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Cestlavenus

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Everything posted by Cestlavenus

  1. Not to spam this topic, but I think people might have missed my original question in my long-ass review. SO. Is there anywhere at all online to find this backstory? A video, a forum topic, someone messaging me, ANYTHING AT ALL I AM DESPERATE. I had one day at the event which meant no behind the scenes, etc. and now I'm back in freaking Wisconsin so no chance of going back this year. But its often the backstory that makes the house for me, therefore I MUST KNOW. I promise not to bring this up again because twice is more than enough, lol. But before I end this post I want to use the Hellraise emoticon because OMG THERE IS A HELLRAISER EMOTICON. I get excited over the stupidest things.
  2. Missed him completely on all four run throughs, and I was VERY ACTIVELY looking for him since he was specifically mentioned in the promo on the website. The absence of the longknife might have been part of it; I recognized the Boogeyman pretty much based on the weapon. Then again, Boogeyman doesn't have a GIGANTIC PYRAMID HELMET so if he was visable at all, I can't imagine I wouldn't recognize him. I do kind of like the idea of him behind the wall because it brings me back to how badly he scared me one of the first times I saw him in the game. At a point in the apartments, he's just standing there behind bars, and he doesn't move AT ALL but you know immediately when you see him "oh crap." Having the scareactor behind the wall would have captured that same feeling for me, you know, if I had seen him at all. Glad to hear that the scareactor is good at the slow menacing movement; an enormous part of why PH is so terrifying is because he moves so slowly, but DOES NOT STOP MOVING, he's implaccable and it's terrifying. A PH that jumped out at me would be less so, imho. And glad to hear that a longknife is in the works as well, despite the fact that I literally only had one night for HHN and I won't get to see it. ;_;
  3. Let me get my obvious bias out of the way real quick, kk? I am OBSESSED with the Silent Hill games up to the fourth. I kind of pretty much hate the movie and the games from five on. I was well aware that the house would be primarily movieverse because duh the second movie is coming out soon OF COURSE IT WOULD BE MOVIEVERSE. I was still hoping for a tiiiiiny bit more influence from the earlier games, and was disappointed in that respect. Still, I don't want to complain about that issue too much because again, it was obviously going to stick close to the newer media. Mild house spoilers, avoid if you want to go in blind: So the facade, it was amazing. I don't care if it was movieverse with the ash falling, the smell of smoke, and the siren, I saw that sign and I WAS IN SILENT HILL. And then Cybill showed up to kill a monster and I almost choked on my joy. Lots of the Boogeyman from Downpour (I'm assuming, due to the cinderblock hammer?), and that was really the only overt game reference I caught. I would have absolutely died of sheer joy if Pyramid Head or Valtiel had been in there, but if they were I missed them on every single run. Also, there was a depressing lack of Silent Hill game hallmarks, like fans, and I was hoping the Halo of the Sun would be in there somewhere, but again, I could have missed it. Robbie! I wanted a stuffed Robbie so bad, WHY DID THIS NOT HAPPEN UNIVERSAL MARKETING DEPT? ;_; The nurses at the end were perfect, the strobe made them look all jerky and bizarre like in the games. The earlier nurses were a bit underwhelming since no strobe = no illusion of horrific jerking around. It was a good house, but not great. I think I would have liked it better if I had liked the movie more, since the scenes from that were pretty flawlessly faithful. Probably my fourth or fifth favorite house; I hate to rank it so low because IT WAS SILENT HILL, but even taking away my original hopes for more game references, I still wasn't blown away by anything except the facade and the nurses. I was there on the 2nd night btw, and am a bit bummed out to hear that it seems to have gotten much better over time and that I'm missing it. ;_;
  4. OMG you guys, this house. I don't even. PERFECTION, IT HAS HAPPENED. Not so much with the scares (it didn't seem like there were a lot of scareactors in there compared to other houses, but I may have been missing them. I was there on the second night, and went through five times so either it was slow in there that night or I was really unlucky?) but I actually didn't mind here since I was less distracted and more able to enjoy the stunning sets. God. This house was beautiful up to the very end. So, I suck at explaining specific points of rad without hitting some mild spoilers. I don't think it's enough to be freaked out over, but just in case, if you want to know nothing at all about this house quit reading now thanks. - The facade had me excited before I even got inside. What is with the facades this year? It seems like they've all been higher quality than usual. Plus I minored in art history, so gothic cathedral entrance = YESSSSSSSSS. - The gargoyle costumes had the potential to look really really stupid, but they were beautiful and terrifying. - Quasimodo! Not giving away the scare, but I was pretty sure I saw the scare coming and nope. got me anyway due to a really clever bait and switch. Well done, both of you! - The hall full of candles was so stunning that I almost didn't look up (which, btw, YOU SHOULD TOTALLY DO) - I never got to the Dead Silence house, but I'm assuming the effect where you look down on the church was similar to the catwalk effect there? It was amazing, I really felt like I was up in the rafters. - The outside scene; I don't know if there was supposed to be a scare there, if so I never hit it. But I don't care. It was so beautifully done, I was completely overawed. It should go without saying after all of the gushing, but this was absolutely the best house for me. In conclusion: UNIVERSAL? MORE OF THIS KIND OF THING PLZ.
