A local horror band came to Hotel of Horror to film “Play With Her Guts.” What began as a search for the right setting became a creative collaboration shaped by the building, its history, its rooms, and a few things nobody quite planned for.
For years, Ripper had seen the Hotel of Horror from the outside.
He grew up in the area. He knew the building was there. He knew what it looked like. And for a long time, that was enough to keep one question alive.
What was inside?
“For the longest time I’ve seen this place and just been very intrigued because I see the exterior and I feel a connection to it, but I’ve always wondered what’s inside those walls,” he said.
Eventually, music gave him a reason to find out.
Rebel Reapers, a local horror centered band built around macabre imagery, theatrical characters, shock value, humor, and an increasing appetite for visual spectacle, were developing a music video for their song “Play With Her Guts. “
Psycho Pat describes the song as somewhat different from the band’s usual material- slower, more groove- driven, but still unmistakably part of the Rebel Reapers world. Ripper approaches that world from another angle: gruesome ideas, dark humor, and a willingness to make the grotesque fun.
They had a song.
What they needed was somewhere for that world to exist.
A Natural Fit
The connection between Rebel Reapers and Hotel of Horror started before the cameras ever arrived.
What might have been a brief introductory call stretched past an hour. The conversation moved quickly beyond logistics and into scenes, ideas, casting and what the building might offer creatively. By the time the band arrived for its first walk-through, the project already felt less like a request to use a location and more like the beginning of a collaboration.
That fit made sense on several levels.
The band is based only about 20 minutes away. Its identity is rooted deeply in horror. And the Hotel was already a place Ripper had been curious about for years.
“We’re a band that’s very horror-centric,” Psycho Pat said. “I mean, all we do is horror. So, what better place than a haunted house to film the video?”
For Hotel of Horror, the project also aligned with a broader philosophy. Artists are not charged a location fee. When a project fits and the production schedule allows, the building can become part of a creative exchange rather than simply functioning as a rented backdrop.
For Rebel Reapers, that meant access to the building, yes- but also knowledge of how the rooms work, how certain effects behave on camera, and how to navigate a five-floor environment built to disorient people.
The Hotel was not simply opened.
It participated.
“Everything Was Here”
The walk-through became the point where the project really came together.
Ripper arrived with ideas already in his head. The building began giving those ideas physical places to live.
“Honestly, my vision of the video – everything was here,” he said.
As he moved through the Hotel, scenes started assigning themselves.
"Yep, that's the room for this part. That's the room for this."
Psycho Pat remembers the same process from a more practical angle. The band needed a group-shot location. It needed individual spaces. It needed environments that matched the personalities of the members and the tone of the song.
Once they were inside, those decisions became easier.
A forest idea became a swamp.
A padded room concept found an actual padded room.
The full band scene found its setting.
The building was not simply accommodating a concept that had already been finished.
It was helping finish it.
Different Eyes on the Same Place
Part of what made the collaboration interesting was that the band members noticed different things.
Ripper noticed texture.
“Everywhere I turned, I saw something that caught my eye,” he said.
He remembered small scenic details – sewing elements, thread, blood splatter, workbenches – the kind of things that could easily disappear into the background but still contribute to the atmosphere.
Psycho Pat was pulled in another direction.
A self-described history guy “in another life,” he became interested in the architecture, and the building’s past, even researching more about it after the band’s first visit.
One member was responding to the hotel as a visual world.
Another was responding to it as a historic place.
Both found material.
Ripper also found rooms that looked suspiciously familiar.
Possinger’s workbench, he joked, looked almost exactly like his own. The large saw room felt just as natural.
“That’s essentially my living room,” he said.
Then he learned what the Hotel calls the room.
The Widow Maker
The name came with the saw itself. The man who sold it in Jacktown near Bangor, PA, had written “The Widow Maker” on the price tag, and the name remained.
It was a small exchange, but one that captured the character of the whole production: art direction, local history, jokes, and found objects constantly overlapping.
