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The Long Halloween Diaries - Queen Mary's Dark Harbor

10/22/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

It's been a crazy, crazy month, and it's not over yet! Though things are winding down, we've still a few stops ahead that promise to be some of the most intense and unique of The Long Halloween. But first, for stop # 10, we have a classic that's been a part of The Long Halloween since the beginning.
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When you think of The Queen Mary, you probably think of it as a tourist destination and hotel in California. You may also know it as one of the most famous supposedly actually haunted places in America. But what you probably wouldn't first think of is it transforming for the month of October basically into a brand new theme park in Southern California, populated by monsters who would enjoy nothing more than scaring the ever-loving daylights out of you. In the three years prior to this Long Halloween that Fi and I have attended Dark Harbor, it has consistently been one of the scariest of the season. Perhaps more than any other theme park haunt in Southern California, the actors working this event are truly enthusiastic and love scaring you. Instead of just waiting in little alcoves to pop out, they prowl hallways. When they see you, they will charge. They will team up in their attacks, and they will corner you, and scream all you like, but they won't let up until they are bored with you.

Top it off with a fun, albeit fairly adult, environment (despite the number of children you're bound to see here, this is a very intense, very adult event), and this is a serious contender with Universal Studios for best multi-haunt Halloween experience in Southern California.

So, with our front of the line tickets in hand, and my best friend from middle and high school, Ashley, along for the ride with us, Fi and I rode for Dark Harbor looking forward to the good times we knew would be there.
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Yeah, I need to work on my selfie face.
THE DARK HARBOR EXPERIENCE
We got to The Queen Mary about an hour early, and my fear that we were too early was quickly dashed when I saw how completely insane the line already was, even with our front of the line pass line. Score one for showing up early! Still, in due time we made our way through security and made our way to the front gates proper.

Long Halloween Tip # 15: Queen Mary's Dark Harbor has some of the strictest security of any Halloween event I've ever attended, including pat-downs. Save yourself some hassle and avoid having anything confiscated by leaving anything, no matter how innocuous, that might be considered a weapon at home, as well as anything that could be construed as a gang color. Or selfie sticks. They were really hating on selfie sticks this year.

After a brief opening ceremony where the Queen Mary's ghostly Captain heckled the crowd and threatened to unleash the monsters on us, the front gates were opened and, well, we ran a gauntlet of monsters. After a little bit of zig-zagging and tight quarters in the town-like setup leading to the Queen Mary, things will widen up into a carnival-like atmosphere. There are dozens of food vendors, odds and ends bars, a performance stage, an upcharge paintball experience (which we did not have the time for by the end of the night), and an honest to god carnival swing set that they've rented from Neverland Ranch, for an extra creepy vibe. Monsters roam the darkness, and sliders will charge you at knee level, the scraping, screeching of their metal knee pads always getting good, reliable scares. Constantly looming over us is The Queen Mary herself, looking extra-ghostly by night (assuming you ignore the hotel guests on the top decks looking down at us and laughing), and making you wonder what terrors are held within.

But this is a Halloween event, and like any good Halloween event, there are mazes to be had! This year had six mazes (three on land, three within the bowels of the ship itself), as well as an upcharge Freak Show attraction that we knew we had to attend.
THE MAZES
Deadrise
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Though the shipboard mazes on The Queen Mary herself are the real draw here, the ones on land are nothing to sneeze at, especially our first maze of the night, Deadrise, which was arguably the scariest of the night. Themed to a crashed troop carrying ship from World War II (a real incident that happened on The Queen Mary) that is forever cursed to carry the ghost sailors to torment the living, this was a damned impressive maze for something mostly built out of a number of disused cargo containers. Though the setpieces were not particularly distinct, the enthusiasm of the ghostly crew more than made up for it. They stalked us from our hiding places, following us when they got behind, darting from around every corner and box, charging us whenever we'd see one in front of us. Maybe we got lucky by doing this so early in the night, but this ghostly crew was utterly relentless, getting all three of us to be screaming, quivering wrecks by the end of it. And just when you think you've escaped, yeah, there's one more monster hiding above you, looking to grab for your hair. He's probably got the best job in the park.

The Freak Show
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At an additional $5 per person, the Freak Show is an upcharge event that Dark Harbor has been running for the past two years. In years past it's been a collection of cargo containers filled with little, random scares and a semi-maze made from said cargo containers that allowed us to see the titular freaks. It's always been a fun little diversion, even if its freaks are really just manufactured makeup effects.

This year, however, I think they came up with an attraction that was the best of both worlds, with part maze, part fun attractions, and yes, this year even a real bona fide freak show of sorts.

They start out by introducing you to Sparky, a charred skeleton who talks to and heckles you, and if you're good enough to banter, well, you can have a pretty fun time with him, though be warned, as there's a good chance he'll convince you to bang your head against the wall of a cargo container.
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Which Ashley found out the hard way.
After taking a narrow path through the show, we're let out in a sort of courtyard that's been made in the cargo containers, full of little mini attractions (including walks through cargo containers full of both dark and light ghosts), fortune tellers, a bar isolated from the major bar lines, and yes, a stage with a real freak show. While we entertained ourselves with our fortunes and the attractions, and Fi and Ashley got their drinks, we had a good time waiting for one of the scheduled freak shows to start. In the meantime, though, we had a rare opportunity we normally haven't had at Halloween events: interacting with the monsters. As we were some of the first few people in a barren freak show, we got the full attention of a few wandering characters, trading bawdy jokes with the bearded lady (not a real bearded lady, but she was a ton of fun), comparing other haunts with the bad-joke-telling-and-completely-awesome Ringmaster, and joking playfully with the near-mute but hyperactive and utterly fun shrunken head man we called MeeMee, as it was all he said.
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He was so much fun.
Kicking back and killing time with the monsters, in character, was so much fun, because they never once broke character and all throughout were blast to talk to.
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Even posing for an Oscars-esque selfie with us, and the top half of my head.
Long Halloween Tip # 17: If the opportunity to interact with the characters comes up, take it! You'll have more fun for it.