  5. I was only able to get to HHN on the second night, but from what I understand from hanging out at this forum in the past, it's ususally slower/less scary at the beginning of the event because the scareactors need some time to figure out what works best? Congratulations everyone in this house for proving that trend wrong, HOLY CRAP I WAS TERRIFIED AT PRETTY MUCH EVERY TURN WOW. The facade was amazing, the sets were gorgous, and I was looking around in a blind panic at every turn freaked out over what might happen next. That doesn't usually happen to me in houses, so bravo! (and quickly adding; although the scareactors were best here imo, pretty much every house was great with the scares with the possible exception of Penn and Teller, and the scareactors in the streets were absolutely amazing, so uh, bravo everyone else too?) My only complaint was the tunnel thing, which I did manage to catch, but seemed kind of... I dunno, silly to me? Like something you'd see in a funhouse at a state fair? It honestly didn't mesh with the extrodinary quality of the rest of the house for me. Trying not to add spoilers, but my best scare of the night was the very end. After getting caught hard by one particular scareactor and thinking I was safely on the way out, I turned to my friend to comment that that was the best scare yet AND THEN TWO MORE SCAREACTORS OUT OF NOWHERE AHHHHH RUNNING OUT OF THE HOUSE NOW. It was magnificent. The three scareactors involved are pretty much my heroes now. Second best overall house for me; the scareactors were best here by far, but Gothic still wins hands down for the sheer beauty of the sets. Quick question: I'm hearing there's backstory to this house that is apparently awesome, and I CANNOT FIND ANY OF IT ANYWHERE. This makes me sad. If anyone could point me to a forum thread where it's spelled out, or message me about it, or SOMETHING, you will officially be my favorite person in the world.
  6. Having watched the video: Oh wow, the distant cemetary looks incredibly intricate and beautiful, even with the lights fully on it's really seemless looking. I COMPLETELY missed it because we just ran through that hall. I bet the scare mentioned in that scene would've really got me too. Phooey.
  7. Count me in as well, that design is reallly well laid out. It looks AWESOME! Like April said, let us know when/if they're available.
  8. Huh. I guess I can see that making sense, burning used as a metaphor for lust and all that. But I think I like my first impression better, lol.
  9. Didn't see the redneck girls, but I did see the tree. WEIRD. I bitched about the OPs here in another thread, so I'll just hit on what I remember from here really quick. -Yikes, Feaster Bunny. Would have been more funny than scary if not for the Robbie Rabbit Silent Hill flashback I IMMEDIATELY had. -We used a VIP pass so I didn't get to see the awesome queue video. On the up side, it was pouring like crazy and we had no line, so yay for that. -Didn't have time to check the tvs as we passed through, so between that and not seeing the queue video I didn't really have a good sense of HR. After reading that he was awesome, I am now sad. The HR actor in the first room was fantastic though. Such a cheerful psychopath! I kind of wanted to give him a hug. <3 -Didn't see the bomb effect, but George and Abe got a great scare by double teaming me - Awesome job guys! -Can someone please tell me what the Hell was supposed to be happening the the St. Patrick's Day room. I'm hearing it's one of the best of the house, but we were rushed through so fast that all I saw was a cave. I didn't even see the skeletons on the walls. -No idea what cast I had, But the Valentine's Day room was... weird. Cupid guy just sort walked out, looked at me, and then walked away again? Certainly didn't SCARE me. He may have been going for "creepy" but it came off more as "dude, I just woke up." Everything else was pretty much a blur of yelling OPs. I think I would have adored this house if I'd had the chance to take things more slowly, or if I'd had the common sense to go back in. Oh well, I enjoyed what I saw. And dammit, now I want to know what the button on the throne does too... annnnnnd I'm already back in Wisconsin, sigh. ;;
  10. Speaking of the minions, I was trying to figure out what they were "suffering from," or however you'd put it... Some were obviously not hard to guess at. Lust - Almost looks like the minions are in the final throes of a sexually transmitted disease, like syphillis, which I spelled wrong but am too lazy to spellcheck? Sloth - Er.... zombies, maybe? That's more or less what it looked like. Wrath - AWESOME CHAINSAW GUYS Vanity - Plastic surgery gone horribly wrong Greed - Puking up cash Gluttony - Puking up... puke Envy - Snake guys? You guys were great, btw, loved how possesive you were of your sin. Please jump in if you can clarify anything Also, was I the only one who immediately thought "Holy crap, Wrath has apparently won the Game of Thrones?" WORD. The girls seem to play to you more if you're off to the side anyway, and if you're not DIRECTLY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMN STREET it allows the scareactors to stalk you without crowds getting in the way! I'd like to add: if you want a photo in front of the girls, could you maybe take the photo and, you know, move? And not stand directly in front of them for the next ten minutes?
