In a very shocking (and early) announcement regarding this years event, it seems as though SCarowinds will no longer be separately ticketed. I am interested to see how this affects the event. Will it be even more crowded than it already is? Will the quality of zones and houses decline? All will be revealed in time I guess, but it is odd. Especially when KD just made Haunt separately ticketed.
In a very shocking (and early) announcement regarding this years event, it seems as though SCarowinds will no longer be separately ticketed. I am interested to see how this affects the event. Will it be even more crowded than it already is? Will the quality of zones and houses decline? All will be revealed in time I guess, but it is odd. Especially when KD just made Haunt separately ticketed.
Interesting to see that Grand Carnivale is back at Kings Dominion but apparently not at Carowinds, which was presumably one of the bigger parks for the event.
The Good:
- Staffing felt great in all houses and zones
- The parade being cut made the zones feel scary again.
- Harvest Fear feels like a zone ripped straight from HHN. It is basically Sweet Revenge from HHN 31, but it is by far the best zone at SCarowinds this year.
- Park felt mostly decorated outside of scare zones.
The Bad:
- Maze lineup is begging for a refresh. Silver Scream is rotting away, Slaughterhouse and Depths of Darkness are pushing 10 years old. Tooth Fairy and Paranormal are starting to show their ages too.
- The actors in the mazes felt very lost. I felt like I was hearing a lot of grunting noises and begging for help. Kind of unoriginal and boring when the 5 houses actually have some pretty fun backstories.
Overall:
Not a bad year and will certainly improve as actors find their groove. The event desperately needs new mazes. You don’t have to look hard to see people complaining about the largely unchanged lineup of houses for the past two years.
I did SCarowinds a couple of weekends back, for both a Friday and Saturday night. And overall, I was pretty impressed both evenings.
I had forgotten how many animated props Carowinds uses throughout their mazes; where when done right, they really help add a level of realism to the house. And in most cases Carowinds seems to nail it just right, putting neighboring parks, like KD, to shame -- where at KD's Haunt here in 2024, by my count MonsterCon has the most animated props with 4. But each one is at the level of what I see on my neighbor's lawn as a Halloween decoration. And at SCarowinds, both Slaughter House and Paranormal Inc have some great ones.
One thing that I did not like at SCarowinds is how they manage FastLane access to the mazes:
For parks like KD, FastLane gets you access to a maze as many times as you want in an evening. At SCarowinds though, you're limited to just one visit to each maze (which is fully understandable). But on my evenings they only ever had one attendant outside each house, where that single person controls flow of both the normal and FastLane lines into the house, and also has to check each and every FastLane pass.
So as the single person has to go down an entire line of FastLane people - where on my Saturday evening was sometimes 20+ people deep - clipping each person's FastLane card to reflect the maze visit, it would keep "anyone" from (either line) entering the maze for upwards of 5 minutes at a time.
On non-busy days this would be fine. But on crowded jam-packed days (like Saturdays), they really need a second person managing the FastLane line, thus keeping the flow of traffic into each maze moving.
Anyway. Great event, and I had a great time. But enough talk, and time for some photos