The freak shows themselves were more people with unique physical talents than actual physical deformities, and though they were fairly gross, or painful-looking, if you've got the stomach for them, they were truly impressive, and combine with an all around fun atmosphere to make the Freak Show my must-see event of Dark Harbor.
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I could show you pictures of a man feeding a balloon through his nose and out his mouth, or I could show you a picture of Fi holding the balloon animal made out of it after the fact. I choose the latter.
Lullaby
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After taking our break at the freak show, we decided to take in our first shipboard maze of the night with Lullaby, starring Scary Mary, the ghost of a little girl who supposedly drowned in one of The Queen Mary's pools (again, based on a real incident). And, well, if we thought that Deadrise would be the scariest we'd see in the night we were dead wrong, as Lullaby kept the screams coming as we went through the demented world of this creepy little dead girl. The bowels of this ship get dark, and when I say dark, I don't mean heavy shadow, I mean so dark you can barely see your hand in front of your face. They take advantage of this on the Queen Mary, so don't be surprised if you find a little girl sidling up to your side and screaming at you. The real highlight of this maze was, of course, coming across Scary Mary at one of the actual shipboard swimming pools where some kids are said to have drowned many years ago.

Voodoo Village
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Back on land we have the sprawling Voodoo Village maze and, well, for a maze I enjoyed as much as I did, I feel terrible in saying that I can't really remember a lot of specific details from it. It was a lot of fun, and the actors are enthusiastic as ever, but, well, with Voodoo being a fairly common theme in mazes these days, it just didn't leave a real impression, which is a real shame because we did all have a lot of fun and still get fairly freaked out at this one. Especially by the guys in gillie suits hiding in the bayou portions jumping out at Fi. This happened at least two times, she never saw it coming, and, well, it got some good screams. Not that I wasn't joining her on those.

Circus
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Now this is a crazy, crazy maze. Taking place in the old airplane hangar that used to house The Spruce Goose, this maze may have had nothing to do with The Queen Mary, but it embraced its theme and went nuts with it in the best of ways. Set in the ever classic circus gone mad and populated by a bevy of evil clowns, this one was a highlight of the night for the sheer oddity of a lot of what we had to endure. Real mirror mazes, sliding and shifting metal floors, an actual giant-sized ball pit to walk through, and even one of those famous spinning hallways, perpetually rotating around you and making nearly everyone fall over from dizziness. This maze also probably got my biggest scare from the night when, distracted by a small ball pit in the middle of a room I was sure had an evil clown hiding in it, the painting behind me opened up into a clown who wanted to test how well my startle reflex was working.

It was working quite well, thank you very much.

Soulmate
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A few hours into Dark Harbor, we were starting to get tired and were more than a little ready to get to the last two shipboard mazes. Though our front of the line passes helped us cut through waits in excess of an hour at each of these, the lines themselves get pretty substantial pretty fast. While this is normally not much of a problem in a maze, the tight quarters and steel box construction of the ship, combined with a near conga-line of a crowd snaking through the maze, made these last two mazes pretty much ovens. As well, the heavy amount of people made the scares fewer and more infrequent, possibly from heat-exhausted actors, but more likely because it was really difficult to scare a bunch of people in a row who can see the scares coming.

Still, the mazes have their fun. Soulmate, the story of Graceful Gail, a beautiful ghost woman setting out to make the perfect man from parts of many others, had its good moments, especially the rows of flayed bodies and skins hanging from the walls, as well as the jump scare hiding in their ballroom, but as one of the more sparsely populated mazes actorwise, this was easily the least scary of the night.

B340
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Our final maze was B340, a trip into the mind of Samuel the Savage, a man who went mad and killed himself on the ship after attacking many other people (probably not based on a true story). While there were a few surreal effects in play in this maze, trying to put us in the mindset that we were going through the mind of a maniac, the energy was low, the crowd was heavy, and not all the setpieces work as well as I think they meant them to. While a trip across a catwalk above the empty and pitch black engine room is pretty cool, I was expecting something impressive below us, instead of a tiny-looking man rattling a cage. This maze, above all others, I think showed the limitations of setting a Halloween event up in a national landmark, as there is only so much you can do for decoration.
Minor late night complaints aside, we had an utter blast at Dark Harbor. We screamed so much we were hoarse for days, there was great food, drink and company, and the Freak Show was perhaps itself a highlight of our Long Halloween. As our Long Halloween slowly starts to wind to a close, we find ourselves hoping that our last few experiences, untested as they are, can match up to the fun we've had so far!

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween Diaries - Wicked Lit

10/18/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

For those seeking a bit of culture in a Halloween season otherwise heavily occupied by dripping blood and severed body parts, Wicked Lit is one of the best options you can find. Performed at an actual mausoleum and cemetery in Altadena, it is a series of three classic stories with a horror or supernatural leaning. With quality, full sets of actors and surprisingly good production values in spite of the fact that they're actually working within an active cemetery and can't really change much, Wicked Lit has been a favorite of ours since we were introduced to it last year.

With an intriguing lineup of shorts in front of us, Fiona and I set off on a cool, misty night (that happened to be our 4th wedding anniversary, woo!) toward the Mountain View Mausoleum to find out what the fine people of Wicked Lit had for us.

The System  - Upon checking in, we were brought to a meeting area where intermissions were held. There were drinks, snacks and restrooms available (which, all told, was nice as the event wore on), and a frame story of sorts to keep things going during the down moments. Truth be told, I didn't entirely pay a lot of attention to the frame story of a couple of bumbling, 19th century reporters investigating an evil mental institute. It was funny at points, and the actors committed to it fully, but with most of this time spent waiting for our next show, it was easy to miss much of this show, especially as it went through every intermission.

Still, when showtime rolled around, the assembled audience was split into three groups to check out the three different shows, where things really got fun.

The Ebony Frame - The first show we got to see, a tale of obsession and deals with the devil, was a great way to begin the night. It's arguably the silliest of the three stories, though it does go to some fairly sad places as it goes on, but it makes up for this with its very dedicated cast and some truly trippy effects that you wouldn't expect to be pulled off in a large mausoleum. Using some old bits of stage trickery, they make a woman disappear from a painting and appear further down an adjacent hallway, and even appeared to burn down the mausoleum at one point (they didn't, but it was still good fun). Though the strangest of the three stories, it was a good way to get things moving.