  11. I won't list the houses in order, I feel like it'd be silly for me to do so since I missed most of Winter's Night due to a panicking niece and HR Bloodengutz due to the OPs. If I can't include 2 our of 8 in the list, why bother? But Nevermore gets my vote for best house, partially because I'm a literary snob, and partially because it was the perfect blend of scares and eye-candy. The In-Between and the Forsaken were close. I feel like we caught a slow night for Thing and Nightingales since not much seemed to be happening. Can't blame that on the houses though, we only went through each house once, and it's unfair to rank a house based on one run through.
  12. 1. 7 - Great eyecandy AND tons of scares, I could have stayed here for hours! 2. Grown Evil - Not a single scare, but I loved the atmosphere. I felt like I was in the beginning of Silent Hill 2, lolz. 3. Acid Assault - The projections were cool, and the cast was really on top of things. 4. Your Luck Has Run Out - Better than I thought it'd be, and I actually got some photos so yay! 5. Canyon of Lost Souls - I was pretty unclear on the concept. Generic demons? IDK. It didn't help that I got lost looking for a house and wound up going back and forth through this zone, like, nine times. 6. Nightmaze - Maybe we caught this at a bad time, but there was NO ONE there, just a bunch of black walls. LAME.
  13. Oh man, THANK YOU for the lights on tour video. Reading this thread was absolutely breaking my heart since this is the first house we went in, my niece freaked out, and all I remember from it is clingy screaming 13-year-old. Everyone keeps saying how amazing and beautiful it is, and I remember: -Snow -Some dead Victorian chick scaring us (Great scare by the way!) -NOTHING AFTER THAT because I was running my niece to the exit. And of course I didn't think to go back in again, because I'm not clever like that. So being able to see some of the details I missed = SO AWESOME.
  14. Eh, I agree to an extent, but he DID write Murders in the Rue Morgue which was a huge influence on Sherlock Holmes (and the detective genre as a whole). Having any author essentially act like their character is bizarre to me (ACD in a Sherlock role would be just as weird), but a lot of people do forget that Poe didn't just write horror stuff.
  15. This was definitely our best house of the night, even though in reading the comments here, I feel like I missed A LOT. We only had one night, were with a terrified 13-year-old, and it was pouring so we only did each house once and now I'm really regretting that. The facade was beautiful and somewhat elegiac. The whole house actually, had a rather melancholly feel that fits the Poe theme well. I'm surprised anyone had to look up to see the Red Death. I'm really short, and he was pretty much right the Hell in my face. That was my favorite part of the house, and the effects were so good I didn't even realize that any of the dancers weren't real! All three Poes were magnificent. I know others have said this, but you'd never know it was three separate actors if not for the obvious logisitics of it. ALSO OMG RAVENS. You guys were RELENTLESS. I could see what was happening to my sister in front of me, so I knew what I was in store for.... but holy crap, I didn't expect you to come THAT close! And the second actually wouldn't let me down the hall for a moment, which freaked me out a little... I think that actually may have been my best scare of the night because YAHHHH RIGHT IN MY FACE. Bravo to everyone involved. I'm not even a huge Poe fan (I prefer Bierce), but this house was a work of art.
  16. Really, really beautiful and atmospheric. I had more of a creeped out feeling here than anything else - I thought I'd get some major scares because it was really hard to see through all of the fog, so I was really paranoid walking through it, but I didn't get a single scare here. And I don't care. Because sometimes you just have to sit back and admire how incredible something looks. The fog, the overgrown plants, the scareactors that almost seemed to merge with their surrounding foliage... really immersive stuff, way better than I would have expected from a scarezone. It actually felt a bit like a house, because once I was in it I felt cut off from the rest of the park. The fog was a huge part of that. Normally that much fog would annoy me, making it hard to see any detail, but here it absolutely made the zone.
