WORST NIGHTMARES.(The Talk of the Town)

"No one's really afraid of Frankenstein," Timothy Haskell said the other day. Last Halloween, Haskell, a theatre director, staged a public haunted house on the Lower East Side, and so many people showed up that hundreds never made it inside. "We realized that we had to turn away a lot of local people," Haskell said. So this year he put up haunted houses in all five boroughs, tailored to prey on the fears peculiar to each one.

For months, Haskell and his crew polled residents of the five boroughs to find out their worst nightmares. A few days before opening, Haskell was putting the finishing touches on the Manhattan installation (the haunted houses are called "Nightmare: Face Your Fear"), on Suffolk Street, along with his chief designer, Paul Smithyman. Although the polling process did not adhere to scientific standards, Haskell, who lives in Brooklyn and is most scared of getting stuck in a cave, and Smithyman, an Englishman, who is afraid of being eaten alive, had ventured to draw a few conclusions. People from the Bronx and Queens, they said, tend to fear things that might actually happen, like being mugged (harpaxophobia), while Manhattanites are frightened of fantastical and unlikely occurrences (flying sharks, riding in an elevator that rockets through the roof of a building). "In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we heard 'fear of the homeless,' " Smithyman said. "Then, in the Bronx, we heard 'fear of becoming homeless.' " Staten Island residents apparently dread chemical spills and gas leaks.

Once the answers were compiled, the team members sat down together to figure out how to translate residents' fears into low-budget theatrical scenarios. Most of the joke answers ...