The Grove of Rashomon - An adaptation of various forms of the Rashomon story (which is fitting in a very meta way), this was the highlight of the night for me. Watching the story unfold multiple times, from multiple, unreliable narrators, it went from fascinating to sad, to really really sad in a hurry. Taking place on the actual cemetery grounds, enshrouded by the cool mist of the night, this one had a particularly eerie feel. The actors in this one were also particularly top notch, throwing their everything into making this a truly heartwrenching performance.

And special kudos to the hanging scene, adding the biggest scare of the night. That came completely out of nowhere.

The Fall of the House of Usher - The short with the biggest name recognition came last for us in the night, and I'll admit to feeling pretty bad about this, because while it was no doubt a very entertaining adaptation, by this point in the day I was exhausted after a long day's work and was beginning to fade. According to Fi, it is a fairly liberal adaptation of the Poe short, with more elements added to it to add to cohesion and make it a workable stage play. Like the rest of the shorts, the actors were dedicated and suitably haunted, especially important for a Poe short, and as the most special effects heavy of the three shorts, Usher works particularly well, especially when the titular house begins to fall around us.
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A suitable shirt choice for this particular event, no?
Apologies for the short review on this one, but I have never been much of a theatrical critic. This was a fun evening, and an interesting, classy diversion in our Long Halloween. If you like the theatre and a bit of the macabre, this is one to check out, though be aware, this one sells out in a hurry!

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween Diaries - Countdown Live Escape Games & Fear... The Darkness

10/15/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

Generally speaking, as most haunt events take place at night, we can only really do one Halloween oriented event a day. However, with a little searching and a little creativity in determining just what exactly you can constitute a "Halloween" event, we've been able to find some options that fit this definition wonderfully this Long Halloween season. And so, in a first for The Long Halloween Diaries, we'll be covering two events.

First up...
My wife and I were first introduced to the concept of escape rooms in last year's Long Halloween, though I know they're a much older concept than that. For those reading who are unaware of escape rooms, they are essentially small rooms that you are locked in with groups of people of varying sizes. You are given a number of puzzles to solve, often unlocking and leading to more puzzles, requiring teamwork and creative thinking and a little physicality, all for the purpose of ultimately unlocking the main door and escaping the room within a set time limit. Prior to this day's event, Fi and I had taken part in 3 different escape rooms, and successfully escaped from one. In these experiences we have learned that both escape rooms and the puzzles within can vary wildly in quality, from cheap-looking setups set up in random office complexes, to high-quality events with Hollywood quality sets and infuriating yet well-thought-out puzzles.

When planning this weekend I'd started looking around for ideas on potential escape rooms, and came across Countdown Live Escape Games, a company that expanded to Los Angeles relatively recently from Las Vegas. They had two available rooms, The Spaceship and The Psycho, and, well, with a room called The Psycho, I kinda knew we had to jump on this, especially after seeing that their reviews online were quite decent.

Not knowing entirely what we were getting into, but excited for an opportunity to jump into another escape room, Fi and I set off for Downtown LA with our reservations in hand.

Flash forward a bit, and I'll acknowledge that we did not escape. We got close. Within a matter of seconds close, actually, but we did not escape The Psycho's lair in time.

But did that matter? Not one bit! The quality and execution of this escape room were top notch, all around. After our briefing at the front desk, we were led into the dimly-lit living room of a serial killer, where we were soon locked in, alone. A TV on a table nearby crackled to life, and we got to see the killer giving a cryptic mission statement into the camera, offering us 45 minutes to solve the various puzzles hidden around his lair that would allow us to escape, lest we die a horrible, horrible death. And after that, it was the two of us against the room. We put together puzzle pieces, solved codes, and even had a fun time using a webcam backwards to read something hidden inside of a cabinet. The small room we were in soon opened into two adjoining, hidden rooms. The puzzles were difficult, but not impossible, and in the end we only had to ask for clues on one particular puzzle we were stuck on. If we'd had ten more seconds, we would have made it out, but alas, it was not to be, and we naturally died horrible, horrible deaths, literally because I accidentally inverted two wooden blocks.

Yeah, I'm still kicking myself over this one.
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You can't see my feet in this picture, but there is kicking of me involved.
Nevertheless, we had a blast. The quality of the rooms and puzzles were exquisite, and the people working the place were nice and professional. If you're looking for an escape room in Los Angeles or Las Vegas, I must highly recommend Countdown Live Escape Games.

Though as always, lessons were learned, and lessons you will hear on the fun nature of escape rooms:
Escape Room Tips From Someone with a 25% Success Rate of Escape:
Escape Room Tip # 1: Be warned that a lot of escape room companies will allow you to buy a number of time slots, but if you haven't filled out their maximum number of slots for that time with people, you might get paired up with strangers. This is not a guarantee, but always a possibility. If you want to be completely on your own, I'll recommend either buying out the entire game (an expensive proposition), going at a time inconvenient to most people (early in the morning on a weekend worked great for us), or having enough friends who want to join you, and doing it all with them. That is the traditional explanation, right?

Escape Room Tip # 2: Communication. If you're going in with a group of people you know, be sure you have an open line of communication with everyone so nothing gets lost or misunderstood.

Escape Room Tip # 3: Be mindful of your time. 45 minutes, or whatever time limit they give you, may sound like a lot at the beginning, but you shouldn't use it to dawdle. It goes faster than you think.

Escape Room Tip # 4: This one's weird and specific, but necessary: know where the actual exit is. Find the exit door ASAP, and what's needed to open it (lock, code, etc.), so you know what to look for while you are collecting your clues.

And with our escape room failed and officially the seventh stop on our Long Halloween, we moved onto the 8th stop, a wholly different and brand new game...
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Sinister Pointe is a haunt-based company that's been around for a pretty long time, from all I've seen, though last year was the first official time that Fi or I had attended one of their events. Their Bloody Mary themed haunted house was quite good from a technical standpoint, though not terribly memorable as Long Halloween events go for us. Still, we had fun, and the company has remained on our radar since, which led us to their most recent haunt, Fear... The Darkness.

