October 27th – Haunt Tour 2016 breakdown & thoughts
Posted by admin in Past Halloweens
There are times I HATE October & the New Years, mainly because it feels like I’m emotionally PMSing the entire month and today it’s draining. I don’t know if it’s cuz I feel the weight of our short finite lives as the new year gets closer and then I start frantically evaluating my life, thinking that I could’ve & should’ve done more and achieved more and that sends me into a weird spiral of sadness, determination, promise of change, crippling fear of change which leads to stagnation, surges of the most love I’ve ever felt in my entire life and now I’m crying for I don’t even know what reason & have no explanation for this. I’m going to go out & walk the dogs while listening to haunt attraction review podcasts to chill out.
I went for a nice walk, listened to the Midsummers Scream recap podcast (months later… yes I know!!) and made a pot roast in the slow cooker. So I feel totally normal now & am contemplating going to BOTH Midsummers & Scare LA next week if they are indeed running consecutive weekends again. The schedule seems really good & the ticket pricing are on point. Plus some fan faves such as Urban Death are ONLY at Midsummers & vice versa with their loyalties to both the creators. I (secretly) love seeing/hearing of all the haunt industry drama.
Oct 13th – Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights
Their #26 year!! I was super ridic excited about this one since they brought back a lot of the “classic” movies & characters. I was pissed that the prices are now literally TWICE as much as they were than in 2011, which was the last time I went. I remember paying like $90 for the fast pass & now it’s over 2x that. We got there a little later than we wanted to, 3pm & started on the rides right away. I had the combo pass so we skipped a bunch of lines even though Cat didn’t have the daytime fastpass thingy. My fave normal ride has to be the Harry Potter one and then the backlot studio tour which was both our first times. Pretty much all of them had 3D glasses & involved some type of animated video combined with a moving car ride.
It was horrible during the time that they switched from normal park to Horror Nights because ALL, and I repeat ALL the food joints literally shut down for 1/2-1hour for the “switch over” except for the stupid hot dog place, lol. So that’s ALL we had to eat in that “free” time frame…. ugh.
As we knew from previous experiences, you cannot physically go through all the haunts in one night with the normal pass so we breezed through all the haunts at a normal time with Fast pass. They were ALL very far from eachother & we were already pooped from doing all the rides earlier…
Sooo… the Halloween & the Exorcist haunts felt repetitive & restricted, mainly because the setting is literally the Halloween house, where they nicely recreated a bunch of kills from the movies, and the Exorcist is limited to basically the 1 bedroom after a quick look at the front house stairs with the iconic regan coming down the stairs backwards scene.
My favorite was American Horror Story of course, where they covered seasons 1,4 & 5. Great job at recreating Hotel (the bed scene got me) & all the characters & Twisty was a fan favorite too.
I was dissapointed in the lack of “scare zones.” This year they only had 1 & it was the Purge Gauntlet. I really don’t understand why the Purge is scary in any way at all because I’d be one of the killers; super fun killing times! So seeing a normal girl in a glitter gymnastics costume wearing a mask yelling stupid noises is the least scary thing in the world.
Friday late morning I hit up Glendale mall to get Tony more of his fave Uniqlo undies. Then we went to Six Flags Magic Mountain where we had a slight SNAFU with Cat’s tickets & it took us over an hour to resolve it. But when we did finally hit our first coaster, it just happened to be the biggest, tallest drop one. We rode a bunch of the coasters before I had to go to the car to get our jackets & eat dinner (that took like an hour). The fast pass for the haunts was only $35 so we breezed through all the haunts super quick since there was no line for any of them. Come to think of it, the coaster lines were all really good too, like maybe 25 mins max for the hybrid coaster & the rest were less wait.
Best maze was the Willoughbys Mansion (classic haunted house) and the apocolypse one had some amazing sets with lots of real fire (and fog). The worst as the Willoughbys Garden which was too dark and very repetitive (of just bushes….. eeek….) My main complaint is the untrained actors inside the mazes who don’t do anything scary. They go for cheap/lame jump scares and half ass it most of the time… like with a shaker can or literally jump out & go “rawr” like a mountain lion, LOL. They just need better training and something to do. We were ridiculously pooped after all the walking, walking up hills & standing in line all day. I LOVED their variety of scare zones which employed some really funny & witty characters that will interact with you.
Since we both have season passes, this is one we are going to go back to next year for sure.
