Oh well hello there forums that I never get on anymore, except to post my opinion of Howl-o-Scream once a year. So I went, and it was an adventure. But certainly not a good one. I can't even rank the houses. But I'll share my experience.
Unearthed was the first house I went into, and I didn’t realize that my low bar for the house would be entirely too high for the entire park the whole night. I didn’t expect much from Unearthed tbh. A few startles from loud noises, a look at some décor, but not much else. What I got instead were actors standing still. Not doing anything at all besides making their presence known. I think maybe two people were hiding in that whole house. Ad I’m not even talking like a scare and then reset. No I’m talking straight up nobody was in hiding. Even the Goat-man, who got me last year, was in plain view. Also can I just talk about one of the last rooms of the house before the EITA queue, there was three actors in one room. And the room was barely a room. Like please Unearthed that’s like half your actors. You can’t have 1 attacker and two victims in a small space like that, it doesn’t work unless the rest of the house is staffed really well.
Next was Catacombs, Catacombs for me has been a house that I’ve been wanting to remove for a while now. The problem for me going in this time is, they sent the quick queue/handicapped line in at the exact same time as the regular line. And me being right up front decided to be nice and let the other line of 6 people go in first, instead of cutting in front of the obviously very slow moving handicapped person. (which also her husband kept walking off in the house leaving her completely alone, which I kinda thought was a dick move?? Mainly because I saw her call out to him several times to wait for her and not to leave her, because she moved slower. Idk it didn’t feel good to witness, but that’s not the house’s fault.) Being nice unfortunately meant that I got zero scares. Not even attempts really. Also what was with the grunting? So two houses and zero scares.
After that it was Frostbite. And holy shit what was even this house. What the fuck was that ice Groot? That mask looked fucking awful, and I’m not brilliant at makeup but I can make something look much better than that. I have no idea what was happening in Frostbite, I got none of the scares, mainly because I was person #1 and I guess being rather quiet and not really nervous that I didn’t make noise, it didn’t alarm the actors that hey another group is coming, besides the fact that the group I was leading ended up being noisy so. SHRUG. Anyways, we were like half way through the house, we got to the black room that looks like everything is upside down, except not really because you have one prop in a single room that is any indication as to where you’re at, but I digress, that room is where we caught up to this wonderful family of four who decided that instead of moving through the fucking house they were gonna play in it. Literally they didn’t start walking through the rest of the house until we caught up to them. They kept stopping to play too. Additionally, that bright ice wall room that they look like they just took their CT decorations and throw it into a house, looks exactly like the backwards portion of the Frozen ride at Disney, minus Elsa being half broken and looking like she had a stroke. But I made a reference to that while walking through and literally one of the actors shouted OLAF at me. Just Olaf.
My dude, my guy, shouting Olaf isn’t scary. Please find better material. Further as we walked through the house I thought the dragon skeleton was really neat but I didn’t understand what it was for?? Also in the room there was a female scareactor in what looked like a motion capture suit. Like having studied animation, motion capture is just generally a nightmare not to mention it never looks good unless it’s a video game, but I couldn’t help but feel like she wasn’t wearing her full costume, just her mask.
At the end of the day that was a fucking horrible house. It probably had the longest wait next to Circo.
Then we crossed the park to hit up Deadline, mainly because it was still fairly light out. Deadline I never have high expectations for, but after Frostbite and their vague attempt at a scare, I was just hoping for one scare. Just one. That’s my bar now. It’s laying on the ground the only way you can go lower is to be the floor, or just purposefully avoid it. Please Howl-o-Scream you can get one scare from me, I know you can. I was hoping Deadline would be that scare but nah. Same old Deadline, missed my favorite scare by like half a second. Everyone else seemed to be fairly stationary. Though, to Deadline’s credit I was fairly pissed walking through the house due to a father forcing his daughter to go through Deadline. We were in line and she’s literally sobbing and crying out that she doesn’t want to go inside. And he just kept shoving ice cream into her mouth to shut her up, but even after she’d swallow she’d go right back to saying she “doesn’t want to go inside please don’t make me go inside.” I really wanted to say something to him and be like She doesn’t want to go in, don’t force her. Ask to do a child swap. But unfortunately, I didn’t want to argue with him, plus it seemed like English was a second language, so I didn’t want to be lost in translation. :/
After Deadline we almost did Circo, but Circo was like an hour wait so we jumped back to Lumberhack. I enjoyed the fact that they reversed Lumberhack, it made it a little more interesting, since I didn’t know where the end was anymore. However again, no scares for me.