Described as a trust exercise, in it teams of two are led into warehouses themed to a number of themes (The Possessed, The Dead, Dolls & Clowns... you know, the usual), and split up. One person is brought into a smaller, pitch black room room, while their partner is led to a computer screen with night vision cameras leading to their partner's room. The person watching the cameras has to guide their partner around the dark room, collecting a variety of items in a 10 minute time window, while being stalked throughout the room by monsters who can see you, even if you can't see them.

Then after the ten minutes are up, you switch places, and the process is repeated.

We'd never heard of anything like this before, and so as soon as we could, we definitely got our tickets for this event. After initially checking in at the storefront set up by Sinister Pointe (a great, weird little shop selling all sorts of genre things), we were guided to a warehouse about a block away where the event was being held. After a short wait due to some technical difficulties (it does appear they're still working out a lot of the kinks), a ringmaster character led us into the pitch black recesses of the warehouse and asked who wanted to go first. Ever the brave one, Fi volunteered, and I got to watch.

And then, well, there was madness, mostly good, some not so good.

We chose the Clowns & Dolls theme, and Fi's room was clearly the clown-themed one. It had two cameras in opposite corners of a relatively small room, and two roaming monsters set about to harass her. While I wanted to win the game while helping Fi avoid the monsters, I quickly realized only one would be possible, and left her to the mercy of the creepy clown and doll while guiding her around the room, trying to find the various listed objects in places that seemed likely. Figuring out a system of communication to start with was challenge enough, a challenge made all the more difficult by me not being close enough to the microphone for her to hear all I was saying, and the carnival kiosk in the middle of the room making it impossible to see Fi half the time. Nevertheless, after some growing pains and figuring out the room system, I was able to guide Fi around with a system of 90 degree turns and making her raise items so the camera could see if they were correct or not. And even though it involved digging through some cream pies that made her hands smell for the rest of the day, I was able to get her to find 4 items! (Out of 12, I believe, but still, not bad I think!)

And then it was my turn.

And, well, I didn't do so great. I'm a big guy, and I bumble a lot, and I'm kind of a coward when it comes to a lot of things, so there were some things I probably should have done (like reaching into a terrarium to pick up a rubber snake I thought might've been real) that I didn't do. Fi, my ever patient and wonderful wife, guided my blundering around well enough for me to find 2 of the objects in the room and helping me avoid most of the monsters, even chasing one of them for a while at one point, but to little avail. Also, at one point, I broke something in the room. I was picking up a number of rag dolls (I think, hard to tell in the pitch black), and dropping them as I thought they weren't needed, and then I hear the shattering of glass on the floor, and feel its grit as I shuffled around. I don't know what it is or what I dropped, and I feel terrible for breaking it, but since the secret police of Sinister Pointe haven't come for me (yet) after all my apologies, I think we're all just glad that nobody got hurt.

Though if anyone from Sinister Pointe happens to read this, I really am sorry.

In the end, this was a really fun experience that I'd like to see done with a bit more polish. The instructions and room layouts were a little more confusing than I think they meant, and maybe making some of the objects actually visible to the watcher, instead of having the watcher have to guide people to put their hands in everything, would have added a little extra fun and feeling of accomplishment. That said, this is still a fun and unique Halloween experience I hope they repeat next year.
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Holding up our prize coins.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was our big game day of The Long Halloween. We may not have done great, but we had a great time, and with some of the days ahead, I'll say that the truly awesome and weird experiences are still ahead.

Stay tuned.

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween Diaries - Ward 13

10/11/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)
 
The fine people at Evil Twin Studios have consistently put on some of the best local haunts that Fi and I have attended during our Long Halloween experiences. When we first went two years ago, to their Theatre of Terror event, we were expecting something low key, maybe fun, probably not particularly scary. After all, they were being put on in an old theatre (and former mortuary) in South Pasadena (i.e. one of the most unassuming stretches of suburbia in the San Gabriel Valley, and for the sake of transparency my old hometown), with all proceeds from the event going to the South Pasadena Educational Foundation.
 
Really, how bad could it be?
 
Well, after surviving the Theatre of Terror, we knew just how bad it could be. Top notch set work, innovative scares with enthusiastic actors, and some damn surprising, damn scary moments. Its quality rivaled, possibly even surpassed anything that Knott’s had done. It was a very pleasant surprise in a busy Halloween season.
 
But could it be repeated? Well, yes. Last year’s Raymond Hill Mortuary haunt was even scarier and more intense, with moments including a random monster appearance *under* us in a crawl through tunnel, and a trip on a mortuary slab, being standout and scary as hell moments.
 
After two years like this, we were excited to see what they had with this year’s experience, Ward 13, a fairly basic theme of a mental institute gone mad. So… did our sixth stop on this year's Long Halloween match up to previous years?
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I believe my smile speaks for itself here.
Yes. Yes it did.
 
I don’t want to go into too much detail  on this, because this is one of those haunts that’s best experienced, but I do want to share some thoughts.
 
Even though I’m reasonably certain most of this haunt is constructed in a parking lot, it’s nearly impossible to tell from the impeccable set design they do. Despite a few instances where it’s clear that the walls are made of thin plywood, most of the time you’d have a hard time telling that you aren’t walking through a creepy institute. The rooms are well themed and distinct from each other as you wander through admitting, the hydrotherapy and electroshock rooms, the rubber room, and the children’s ward (full of actual, very creepy-looking kids). Secret doors open to rooms open in walls, hiding under a bed leads to a secret, crawl-through tunnel, and a pitch-black maze lined with mild electric shocks in the walls finishes things off.
 
Long Halloween Tip # 14: Watch out for any narrow, pitch-black stretch of smaller mazes out there. It’s become more and more common to put minor electric shocks in, and if you don’t expect them, they can hurt like hell. They won’t kill you, but they’re annoying, and one of the few things I generally don’t approve of in mazes on principle, because most of them don’t warn you that they’re coming.
 