  17. God, this zone was AMAZING. I loved the idea, and they really worked with the potential it had. This was my first year, so I have no idea about which cast was which or anything. It was Sept 24 at around 10pm if that helps? Chainsaw guy would not leave me alone, so SO awesome. And I was trying to film the girls which made me a super easy mark for the wandering scareactors, lol. I honestly could have stayed here for hours, and it's a shame I only saw a bit of the "transformation." Gluttony? You were ROCKING MY WORLD OMG.
  18. SO. I've been a long time lurker here... this is my first actual post (made after my first actual visit to HHN WOOT), so please forgive some minor major ignorance on my part. K? K. First possible mistake: I assume the people outside of the doors as you enter/exit are also OPs? That's going to figure in pretty heavily to this post, so if I'm wrong about that feel free to yell things at me. Like I said, first visit, and I had two wildly differing experiences with OPs that I wanted to share. I'll get the bad one out of the way first. Apparently I'm not the only one who thought the OPs at HR Bloodngutz were super aggressive? Going through posts here, I'm seeing a lot of people felt the same way. I'm willing to make an allowance due to the fact that it was freaking POURING when we went through, and perhaps everyone outside just kind of dove for the first house they saw and that made things busier? But honestly, I saw no one behind us or in line so probably not. Anyway, our group (myself, an older sister, and her 13 year-old-daughter and OH MY GOD I will get to that in a second) moved through ALL of the houses at a pretty fast clip, this one included. We certainly never stopped, and I honestly felt like we went way too fast because you guys keep talking about all these awesome details and I pretty much missed every single one of them. Like seriously, here's me in the St. Patricks Day part: "Oh, we're in a cave now. Annnnnd now we're not? Wonder what that was all about?" Moving that fast, I certainly didn't expect the constant barrage of KEEPMOVINGKEEPMOVINGKEEPMOVING around every corner; especially since this was our last house of the night, and the OPs in all of the other houses had been great, unobtrusive, etc. It got to the point where my sister started screaming back at them, which was a bit embarassing since that's kind of a crappy thing to do. She's usually not that kind of a person. But basicallly? If it pissed her off, it was BAD. We saw nothing in this house, and I don't mean we missed scares since that's more of a timing issue. I mean we were practically chased through so fast that we barely registered the scenes. Now onto the good (which IMHO totes outweighed the bad) My niece is 13, and generally very brave. She really wanted to go, seemed up to going, and enjoyed it... right up to the first scare of the first house at which point, holy shit she wanted out. Apparently she was under the impression that she would get hurt, even though we had explained that the actors weren't allowed to touch her? Honestly, we obviously wouldn't have brought her if we knew she'd be so scared, but she gave absolutely no warning that it would be a problem. Anyway, we got out of there without any issues, but she flat out refused to go into any more houses (save HR Bloodngutz since we convinced her it wouldn't be that scary, more funny), We'd get to the entrance, she'd freeze, we'd try to convince her to go in... ENTER THE AWESOME OPS You guys? THANK YOU SO MUCH for not doing either of two things a certain other theme park I've worked for that may or may not involve a mouse often does with terrified children: You did not force our whole group out of line, nor did you pressure the scared kid into the house. I've seen both of these things happen a fair amount, so it not happening at a huge event like this was a welcome surprise. What did happen was: our group was kept to the side while we talked to my niece so that we didn't hold up the line. When it was clear that she wasn't going in, an OP stayed with her and we were allowed to enter at that point in the line, rather than be forced to wait in the line all over again. This was, to me, a really fantastic way to handle a situation that had to be super crazy annoying to the OPs, and they were all really patient and sweet with my niece as well. Let me repeat one point: This happened at EVERY HOUSE except two, and not ONCE did an OP get pissy about it. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. I understand that being an OP is a thankless job - I've worked theme parks, and to use a comparasion someone else made in this thread, my father was a police officer, another thankless job. I totally get that sometimes it sucks to be you. My memories of you guys at this event may be very slightly tarnished due to the HR Bloodngutz craziness, but your patience and kindness with my niece more than makes up for it, and definitely the main thing I'll remember. Again, thank you. And, um, sorry for writing a book about this. I felt like I needed to over-explain due to my lack of experience... or something, IDK.
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