Howl-O-Scream 2011
- Thread starter Zachary
- Start date
Luckily the parked reached capacity before I left my house for BG. I knew it was going to, but my thought was that it would been around 4.
I'm going tomorrow with a different group, but I may just go by myself for a few hours- can actually be really peaceful there alone. Weather looks fantastic too. May actually ride a few things that I normally don't because no one likes them except me
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I don't recall ever going to HOS on a Sunday though- new experience.
I'm going tomorrow with a different group, but I may just go by myself for a few hours- can actually be really peaceful there alone. Weather looks fantastic too. May actually ride a few things that I normally don't because no one likes them except me
.I don't recall ever going to HOS on a Sunday though- new experience.
yea I wanted one time without rain so I could see the scarezones. I missed out on that the first time because of rain.
Well, I wrote this up yesterday, hit post reply and then my internet died. Thankfully I was smart enough to copy paste into word.
But anyways, I finally managed to make it out to Howl-o-Scream this past Saturday.[Better late than never right?] and I found it to be one of the best Howl-o-Screams in what feels like ages.
Monster Stomp Revamped: This was the first show my group saw. I enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed the zombies tap dancing than the Werewolves. The intro was interesting. I didn't find it too annoying, although I did miss the video intro.
Fiends: Ahhh... Fiends. I had been waiting to see this show since the mini controversy on the Facebook page [and on here] started. I had seen the video posted of the back of the show, and I had seen Tampa's version many times as well, and now I got to finally form my own opinion on the show. I enjoyed it, my only complaint was that there seemed to be less of the actors singing and more of the recorded songs. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something that to me made it feel off. The only other things I didn't care for, was how jarring it felt to listen to the songs and have them just cut off and then they quickly moved on to the next one. It didn't flow together very well. And the fact that the Werewolf, Vampire, and Mummy really didn't do much, nor were they explained very well as to why they were even there. In the Tampa version, the Doctor says that they are his guests that are arriving. In our show they basically just told them to take off their robes.
But I think I'm just being nitpicky with story on that fact. lol
13: Your Number's Up: This had the longest wait for me. I waited about an hour and 40 minutes for this house. [40 of those minutes were waiting before Howl-o-Scream even started.] I felt this was the weakest out of the new houses, and not worth the wait at all.
Some of the fears didn't make sense to me. The torture room I can't even remember. I didn't see anybody getting tortured. Dentist's scare me tremendously, but all they had was a chair on the right of the room and some woman walking on the other side. The fear of bats... What in the world? A guy shoving a bat in my face going "IT'S A BAT" isn't scary. [and my friend misheard him and thought he said "It's a bird!"] And the fear of death... was something to be desired. Giant wind blown sheets don't scare me. I didn't even see how it related to death. I thought it was trying to be claustrophobia. [which I'm not claustrophobic, so it was just annoying.]
I do have to say that i enjoy the fear of heights. That was a neat thing, and got me for a second.
Dead Line: Favorite. House. Ever. The themeing was amazing! I just loved, loved, loved it! It didn't scare me, but I think that was because I was just so over whelmed with how amazing the house looked that I was paying attention to every detail, that I noticed all the places people were hiding. haha.
Fear Fair: This was my first and last clown house. Never again. I've been doing better with my fear of clowns so I figured I'd give it a try. Nope, that wasn't only a bad idea for me, but it was a bad idea for my group. [My friend still hates me for it. lol] So that's just a personal bias.
I will say that the actors used the fog to their advantage, although I felt that they over used the fog [And strobe lights for that matter.] At one point, we had lost sight of my dad who was in front of my group in the fog. Now I understand that they want to make it where its hard to see, to give you that disorientated feeling, but at the same time, when you have to stop moving completely [Don't worry there wasn't anybody behind us, we were the last of the group.] because we just flat out lost the path we were on and couldn't see where any of the tents were nor any bushes or props they may have set up, causes a bit of a problem for me. Thankfully, my dad had noticed that we weren't directly behind him anymore and had come back to find us.
Other than that, it was interesting that they worked on smells this year. Although the chicken room smell didn't get me [Hurray for paying attention to stuff and breathing through my mouth] the smell of the gasoline and exhaust from the chainsaws did. Especially with the fact that I was barely breathing from the previous room.
Grin and Scare It: Can I just say that I can't stand where this is located. That bridge is a terrible location for a scarezone. The amount of congestion for it was ridiculous. People were shoving others left and right. We were stuck at a stand still for at least 5 minutes, because the people leaving the section wouldn't let us through. And of course the people behinds us were trying to push us forward when we had boxes stacked in front of us.
