Like most people in this industry, Drew Badger has been a Halloween fanatic all his life. As a kid he would organize the best routes in his neighborhood for trick-or-treating and would often work with other neighborhood kids to determine maximum candy output while avoiding the dreaded ‘apple ladies’. In 1977 at the age of 10, he was volunteered to help work in his school’s Halloween carnival, and it’s haunted house. That was the catalyst for a lifelong love of all things haunted.
Fast forward 25 years and in 2002, Drew began working as a ‘professional’ actor at Scarowinds Halloween Hauntin Charlotte. Carowinds is a 110-plus acre theme park that began a Halloween attraction (Scarowinds) in 2000. Within his first hour of the first night of the park being open, he was moved from an early scene as a greeter to one of the final scares along his maze (a much more intense spot) At that point he realized that this was what he had always wanted to do. A couple of weeks later he was told by a manager that a vice-president of Paramount (Who owned Carowinds at the time) had toured the haunt and told them that he “had the best scare in the park.” During his second season, he was made a swingman working several rooms in his haunt while relieving other actors and playing multiple roles each night. By his third season, he was working outside as a creeper/slider and given much greater leeway as an actor. In 2005, he and several other veteran actors were asked to help with some of the novice actors. Actor training just came naturally and he began laying down the foundation of what eventually became his “Boo-Camp” actor training methodology.
In 2007, he founded Rabid Badger Haunt Consulting and began promoting himself as an actor trainer. In 2008, he attended Hauntertainer U at the Midwest Haunters Convention and became a certified “Hauntertainer”. Ever since then, he has been studying other acting techniques and continues to improve his class each year. As he claims during his workshops, “I’m like BASF: I don’t make your haunt, I make your haunt better.” Badger lives outside Charlotte NC and is always for hire.
In 2012 he teamed up with The Unknown Scare-Actor, Storm, and the Haunt Rocker Jerry Vayne to create The Big Scary Show. His role as news reader and interviewer, as well as hosting the Roundtable of Terror make him a vital part of the show. In the future, he hopes to continue finding the most important news stories and interesting interviews of celebrities, prop-makers, and other haunt industry professionals in order to make the Big Scary Show the leader in the the haunt podcast field…