The true highlight of this maze was a tour of the exercise yard, while strapped into a wheelchair. Completely helpless and at the mercy of the monster pushing you, it’s a lot like playing an on-rails video game in the best of ways.
 
This haunt also brought one of my favorite memories of Long Halloweens, when I actually got a monster in the haunt to completely break down laughing. Now, as a general rule, I don’t condone people trying to get the monsters to break character. The monsters are good, hard-working people who just want to scare folks, and they’ve got a really hard job, all told, because so many people are just as apt to fight them as they are to scream. It’s well known that I’m a pretty hefty screamer when it comes to haunts, and, well, one thing led to another here, I was scared, and I may have shouted out a famous four-letter-word that began with the letter “F”, followed by the word burger. This bizarre compound swear word got a man dressed like a gorilla in a hallway made of hallucinations (long story), to completely break character and just keep loudly laughing as we walked away.
 
In retrospect, I feel bad that I broke the gorilla in this fundamental way, but at the same time, well, I hope I entertained him.
 
Tickets are $15 online, $17 at the door, and they’re open Friday and Saturday nights through Halloween night. Come on, take a short trip, enter Ward 13, and let the madness take you. You’ll have so much fun for it.

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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The Long Halloween Diaries - The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride

10/8/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride is one of our regular favorites for The Long Halloween, as this will be our fourth consecutive year doing it, which is funny in its way, because it's not particularly high up on our favorites list. As haunts in the Los Angeles area go, it's not the scariest (in fact, as scary events go I'd call it the most family friendly), it's fairly low quality when put side by side with comparable haunts, and has never had much in the way of a storyline to speak of. The carnival atmosphere they tend to create around it, as well as the additional attractions they've added in recent years, have always looked on the cheaper side and have been very hit or miss. And as an avowed carnivore, the all-vegan snack selection has always made me nervous.
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What can I say, I've always been distrustful of vegetables.
And yet, in spite of all this, we keep going back, and will continue to go back. Why? Well, in spite of all its cheesiness, this is still a very fun event. The people here are having a blast, and what they may lack in quality they more than make up for in enthusiasm. The titular hayride is always a fun, strange trip (albeit often tasteless in strange ways), the carnival environment is still entertaining, and the side attractions can offer their own holiday excitement. So, this year Fiona and I are setting off for The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride expecting good fun and good times with our special guest stars, Fiona's sister Heather and her fiancée Serith. Will a good time be had by all? Let's find out!

Long Halloween Tip # 12: When it comes to Halloween events, the more the merrier. Especially if it's something you might be split up during (so you'll get the full experience), or if it stands a chance at being pretty cheesy so you can enjoy laughing at it more.
The Haunted Hayride Experience
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Taking place in what used to be the old Los Angeles Zoo, the nestled hillside environment of The Haunted Hayride has always had a creepy, almost country vibe to it compared to its proximity to downtown and the freeways. After hiking through the darkness because we chose the first parking lot we could find-

Long Halloween Tip # 13: Always research your parking options. Know if you have to pay and always have money on you just in case, and know the layout of the area around you to know if you really got the best parking or will have to hike a mile or two to get there.

-thank you for that interruption, Long Halloween Tips.  Anyway, after the hike and getting our tickets scanned, we made our way inside. There's not a particular layout to the grounds of The Haunted Hayride, and bathrooms are hard to find (and being offsite will actually need you to come back in for reentry in order to get in again), but with a little exploring you can see the sights. There's a stage with some shows, a snack cart with all vegan snack foods (great candy apple slices and pumpkin fritters), and the Scary-Go-Round, a rickety merry-go-round with skeleton horses on it. For other entertainment they also have a pumpkin patch and some psychics.

There are a few costumed monsters milling about, scarecrows and zombies and werewolves and even a cameo by the Slender Man.

But what about the main events? Well, this year we have returning favorites, The Haunted Hayride and The In Between dark maze, as well as a couple new attractions, Trick or Treat and The House of Shadow. How do they rate?
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It's hard to tell at this range, but we're packed like fairly large sardines in the back of this hay cart.
The Haunted Hayride: In the past, The Haunted Hayride has always been something of a weird, disjointed set of themes that in spite of any of the Hayride's attempt of a theme, don't really have anything to do with one another. But, they're generally fun, and weird, and if they don't get you to scream, they're usually good for a few laughs. Going in knowing this year's theme was "The Boogeyman", I was curious to see what they were going to do, and, well, I'm still kind of processing it, to be honest. This year they went a bit more simplistic, a bit more artsy, and I think it lost a lot of the silly charm that you'll usually find at The Haunted Hayride. Don't get me wrong, we still had a lot of fun (even though we all lost some feeling in the legs about halfway through), and the grand finale was awesome, but it lacked a lot of what we normally come looking for.

As well, there's an innovation they did this year that, well, just doesn't work particularly well. There was a great moment last year where a sheet is thrown over the cart, leaving the riders disoriented and wondering just what was happening outside as the sheet thrashed and was flung about. No doubt looking to repeat this moment, each cart came in with a built in sheet mechanism on top of the cart, and, well, it didn't add particularly much. The sheet was only used twice, and on neither of those occasions was a big scare lined up after hiding us. As well, the sheet mechanisms on the cart had these steel cables used to suspend them, perfectly at arm height, and though we were warned constantly not to touch them, people kept doing so and finding out how sharp the cables were. Top it off with the sheet mechanism bunching at the front of the cart and making it impossible to see what was ahead, and this was a bit of a bust, unfortunately.
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The House of Shadows: With more haunts going the interactive route, the LA Haunted Hayride tried installing a semi-interactive house experience last year, and though it was just as much a disjointed set of scenes as the hayride itself, it felt a little lacking in its way. This year's house, The House of Shadows, was a marked improvement. Its line moved better, and it mostly fit the Boogeyman theme of the whole event as we tour through various, small suburban rooms. There are a few reasonably innovative scares and even one scene I'd call surprisingly cool (not spoiling it, but it involves a TV, and it was genuinely surprising to see executed). If I had one complaint, it would just be the fact that the line for this attraction is difficult to find and can be easy to miss if you aren't going out of your way to look for it (spoiler alert: it's near the food cart). If I had another complaint, it would be that the end of this attraction opens right onto the ending of Trick or Treat, which can kind of spoil the final scene there, and lead to some confusion as to whether or not the attraction's continuing.