The only other issue we had, was that I had to calm my friend down so she would attack the next actor she saw. While stuck, one of the clowns came up to her and kinda stuck their face in her's. We have no problem with this, we know that they are supposed to get in our space. The problem came, when she claimed that the clown had basically rested their head on her shoulder the almost the entire time we were stuck there waiting for a moment to move forward. Now, I can't say whether she's imagining things or not. I do know that their face was next to her for a long time, and I do know that after a while she basically said "Look, you need to back off." They weren't scaring her, they were just... there. I understand that sometimes the actors will wait for a reaction, but 5 minutes is kinda pushing it, especially since she knew they were there. I know if it had been me, and they really did rest their head on my shoulder I would of been quick to say "If I'm not allowed to touch you, you aren't allowed to touch me. Get off."
Widow Makers: Chainsaws. They make people run. Not much I can say about this, we moved through the stores to get around since we were just trying to make our way into Germany, with the use of the train to avoid going through Grin and Scare It again. [Yes go through two scarezones to avoid one.]
Stitchin Time: One person got us going through, but everyone else in the scarezone... looked bored. In fact two actors were standing in the middle of the walk way conversing. Not that I can blame them too much, the whole scarezone was pretty much empty. Shame too, cause they had pretty interesting costumes.
That's basically it. We skipped Scavengers because we wanted to get to Dead Line quickly as possible, since 13 had a ridiculous wait, we thought DL would as well. [Actually the line moved super quick, we waited about 20-30 minutes at the most for it.] Unleashed was in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go [Germany]. Bitten and Catacombs were skipped because we were tired, and after Fear Fair we were just no longer in the mood to deal with lines and people scaring us that we just skipped them.
But anyways, I finally managed to make it out to Howl-o-Scream this past Saturday.[Better late than never right?] and I found it to be one of the best Howl-o-Screams in what feels like ages.
Monster Stomp Revamped: This was the first show my group saw. I enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed the zombies tap dancing than the Werewolves. The intro was interesting. I didn't find it too annoying, although I did miss the video intro.
Fiends: Ahhh... Fiends. I had been waiting to see this show since the mini controversy on the Facebook page [and on here] started. I had seen the video posted of the back of the show, and I had seen Tampa's version many times as well, and now I got to finally form my own opinion on the show. I enjoyed it, my only complaint was that there seemed to be less of the actors singing and more of the recorded songs. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something that to me made it feel off. The only other things I didn't care for, was how jarring it felt to listen to the songs and have them just cut off and then they quickly moved on to the next one. It didn't flow together very well. And the fact that the Werewolf, Vampire, and Mummy really didn't do much, nor were they explained very well as to why they were even there. In the Tampa version, the Doctor says that they are his guests that are arriving. In our show they basically just told them to take off their robes.
But I think I'm just being nitpicky with story on that fact. lol
13: Your Number's Up: This had the longest wait for me. I waited about an hour and 40 minutes for this house. [40 of those minutes were waiting before Howl-o-Scream even started.] I felt this was the weakest out of the new houses, and not worth the wait at all.
Some of the fears didn't make sense to me. The torture room I can't even remember. I didn't see anybody getting tortured. Dentist's scare me tremendously, but all they had was a chair on the right of the room and some woman walking on the other side. The fear of bats... What in the world? A guy shoving a bat in my face going "IT'S A BAT" isn't scary. [and my friend misheard him and thought he said "It's a bird!"] And the fear of death... was something to be desired. Giant wind blown sheets don't scare me. I didn't even see how it related to death. I thought it was trying to be claustrophobia. [which I'm not claustrophobic, so it was just annoying.]
I do have to say that i enjoy the fear of heights. That was a neat thing, and got me for a second.
Dead Line: Favorite. House. Ever. The themeing was amazing! I just loved, loved, loved it! It didn't scare me, but I think that was because I was just so over whelmed with how amazing the house looked that I was paying attention to every detail, that I noticed all the places people were hiding. haha.
Fear Fair: This was my first and last clown house. Never again. I've been doing better with my fear of clowns so I figured I'd give it a try. Nope, that wasn't only a bad idea for me, but it was a bad idea for my group. [My friend still hates me for it. lol] So that's just a personal bias.
I will say that the actors used the fog to their advantage, although I felt that they over used the fog [And strobe lights for that matter.] At one point, we had lost sight of my dad who was in front of my group in the fog. Now I understand that they want to make it where its hard to see, to give you that disorientated feeling, but at the same time, when you have to stop moving completely [Don't worry there wasn't anybody behind us, we were the last of the group.] because we just flat out lost the path we were on and couldn't see where any of the tents were nor any bushes or props they may have set up, causes a bit of a problem for me. Thankfully, my dad had noticed that we weren't directly behind him anymore and had come back to find us.
