Cody

The vampires have started to get some better chemistry. Last night I saw two (dressed as an adult couple) walking arm-in-arm. One greaser vampire also checked and adjusted a bowler vampire's lapels for him.

It feels like they've added some water misters around the crashed boat. I took a short video last night of one scareactor's tactic: he pretended to be hammering a crate near the zone entrance before rounding a bar sign to ambush people.

Also, I noticed this past Sunday that the scareactors have begun to have little confrontations in the zone. The Hounds and Dominion had a standoff between chainsaws and spears when the former drove through their borders, and a group of Dominion actors snuck around and suddenly ran through Artifice territory before being chased away.

The In-Between was a 2011 house set in an alternate dimension. The story is that a couple college kids started playing with a Ouija Board-style puzzle they found in a professor's office and accidentally opened a portal which they were sucked into. A short primer on 3D: the glasses work by filtering different wavelengths of visible light (meaning different colors) so that reds appear behind the actual object and blues appear in front of the actual object, for instance. Applied correctly, this causes images on surfaces to appear as if they're floating off the surface when viewed with 3D glasses. Blacklight paint and neon colors are used to make the colors "pop" and be easily visible. Most 3D houses in HHN history and elsewhere at both theme park and independent haunts are very similar to Lunatic's Playground: a very colorful environment with patterns and images on the walls and blacklight paint everywhere, and multicolored strobe lights flashing during scares. They often have a carnival or funhouse theme; even if they have a different setting, they typically make use of similar styles of imagery. It's basically a gimmick that makes the house resemble a carnival haunt. The In-Between, on the other hand, used 3D imagery to make literally impossible imagery for the demonic alternate dimension. Three-dimensional props like "floating" demon heads were painted with blacklight paint and shaken around, making them appear to shimmer in multiple directions at once when viewed through the glasses. Scareactors were hidden among patterns on the wall; in general most rooms were actually very dark with only splashes of color from the actors and certain props, unlike a typical 3D house where every surface is brightly colored. Actors would be positioned in front of walls painted with runes, with the 3D making the runes appear simultaneously in front of and behind the actor standing in front of them (if this sounds impossible, that's exactly what it was; your brain worked overtime in that house trying to make sense of what it was seeing). In all, The In-Between used the 3D as an addition to an already excellent house, using it to sell the idea that you were in an alternate dimension where physical space held a different meaning than it does in our reality. Instead of just having crazy cartoon images popping off the walls, it was a supplement to other effects like lasers and smoke-like glass floor textures.

If you want a true "HHN experience", start off with Ghost Town and American Horror Story. One is an excellent example of an original property (and a sequel to a 2004 house) and the other is an excellent example of Universal putting their funding toward immersive IP houses. They're also both right at the entrance so you can hit them ASAP.

HHN has a total ban on pictures or videos inside houses except for media privileges.

About the same as all the others, really. Average quality with one new room (maybe two) and just repeating content from all the past ones. Bah, mediocre. I did it once to say I did and I have no intentions of going back in.

He may have been bullshitting. The police and security are crap at catching people, but the police will not release someone who committed a crime at the event. Typically as soon as an actor says that they got attacked, the perpetrator (again, if caught) is ejected and potentially arrested. The only time something like this may happen is if Universal security detains someone who manages to walk away while unsupervised, which unfortunately has happened before.

Police were called to Tomb of the Ancients about midway through Saturday night. According to a scareactor, a man was caught dragging his unconscious girlfriend's body through the house. Setting the bar high this year, huh?

I'd really like to see more 3D houses along the concept of The In-Between. Not necessarily sequels, but houses that use the 3D effect for immersive otherworldly environments instead of the usual trippy neon rooms.

The show has had the same writer since 2012, which explains many of the repetitive jokes and references like "THEY HAVE SEX WITH THEIR TAILS" and Kim Kardashian. It feels like the show has fallen into complacency. There's a fiercely loyal fanbase that continues to see the show over and over and laugh at the non-jokes; I think they'll keep going as long as Bill & Ted exists because they love the idea of the show rather than the content. But this means that the show has no reason to improve. Unless there's another incident where the script horribly offends a bunch of people and Universal forces a change, the same crappy formula can be repeated ad nauseum because it fills seats. For the past few years, there's been no story. I mean there's technically a villain with a plot, but the amount of time the plot actually takes up isn't even 5 minutes of the total run time. Instead it's just a parade of the year's celebrities and pop culture with little to no context that occasionally gets interrupted to vaguely forward the plot, usually nothing but saying "Let's get back to the plot" and immediately getting sidetracked again. This year outright stops the action to have Abe Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth fight in a Mortal Kombat parody for absolutely no reason. It's baffling. The quality of the impressions has also gone straight down the toilet. The show used to put at least some kind of effort into its impressions, with proper impersonators who even looked like their characters and good costumes. This year has Batman and Superman make their appearances wearing off-the-shelf pajamas, with Wonder Woman in a cheap Halloween costume. David Bowie and Prince both make appearances in the finale (a much more tasteful tribute than Muhammad Ali, who gets to be a ghost fighting the Ghostbusters) played by whichever women on the cast happened to look the most like them, with Prince outright having cleavage in a visible bra that "he" plays with during his song. The funniest moment of the show last night was a dancer in the opening trying to take his cape off and his hood getting stuck on his face. I spent the rest of it sitting slack-jawed and wondering when something funny would happen.