Saturday! So I was ELATED to wake up and discover there was the Orans Black Museum (site) down in Inglewood. So I waited til it was a normal time to make a phone call & Oran picked up and informed me that it was closed 
Elation to total dissapointment in 0.4 seconds.
SO I decided to drive down to the normal African American Museum beside USC and all the exhibits were CLOSED!!!! I’m like whaaaaat.
SO I walked next door to the Science Center which was amazingly FREE and very intensive. I spent a couple hours there and then wanted to drive over to Inglewood but then got caught in traffic cuz they were having their annual block party where all the streets were shut down. I would’ve had to park super far to have to walk over & back so I drove back to North Hollywood where I went to the 1 & only horror book store & bought a couple books & walked around. Then Cat & I went to pick up Lauren & ate at an authentic Mexican joint by her grandmas house. We drove all the way to Thousand Oaks for…..
REIGN OF TERROR!!! FINALLY I get to go!! It’s like what…? 94 rooms of immersive terror… I really felt I was IN THE LOCATION, whether it is un underground rock mine or insane asylum or outside of a redneck murderers house. They let us 3 go on our own and the actors were all on point and also helped space us out so we wouldn’t be running into other groups, or bottleneck. This should be the example for every single pro amd am haunt everywhere. I mean, it didn’t get more professional or real than this one. My favorite theme was… probably the underground mine with the bridge that “fell.” OMG they had a bed mattress come up via hydraulics & a body come out of it & reach out to grab us…. I actually screamed for real & pushed past the girls to run out. LOL. That doesn’t happen often. It took maybe close to 30 minutes to complete it and then we drove back & dropped off Lauren & Cat & I went to this new interactive play called Fallen Saints by her house. It’s a new company & it was… cute… not really scary and could’ve been more interactive but it was fun & different.
Then we went back to Cats house & then walked over to Zombie Joes & met Lauren there. There was a ton of people and apparently rules were broken last year so there had to be a list of “rules” loudly addressed to the crowd before we went in… this is the 1st time they’ve done this so some incidents must have happened to make this required. There was a lot of “mainstreamers” along with the usual hauntlife crowd. The vignettes were great as usual… I made Lauren sit at the very front edge of the floor where it’s a nice uninterrupted view of the madness. On the way out, it was somehow scarier than going in…. a clown popped up right before the exit literally 4 inches from my face & I freaked out. Lauren had already run ahead & didn’t see it… LOL. She said she never wants to do that one again cuz it was too scary….
On Sunday I slept in cuz we were out pretty late last night… I met a raceplay guy downtown and we had a really really long great conversation & time together talking about slavery and such. Finally went to CliftonsLA… he massaged my feet & we talked… and talked… he’ll be wonderful.
On the way out, by the fabric district, was the Think Tank Gallery which had a horror art display going on at the time. It was marvelous… I looked at all the pieces carefully and enjoyed it as much as I could. I didn’t have time to do the secret escape room cuz I had to drive ALL the way to Tustin for…
17TH DOOR! I went by myself cuz Cat didn’t want to go again… too scary with the cockroaches & stuff. There was an Indian guy who was also going through by himself so it was us & a group of 4 women. there was some crawling, we went into a real van which moved, an octopus tentacle got caught in my hair, I think there was a real dead pig fetus which was sad…. I didn’t like seeing that so I may boycott this haunt for the future. and they had cockroaches stuck on a piece of tape… not cool. Other than that, it was sophmore year and her journey through her pregnancy and abusive boyfriend, bullying and drugs… I didn’t feel any empathy for the character so it wasn’t scary to me at all… they had much less “ghostly” and supernatural stuff like that year which made it jumpy and scary for me… this year I was like… unemphathetic and it seems like others agree with me according to other Yelp reviews. It was certainly anti-climatic, esp at the very end… we were spit out wondering “is that it!?!”
Motel 6 FU!! At the same awesome location with my free ticket from ScarelA. I got to go in by myself cuz there was somehow no lineup on this sunday!! They had an elevator ride that moved and Mable would fall on top of it… very fun! Most of it was the same with the innovative switchbacks & all. Good old fashioned non-gory fun!
All in all… an amazing memorable trip for Haunt Tour 2017… I like that we hit 2 big theme parks and Universal…. which was supposed to be the highlight but Reign of Terror outshined it by a lot! As I”m writing this (Feb 17th, 2017) I miss Halloween so much…