Trick or Treat: I'm not quite sure what I'd call this. It's not a maze. It's not a haunted house. It's not quite an interactive experience. It's, well, it's a walk through a number of doors set up, with increasingly weird people usually threatening us for Trick or Treating. It does have a fun scare at the end though, so long as you're not spoiled for it by House of Shadow.
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The In Between - For my money the most entertaining attraction at the Haunted Hayride has always been the In Between dark maze. It's not the most elaborate of mazes, and in fact it's quite bare bones when compared to most other haunts. For the most part it's just black plywood walls with a handful of characters thrown in to give you scares and occasional props and effects to add to the effect. However, what it lacks in frills it makes up for in being an actual, legitimate maze, as in something you can actually get lost in. Add to that the pitch darkness, only lit by a single, large, overhead strobe, and you can spend some time in here getting fairly lost and freaked out (especially when it comes to the hallway with the big inflatable walls).

In past years they've provided groups of people a lantern to carry which didn't light very much, but did alert monsters to our presence. This year they did away with the lanterns and added, instead, creepy clown masks. These clown masks added a couple of beautiful things to this maze. The first being that they're cheap plastic, and as such cut down on our peripheral vision considerably. The second was that they basically transformed every lost person wandering the maze into evil-looking clowns, upping the number of scary characters in the maze exponentially.
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In retrospect, I really hope they disinfected these as often as they claimed.
So, while it may not compare quality-wise to a lot of haunts, The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride is still a fun, really entertaining haunt that the whole family can enjoy, and I recommend that everyone in the area who can try it at least once.

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween Diaries - Rise of the Jack O'Lanterns

10/4/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

Lest you think we're all doom and gloom and gore and screams at the Carter household, I do want to note that we love more about the holiday season than just having the pants scared off of us. Indeed, we love Halloween culture as a whole, including the artwork and decoration, the costumes, the candy, and the jack-o-lanterns. Though my skill in carving jack-o-lanterns can be quantified as limited, at best, each year my wife and I do our best to create our own weird, pop-culture themed pumpkins.
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As seen here by our tribute to The Walking Dead.
So when we came across the Rise of the Jack O'Lanterns event last year, we knew we had to attend. Billed as a display of thousands of professionally carved jack-o-lanterns under a variety of themes, we were impressed with this lengthy walkthrough experience at Descanso Gardens in La Canada. This event is completely scare free and wonderful for the family, and if you're looking for something Halloweeny to do this year that's fun for the whole family, well, this is one of the best. Instead of a lengthy walkthrough of everything available, below I'm just going to post a selection of my favorite carvings of the night, though know that they are but a tiny fraction of what is available (especially now that they've opened a second LA location at the Santa Anita racetrack). This year was as much a crowdpleaser as last year's, so if you do decide to attend, you won't be disappointed (though grab tickets when you can, they seem to disappear fast!)

Though, as always, I have tips, and this one's pretty basic:

Long Halloween Tip # 11: Know how to use your camera. Most Halloween events naturally take place at night, so you're going to have a pretty good collection of pictures with the flash obliterating chunks of what you're photographing, or dark and blurry flash-free photos unless you lock the camera down and try really hard. At Rise of the Jack O'Lanterns, both flash photography and tripods/monopods are against the rules. My best advice to get around this is to use the shoulder of someone you're attending with as a makeshift tripod.
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Seen here as demonstrated by Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road.
It's not perfect, but it gets the job done.

So, without further ado, let's thank my wife Fiona for being a wonderful and sporting tripod this year, and get to some of the photo highlights!
MATT'S FAVORITE RISE OF THE JACK O'LANTERNS CREATIONS
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The Jack O'Lantern tree is always a crowdpleaser.
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Spider-pumpkin, Spider-pumpkin, does whatever a-... you know what, this joke wasn't very good.
Please continue to the next photo and ignore that I made it.
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Their zombies are much better than mine.
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Giraffes!
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Possibly my clearest picture of the night. Thanks Fi!
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Their dinosaurs are always impressive.
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Their tribute to Inside Out had pumpkins of all five emotions; this was my favorite of them.
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While I heard nothing good about the new Terminator movie, this endoskeleton was cool.
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Carving into the pumpkin rind has always struck me as one of the creepiest artforms.
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Mother of Dragons!
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No commentary, this one's just cool.
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And finally, ending the tour with their In Memorium section of pumpkins, with pumpkins carved to represent and honor famous people who've died this past year, with this beautifully done (if blurrily photographed by me) tribute to Leonard Nimoy.
If these pictures weren't enough to get you to want to attend the Rise of the Jack O'Lanterns, well, then you probably just don't like pumpkins. Either way, they've got two events in the Los Angeles area, one in San Diego and one in New York this year. Check them out for some good, quality seasonal family fun.

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween Diaries - The 17th Door

9/29/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

Even though theme park Halloween events are intense and oft gory, they've still got a limit for how "extreme" they're going to go because they cater to a fairly broad audience that usually contains a fair number of kids despite many a sign suggesting otherwise.

Individual haunts, on the other hand, don't usually have those restrictions. Often having age limits of 18+ and requiring liability waivers, individual haunts are free to be a bit more experimental when maximum capacity isn't as much of an issue. Boundaries are pushed quite regularly, with greater theatrical elements, deeply involved stories and more "extreme" scares becoming the norm. More and more in the few years we've been doing this we've seen houses try and be more intense and gimmicky in an effort to compete with every other house on the market. A lot of these gimmicks work, and a lot don't, but all the same we enjoy finding out for ourselves just what limits a lot of these houses are willing to go to.

Which brings us to our third stop on The Long Halloween, The 17th Door.