Cornered, has been my favorite house for the past two years. Even when my bar is exceedingly low, Cornered has always managed to get me at least once. But nope, not this time. :’) The only thing I’ll give Cornered is the fact that the replacement for the mirror maze did a good job of building some anxiety. But beyond that it was a house that did nothing. The actors were at least active in this house, I will say! They were moving around and making use of their environment! Which is great to see however, again nobody scared me. I was even in between guys like we had a small group of relatively large men in front of me, and then there I was, at this point trying to pretend to be scared to hope and trigger somebody to scare me. Please I’m a girl!! I’m usually like a first target!! I shouldn’t have to pretend to be scared to be targeted!!!
Last house was Circo Sinsitro, and honestly I got more of a kick from the first Ringmaster than anything else in that entire house. “Some of you had to wait a rather long time... I don’t care!” Me too man, me too. He was the best thing about the house. Circo is still interesting layout wise, the train car is neat, at least one person attempted to scare us in there, but nothing came of it. The rest of the house like it was last year. As for the split room, I went right this time, since last year I went left and saw… Nothing. Right had somebody but let me make this perfectly clear: IF YOU WANT TO SCARE SOMEBODY IN A ROOM THAT IS RED AND WHITE STRIPES, YOU DON’T PUT THEM IN AN ALL BLACK SUIT AND TELL THEM TO STAND STILL AND THEN MOVE SUDDENLY. –jumps off soap box- What the actual fuck was that. Please. Tell me. Also there was a clown in the trapeze section, the trapeze girl was like off to the side just standing there.
What the actual shit were these houses. None of them performed well, the most attempts I had in a single house was Circo, and that’s because I put my hood up mainly because I actually got cold. But my god. These houses are so poorly done, the actors aren’t doing their jobs. I don’t understand.
When it comes to Scarezones, yes Scarezones I said it. We did all but Ripper Row.
Axeless Alley we went through twice. Make no sense as to why you name it something specific and then done have said object anywhere in sight. They had sticks. STICKS. IT’S CALLED AXE ALLEY. NOT STICK ALLEY. A X E, I WOULD HAVE TAKEN THEM SPRAYING THAT TERRIBLE BODY SPRAY OVER STICKS.
Vampire Point was confusing, because Rhinefield is still labeled as Vampire Point as you walk through it. However on the map and the actual location is over in front of DarKastle. I will say one Vampire made his attempt, except it was right as we were leaving Frostbite, so I was just complaining about the house and he said “Oh it wasn’t that bad.” My dude my guy u clearly and haven’t been through the house. “Okay some of it was bad.” I’ll compromise. He did call me Spyro though because I’m wearing my Figment hoodie. (Purple dragons with orange wings and horns, I get called Spyro a lot) he also had an okay singing voice. Thanks Vampire man for being entertaining to us.
Sideshow Square seemed to be having a lot of fun, unfortunately for them I was rather distracted by how good the dole whip was to really care about being scared. Plus it shocked at least two actors to be walking through with a pineapple filled with ice cream. My favorite is one of the clown girls running up and honking her horn trying to scare us, then a double take and a shocked “Oh my god.” As she saw our mountain of 9$ ice cream.
As for shows uh. Monster Stomp is good. They sold me on the rap this time, which was nice, finally. But remained unchanged. Fiends is… Fiends. Though I have to say I did like the “when I was studying at Harvard” bit, however I could have done without the obvious “lol women only pick odd majors” instead you could have, I don’t know, MADE HER A SCIENCE MAJOR OF SOME SORT. Man you could have picked so many different things for Simplicity, and you picked that. And I can’t believe they left the Festhaus dark this year as far as a show. It’s so weird that they decorated the stage with what looks like Bitten’s remains, and then didn’t even bother to put a show in there.
But that’s all I have to say about it. This event was a shit show. The actors in the houses aren’t doing their jobs or if they are, the people behind the scenes need to understand that grunting isn’t a way of scaring people. That’s all. I’m glad my ticket was free because it isn't worth the price of admission. Until Next year.