Slaughter, Laughter, and a Demonic Church
The finished video embraces that overlap.
One of Psycho Pat’s favorite sequences was filmed in the Hotel’s demonic church, where the band performs together while Val appears tied in the scene. Ripper repeatedly praised Val’s performance during the shoot, especially her scream, which ultimately became part of the song itself.
But the video was never intended to remain entirely serious.
There were comedy shots too: band members popping their heads around corners, repeated takes because everyone was laughing, and the kind of deliberately excessive imagery that Rebel Reapers seem happiest inhabiting.
Psycho Pat describes the band as leaning further into campiness and fun.
Ripper describes the intended tone even more efficiently:
“I wanted it to be like Rob Zombie’s movies meet Scooby-Doo.”
Hotel of Horror already has its own phrase for that same relationship:
You can’t have slaughter without laughter.
On the shoot, the two rarely seemed far apart.
Working With the Building
Some rooms were easier than others.
The swamp, for example, looks amazing in person but is notoriously difficult to capture on camera. The effects happen quickly. Timing matters.
Psycho Pat recalled the Hotel staff already understood what the camera needed and helped the band work within the room instead of leaving them to troubleshoot it from scratch.
That became one of the clearest examples of the collaboration itself.
The band brought the concept.
The Hotel brought intimate knowledge of the environment.
Not every challenge was technical.
Psycho Pat also managed to get lost while carrying a bass drum.
He fell behind the people who knew where they were going and suddenly found himself alone in a building design specifically to make orientation difficult.
“It seemed like forever,” he recalled.
And then there were the moments nobody quite had an explanation for.
During the band’s, first walk-through, Ripper remembered feeling something beside him on a stairwell – something he described as possibly touching or pulling at him. He later learned he was near an area associated with one of the building’s darker stories.
During filming, the camera unexpectedly lost battery power in the attic despite the crew believing it had considerably more life remaining. Hotel staff noted that similar battery issues had happened during other shoots.
Nobody needed to settle what any of it meant.
It simply became part of the experience.
The Environment Becomes Part of the Work
When asked how the finished video represents Rebel Reapers creatively, Ripper kept returning to one idea.
Environment.
“When you have a set that is as amazing as the Hotel of Horror, it just amplifies what we do to that next level,” he said.
The point was not that the band required a haunted attraction in order to perform.
It was that a place with character gives them something to respond to.
“You put us in an empty room, we are going to do what we do,” he said. “It ain’t gonna be as good as what we did here.”
Then came the Ripper version of a creative manifesto:
“You need this grit. You need this macabre. You need the bones. You need the fucking blood. You need it all.”
It is difficult to improve on that by making it more polite.
Rebel Reapers are becoming increasingly visual as a band. Their live shows now include smoke, light up tombstones, inflatable Halloween decorations and other theatrical elements. The videos extend that instinct into another medium.
Psycho Pat compares it to the music videos he remembers from the ‘80s and ‘90s – the ones where the imagery becomes difficult to separate from the song itself.
For “Play With Her Guts,” the Hotel gave those images somewhere physical to live.
More Rooms Remain
The collaboration does not appear likely to end with a single video.
Rebel Reapers have already filmed another project at the Buffalo Bill House in Perryopolis, Pennsylvania, and are continuing to develop new music, new videos, and a more theatrical live presentation.
But while sitting in the Hotel bar during the interview, another idea was already beginning to surface.
A song called “Blood Thirst.”
The band had imagined another bar for it.
Then they saw this one.
Ripper said he would gladly return.
Psycho Pat made the possibility sound almost endless.
“We could do 10 more videos here and we wouldn’t have to repeat a single room.”
Which may be the right place to leave it.
For years, Ripper looked at the Hotel from the outside and wondered what was inside those walls.
Now he knows.
And one visit was apparently enough to start wondering what else he could do there.
About Rebel Reapers
Rebel Reapers are a horror-centered punk band blending macabre imagery, theatrical characters, dark humor, and increasingly visual performances. Learn more at RebelReapers.com