The 17th Door wasn't initially on my radar when we started planning The Long Halloween, mostly because it's a new event, and we tend to be wary of events that don't have an established history after having been burned by a few subpar ones in the past. The fact that it's in Tustin (more than an hour away from where we live), made ignoring this one seem like an easier option. However, after looking into it a bit more, I began to reconsider. I'd read preview articles on a few websites I trust (namely the fine people at Theme Park Adventure and HorrorBuzz) about the high quality of work that was going into the show, and after reading on their website about how this was going to be a house that takes about half an hour to get through (impressive considering most independent haunts only last about 10 minutes, give or take), with 17 rooms of increasing intensity and a safe word available if you want to opt out, I was intrigued.

A little wary, but intrigued. You see, in line with what I was talking about how people are pushing boundaries with haunts, there are a lot of houses out there that are considered "extreme", like Blackout or McKamey Manor. These are houses that will, well, from what I've read have you sign yourself away to be tortured for a short while. While I'm all for pushing boundaries and people doing what they consider fun, that's just not for Fi and me. We love being scared, but we still like having fun in our own way.

Long Halloween Tip # 8: Know your limitations. Research all events in advance and see what kinds of warnings they've got, then use your judgment from there on whether or not it's for you. There's nothing worse than paying for an event and then arriving only to realize it's something you cannot or will not do. A lot of events will require you to sign waivers these days; don't let that be an immediate turnoff as this is a) pretty standard text for liability purposes and b) often a sign of a fairly fun event.

That said, while the warnings for The 17th Door did sound like they bordered on extreme, they didn't sound too bad for us, so we made the long drive out to Tustin to see just what The 17th Door had in store.
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The first thing that caught our attention, and not in the best of ways, was that the lines to claim your tickets weren't exactly laid out particularly well, so when the attraction opened for the night there was a bit of a mad, confused rush, and the multiple lines (presumably for standard and VIP entrance) were confused, to say the least. That said, it was opening weekend, so I'm sure they were still working out the kinks. After our tickets were scanned and waivers were signed, we got in the first group for the night. We were led into an amazingly recreated classroom, instructed on the rules of the event by the teacher and told the story of Paula, a young woman escaping her troubled past by going to college, only to be faced with her own fears and spiral into madness. The shocking jump scare that follows in the room is of a kind I've never seen before, and really sets the surreal and unsettling mood of the event to come.

This shock over, we are led into a hall and told that we will be going through 17 rooms, one at a time, and, well...

Well this is the point where I'm going to be quiet to avoid spoilers, but I'll share some teases of this exquisite haunt because I think it's one that everyone should know about.

The journey through Paula's psyche is a twisted and bizarre one, but unlike a lot of similar haunts that just usher you from creepy scene to creepy scene, this one actually had a story progression that was at once both welcome and sad. Paula's made into a fairly sympathetic character to understand and follow as she descends into greater depths of madness, leading to what's a surprisingly sad ending for a haunt. Coupled with the stellar makeup work and the unbelievable sets (seriously, a lot of these feel like film quality sets, I had a hard time believing I wasn't in a school much of the time), and this was a professional event from top to bottom that would've been worth remembering.

But how extreme was it? Well, the quick answer I have for that is, moderately. There wasn't anything I couldn't do, anything I didn't want to do, but it got pretty close at times. In between standard haunt jump scares, there were moments where we were shown footage of real surgeries, endured mild electric shocks (a trend in haunts I still don't approve of), forced to walk through a floor covered in real dead cockroaches, walking through a room at near-freezing temperatures, and were forced into a small room with the 8 people in our group, had the lights turned out, and were buried in... things. Between rooms we often got to watch video footage of our responses to the previous room, and, well, I'm not entirely sure they didn't use our reactions to customize experiences the way they antagonized certain members of our group.

In the course of the event I was forced to eat a piece of bacon by a disgusting pig man, and had a tongue depressor shoved into my mouth by a large monster doctor. The ending sequence, where we were put in individual, small and pitch black isolation rooms in a mock mental institute and were assaulted on all sides by random, loud noises, sprays of water and foam, and the occasional invader, were disturbing and enough to make me wonder if I might just be going mad at points.

Long Halloween Tip # 9: In the event that you go to an event where you might have to eat something, even something not that bad, bring gum as a just in case for afterward.

Long Halloween Tip # 10: For any haunt, bring comfortable clothes, but as an addendum to my earlier rule, wear comfortable clothes that you don't mind getting messy. I'm not saying you'll be covered in blood (though that's always a possibility), but wear and tear and crawling around aren't impossible.
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We survived The 17th Door!
This was an intense, fun and truly unique experience, and I would go so far as to calling it one of my favorite standalone houses we've ever done for The Long Halloween. If you don't mind scares that'll push you without pushing you over the edge, I cannot recommend The 17th Door highly enough.

With the way we started this year for The Long Halloween, it's feeling like what we've done so far will be hard to top. Prove us wrong, October! Prove us wrong!

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween Diaries - Knott's Scary Farm

9/27/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

The second stop on our 2015 Long Halloween is Knott's Scary Farm. Yes, we're doing the two big theme park haunts down here in a row. Normally we try and space things like that out a little for variety's sake, putting a few solo houses in the middle, but when it came down to it, there were so many things we wanted to do this year that were only running in October, that the few that were open in September we just had to jump on. This is one of them.

From past experiences, I'll say that Knott's isn't quite up to comparing with Universal Studios. They lack the same quality and dedicated special effects/production design/makeup people and have always had a slightly lower quality, with more mazes based around cheap, loud-noise based jump scares (having actors with gloves covered in washers slamming against plywood does get the job done, though). As well, they tend to keep their mazes on for several years at a time, offering only a few new attractions each year alongside other mazes that have been around for up to five years. All told, while I love constantly rotating variety like at Universal, I also do love the familiarity of keeping stronger mazes from years past and mixing them with new blood.

The one thing that Knott's does have going for it, though, is volume. While Universal usually only has about 6 mazes and their Terror Tram, Knott's tends to average about ten mazes each year, along with some other odds and ends interactive attractions.