Other than that, it was interesting that they worked on smells this year. Although the chicken room smell didn't get me [Hurray for paying attention to stuff and breathing through my mouth] the smell of the gasoline and exhaust from the chainsaws did. Especially with the fact that I was barely breathing from the previous room.
Grin and Scare It: Can I just say that I can't stand where this is located. That bridge is a terrible location for a scarezone. The amount of congestion for it was ridiculous. People were shoving others left and right. We were stuck at a stand still for at least 5 minutes, because the people leaving the section wouldn't let us through. And of course the people behinds us were trying to push us forward when we had boxes stacked in front of us.
The only other issue we had, was that I had to calm my friend down so she would attack the next actor she saw. While stuck, one of the clowns came up to her and kinda stuck their face in her's. We have no problem with this, we know that they are supposed to get in our space. The problem came, when she claimed that the clown had basically rested their head on her shoulder the almost the entire time we were stuck there waiting for a moment to move forward. Now, I can't say whether she's imagining things or not. I do know that their face was next to her for a long time, and I do know that after a while she basically said "Look, you need to back off." They weren't scaring her, they were just... there. I understand that sometimes the actors will wait for a reaction, but 5 minutes is kinda pushing it, especially since she knew they were there. I know if it had been me, and they really did rest their head on my shoulder I would of been quick to say "If I'm not allowed to touch you, you aren't allowed to touch me. Get off."
Widow Makers: Chainsaws. They make people run. Not much I can say about this, we moved through the stores to get around since we were just trying to make our way into Germany, with the use of the train to avoid going through Grin and Scare It again. [Yes go through two scarezones to avoid one.]
Stitchin Time: One person got us going through, but everyone else in the scarezone... looked bored. In fact two actors were standing in the middle of the walk way conversing. Not that I can blame them too much, the whole scarezone was pretty much empty. Shame too, cause they had pretty interesting costumes.
That's basically it.
We skipped Scavengers because we wanted to get to Dead Line quickly as possible, since 13 had a ridiculous wait, we thought DL would as well. [Actually the line moved super quick, we waited about 20-30 minutes at the most for it.] Unleashed was in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go [Germany]. Bitten and Catacombs were skipped because we were tired, and after Fear Fair we were just no longer in the mood to deal with lines and people scaring us that we just skipped them.After doing all the houses about 7-8 times each this season, I've like 13 less and less. Especially compared to Deadline and Fear Fair. I thought those two were outstanding. I'm not really sure why 13 developed this aura of being "THE must see house." But whatever. It has some excellent elements (the bed and heights rooms for example), but a lot of it is just kind of flat and quite frankly, boring.
As for the scare zones, I think I've come to the conclusion that Unleashed was far and away the best. Other than the first weekend, it consistently had lots of scare actors, it had a good length, lots of fog, the actors were very animated and used the fog, props, and surroundings very well to pull off a lot of effective scares. The other scare zones didn't come close to being this effective IMO.
I'd also agree with Applesauce on Fiends. While it was generally a "fun" show (and I never got tired of the nurses), it really needed some improvement with a storyline and just the overall general flow. Lots of spots were just kind of awkward.
(Also, please, please let this be the last year of Bitten. It really needs to go.)
As for the scare zones, I think I've come to the conclusion that Unleashed was far and away the best. Other than the first weekend, it consistently had lots of scare actors, it had a good length, lots of fog, the actors were very animated and used the fog, props, and surroundings very well to pull off a lot of effective scares. The other scare zones didn't come close to being this effective IMO.
I'd also agree with Applesauce on Fiends. While it was generally a "fun" show (and I never got tired of the nurses), it really needed some improvement with a storyline and just the overall general flow. Lots of spots were just kind of awkward.
(Also, please, please let this be the last year of Bitten. It really needs to go.)
The last time I went through Stitchin Time it just seemed like the actors were trying to look scary rather than scare people. It was probably my least favorite part of howloscream.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way about Fiends.
Shafor, I didn't get the fear going to bed, the room was completely empty save for a guy in a wardrobe. And by the time we got around to that fear, we had seen so many "false wall" scares that it no longer scared us.
MusicIT, the one who got us was the one with a bunch of horn sticking out, I believe the mask was also red. I can't remember exactly. I just know he got us because he was using the fog to hide.
Shafor, I didn't get the fear going to bed, the room was completely empty save for a guy in a wardrobe. And by the time we got around to that fear, we had seen so many "false wall" scares that it no longer scared us.
MusicIT, the one who got us was the one with a bunch of horn sticking out, I believe the mask was also red. I can't remember exactly. I just know he got us because he was using the fog to hide.
I am very disapointed with catacombs, i was expecting it to be so much better this year, and i actually think its worse than its ever been
Applesauce said:
We noticed they were missing a lot of scareactors in 13 on Sunday. The "bed" room is normally very well done.
