passes because of it,” she added. “So anecdotally, for sure, it has had a significant social commentary, which we think has also led to tickets.”
Bryner cautioned they can’t say that the haunt sliders popularity is the sole driver of the growth of the Halloween event, but that the Dark Nights has become a success and grown year over year in attendance and ticket sales. “We can confirm that the event’s popularity in the past few years has allowed us to expand operating days throughout the fall, resulting in total Halloween attendance doubling the numbers achieved prior to 2021,” she said.
For the last three years, Fryboy and some of the sliders do a meet-and-greet for the diehard fans after the performance on weekend nights. Fans wait up to an hour in line to meet them and take photos with the sliders (or purchase keychains or other photo prints from the professional photography service the park provides, which has taken over 4,000 photos for fans this fall so far).
The three sliders I interviewed — who asked not to publicize their full legal names because they are concerned about overzealous fans — have breached containment from something that happens inside the park gates to a full-blown social media phenomenon.
The sliders have anecdotally noticed the effects of TikTok on the crowds in the park. “This year especially, it feels like every other person’s coming up saying they drove eight-plus hours to come see us or they just came for us,” Fryboy said.
“We see them sit in our zone the whole night and it’s pretty obvious that they just want to watch us,” Valkyrie noticed.
Hersheypark is well aware of the Decayed Brigade’s social media success, which is clear even on its own social channels. The most viewed videos on park’s official TikTok channel were all of the sliders — even during the off-season.
Haunt sliding dates back decades
Haunt sliding has been a part of Knott’s Scary Farm, the Halloween event at amusement park in southern California, for decades. A few of the performers working there figured out they could modify knee pads and gloves with metal pieces to allow them to slide up on guests as a novel way to scare them.
Sliding became a staple of Knott’s Scary Farm, and the trend spread out around the country to various haunted theme parks and cornfields. It evolved into something more than just a scare tactic, with increasingly athletic stunts, choreography, and showcases during the off-season.
Although haunt sliding has become a haunted house mainstay, there is no group of performers who have attracted as much attention from people who never set foot in Hersheypark as the Decayed Brigade crew. This year, there are eight sliders, but Fryboy and Archer — both well over six feet tall, lanky, and with poufy dark hair — seem to have garnered the biggest online fandom.
When I spoke over a video call with Fryboy, Archer, and Valkerie, the current sole female performer in this year’s crew, it was the hour before the park opened on a Friday night at 6 p.m., and they were in their full faces of makeup (they have a makeup artist on staff who does it for them), but not their performance clothes.
Fryboy, whose real first name is Carter, is not technically the leader or founder of Decayed Brigade, although he has become the most visible online and has been working at Hersheypark since Dark Nights started in 2021. He first saw sliders at Knott’s Scary Farm when he was 13, and was inspired to start trying it out on his own at home. By 16, he got hired at a local haunted house in Florida, and eventually landed a job at Knott’s in 2018.
“When sliding first started, it was mainly just a scare tactic and it wasn’t really anything crazy, but once people started doing it more and more, a lot of the guys that started sliding at Knott’s were stunt performers, so they would do little pre-shows before their stunt show was sliding,” Fryboy explained. “They’d go out there and they’d do little rolls, and then they’d start jumping bodies, and then now they’re jumping two, three, four bodies. So then tricks started getting added into it, and over time, a group was formed.”
“I really think in this case, Carter took it upon himself to create his own iconic character in the social space and then share it amongst an audience that loves scare, but didn’t have a way to maybe communicate and build on that,” said Brewer Lister, managing director of immersive experiences at Hersheypark.
“He’s built a following, and then he and his team have added to it by becoming more of a team in a group, especially Archer, the two of them,” he added. “I think they tapped into a growth factor of what’s taken place over the many years in social media in a particular realm, and it’s worked.”
Their fans are…thirsty
Hersheypark
It is crucial to explain here that the internet viral around the Hersheypark haunt sliders is not just an appreciation of a good scare. It is extremely horny. The TikToks from fans are often set to suggestive music clips, and the comment sections are bawdy.
In one video from last fall of Fryboy and Archer standing together, set to the chorus of “Same Damn Time” by Future, comments say things like “Fryboy looks like he talks you thru it. Archer looks like he know how to do that thing your ex couldn’t do.” (18.3k likes) and “the makeup stays ON” (160.8k likes). In another video from this month of the two men, one commenter says, “Ok maybe my ex was right and i’m actually ill.”
The allure of scare actors in face paint might not seem obvious. But hear these women out: They’re tall, athletic, and mysterious. That’s enough.
The thirst isn’t limited just to the male sliders. On one video of Valkyrie walking through the park in slow motion, comments from women pour in: “Me and my husband aren’t that serious.” “I DIDN’T KNOW THIS WAS AN OPTION,” and “i was already hooked but when she smiled i lost all control.”
I asked Fryboy about getting that kind of attention.
“I think at the end of the day, we’re just trying to perform and have a good time, and it’s Halloween, we’re dressing up as characters, so there’s always going to be something along those lines, I think,” he said. “But it’s definitely not the end goal in any sort of way.”
The sex appeal of the sliders seems to be an accidental collision with a current trend of “dark romance” and romantasy that’s popular on Booktok. However, threading the needle of adding sex appeal into a haunted house seems fraught. SeaWorld Orlando’s attempted a dark romance themed scare zone, but videos of bare-chested scare actors in masks (including at least one slider) awkwardly gesturing at guests went viral for being high on cringe and low on actual eroticism.
The difference with the Decayed Brigade is they claim they’re not intending to be sexy.
“Halloween has always been the holiday for the weirdos, and we’re the weirdos,” said Fryboy. “We embrace it just as much as I’m sure everyone else wants to embrace it.”