This house can either be great or mediocre. It seems like it depends a lot on the timing and the actors to have effective scares. A large portion of the house has nothing but Leatherface as a scareactor in each room, but it actually makes sense: the house roughly follows the film's narrative inside the home, and you're meant to be running through it pursued by Leatherface after about the halfway mark. The actors appear to be carrying real chainsaws with sound effects, but the sound effects are made very loud and more realistic than any past HHN with fake chainsaws indoors. This does serve to make the inside of the house very loud. Every Leatherface is appropriately huge and with an excellent costume, so it's a very nice and immersive haunt. The house even has Sally's dramatic escape from the dinner represented, and it's awesome to watch.

This is easily as good as the last Halloween house we got. Like before, it almost exclusively uses sound effects from the movies rather than modern stock sound effects like most houses use. There's a ton of actors for the space, with some creative hiding places. And yes, the spectacular finale of Halloween 2 is represented well in here. I don't want to spoil it, but the room for it is incredible.

This is definitely top of the heap right now in terms of scares. The dark and claustrophobic sets make it very easy for the actors and it's essentially devoid of anything humorous. Because of the small rooms, there's very few big effects or huge and creative costumes so the actors need to carry the house. Also, there's a hallway with puffs of air simulating poison darts flying past. After you round the corner, you'll see a bunch of ropes hanging from the ceiling. The first one on the right with a big knot in it? Give it a tug.

hahahahaha this was awful. Seriously, I don't get it. Is the Avatar joke still funny after all this time? Is the writer just bitter about getting fired from Disney? Are we supposed to laugh because Kim Kardashian appears for literally five seconds just so they can do a "Hey, it's Kim Kardashian!" joke before she disappears with absolutely no explanation? Why does Abraham Lincoln engage in a poorly choreographed parody of a fighting game against John Wilkes Booth? Was the writer really so tasteless as to have the ghost of Muhammad Ali fight the Ghostbusters? Is this supposed to be the incredibly popular comedy show that's spent 25 years packing theatres and having superfans sit in the front row to high-five the actors?

Pretty typical 3D house. If you liked the ones in the past (other than the In-Between, which was a phenomenal and immersive usage of 3D tech instead of a gimmick house), you'll probably like this. If you're comparing it to the other houses, it's just okay.

Just edited it. I mixed the two up. I know Sting Alley isn't being used but Dominion controls that end of the street.

AHS fans will probably leave this one feeling a little tingly in their nether regions. It's an absolutely amazing interpretation of the three seasons used. As a house, it's actually pretty good. The scares are nice and the sets are attractive. I'd take this over TWD any day.

I'm divided. In terms of effects and scenery, the house is absolutely brilliant. It's incredibly pretty and perfectly engages with the more metaphorical "mindspace" scenes that don't simply replicate movie scenes. At the same time, I felt like the actors needed better positioning or performance to really get big scares.

This house surprised me. It actually had a really nice setup and detail, and the actors were excellent at their roles. It may end up a sleeper hit. During the final scene, take a look on the shelves. You may see some past HHN facades...

This was my favorite of the evening. The sets and effects are top notch, and the actors are clearly having the time of their lives. Fun fact from an Unmasking the Horror tour guide: almost every ghost is positioned next to their own mummified corpse.

This zone wins for atmosphere right now. There's a ton of set dressing and fog shoved into a very small area, which makes it incredibly cool to walk through. The actors are still working out the scares, but this zone has a ton of potential.

According to an Unmasking the Horror tour guide I attended the event with last night, they actually have 3 Chance actresses to rotate off. One of them is the actress from all the commercials, who also played Chance during last year's show.

This zone did a pretty good job on the scare front. There's some non-vampire humans still left who have interactions with the vampires, including a little mini-show on one of the floats. This is definitely the more comedic zone, but the actors emphasize scaring more than making people laugh.

Pretty decent for an opening weekend scarezone. The music is much more subdued than prior years here, which lets the scares make up most of the noise. They do have some neat set pieces, but it's still not incredibly different from past forest-themed zones.