We skipped last year's Knott's, and their introduction of the interactive Infected, zombie hunt attraction, due to a number of other haunts demanding our attention, but with some of our favorite haunts from previous Long Halloweens not making a reappearance this year, Knott's got added back to the schedule. Will the returning mazes still scare? Will the new mazes offer anything, well, new? Let's find out!
Welcome to Knott's Scary Farm
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This year's Knott's Scary Farm has a total of 11 haunted attractions; 9 mazes, 1 haunted train ride and the interactive Special Ops: Infected experience. With our Skeleton Key ticket upgrades granting unlimited front of the line access, we knew we could make a good year of the attractions. Still, we skipped the My Bloody Clementine train ride this year because of memories of lackluster modification to the train experience from Scary Farms past, so we kept to the mazes and Infected this year. With so much to do, we instituted a long-ago learned Long Halloween tip.

Long Halloween Tip # 6: Research what you can in advance. For smaller, or newer haunts, research can tell you if events are worth your time and money, while for bigger events with multiple attractions, research can tell you what to hit first to avoid the really big lines and make the most of your night.

With Infected being an experience that you can attend via a limited number of timed tickets handed out at the beginning of the night, we knew we had to get to the ticket handout first, which is sometimes easier said than done.
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Especially with a crowd this densely packed at the beginning of the night.
As soon as the floodgates opened and the night began, it was a mad rush of bodies to get to the few people they had handing out tickets. With tight quarters and many low planters and decorations, I'm amazed nobody tripped and got trampled in the mess.

Things didn't get much better once we got to where the tickets were being handed out. There were maybe a half dozen Knott's employees standing at the entrance of the Camp Snoopy area, each of whom had a small stack of tickets and handed them out at their discretion to the swarming mobs that gathered around them like ants. There was no order, lines were non-existent, and I'm also impressed things didn't get violent the way the people mobbed the employees. In short, I guess I'm saying that this was something that could have had better logistics and more organization, but with a little effort and a little more yelling, I was able to get Fi and me tickets for 10:00 pm.

With this done, we finally got to wander the park. Like Universal, there are a few scare zones around Knott's Scary Farm, though they aren't as well marked, or populated. While they've got a bunch of sliders (guys with special knee pads that allow them to noisily slide along the ground, a very creepy and fun effect when done well) who do great work, most of the scare zones were too dark to see the characters, or in the case of the "Ghost Town" scare zone, too foggy to really see where we were going. Still, there were plenty of scares to be found in these zones, you just had to go looking for them (well, except for the always entertaining clown area; they were pretty hard to avoid).

And with that, we were off to the mazes!
The Mazes
Paranormal Inc.
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Even the Jason on my shirt is embarrassed by how much I blinked in these pictures.
A new maze this year, and one of the most heavily hyped, Paranormal Inc. is played as a ghost-hunting show gone awry in an abandoned mental institute. With a lot of special effects and some stunt work in play, it was supposed to be the must-see maze of the night, so naturally we headed there first. We were ushered in in groups to see an opening scene with a ghost hunter crew that accidentally unleash the ghosts, and, well, I'd tell you more details but I couldn't be sure what they were, since the setup of this opening room made it impossible to hear the lead ghost hunter unless you were right in front of him. We got a few words of story, then some scares, and were then sent into the maze itself. The maze itself was cool, albeit sparsely populated by actors, relying more on special effects projection and an admittedly cool giant robot at the end. Was it a fun maze? Most definitely. The must-see of the night? Eh.

Maze Ranking: # 6

The Tooth Fairy
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One of our favorite mazes from Knott's Scary Farm's past was called Delirium, and it was a descent into madness done in the best ways, made of surreal, disturbing imagery. When we heard last year that it was being replaced by a new maze called The Tooth Fairy, we were more than a little upset.

Then we got to do The Tooth Fairy this year, and my thought was, Delirium who?

The Tooth Fairy was the maze of the night, utterly terrifying with its many portrayals of dental trauma and children being kidnapped and mutilated by a demonic tooth fairy. I'd almost say this one was too much, too disturbing for an event like Knott's Scary Farm which has a lot of kids in attendance, but we had a blast getting scared out of our minds by the tooth-obsessed psychos of this maze. The additional room we had at the beginning, thanks to our Skeleton Key passes, got us a little more backstory of the maze, starting in a suburban bedroom with a child (well, a 20ish-year-old child) looking for his lost brother before ripping out one of his own teeth in front of us.

Pleasant dreams.

Maze Ranking: # 1

Voodoo: Order of the Serpent
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I'm sure I could've taken a more generic picture of this maze's facade, I just don't know how.
Voodoo was a pretty basic maze, set wandering through a haunted bayou in Louisiana, and, well, that's really about all I've got to say about that. There weren't many people inside working to scare us, compared to most mazes, but what it lacked in actors it made up for in some pretty impressive set design. We were walking on actual bridges above actual water, and they did a fairly convincing job making this indoor facility look like we were wandering through an actual dark bayou. The Skeleton Key extra room that came with it was a fun little jump scare, while the zombie skeletons actually coming out of the water were a real highlight.

Maze Ranking: # 5

Trick or Treat
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Trick or Treat's a maze that's been around since we started doing The Long Halloween, and it hasn't changed much. Made to look like a suburban witch's house that you've invaded on Halloween night and protected by the ghostly trick or treaters she's killed and enslaved over the years, it's about as basic and classic a haunted house as you'd expect to find. Literally, if you think of the most basic haunted house possible, this is probably what you'd think of, and that's not a bad thing. What it does, it does well, and its special effects and set pieces are high quality, while its actors are enthusiastic. It's not a standout for me, but it's fairly well done all the same.

Maze Ranking: # 7

Forevermore
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As you can see from the picture, this is Fi's favorite maze.

Now we're getting to the really cool ones. Forevermore is based on the premise of a serial killer who themes his crimes to the poems and stories of Edgar Allen Poe, and with this premise you tend to get one room or section based on its own dedicated story, which is executed well. The Raven, The Pit & The Pendulum, The Telltale Heart, The Masque of The Red Death and more are represented in awesome, twisted representations of the story. The additional Skeleton Key room themed to Eleonora, a story I'm unfamiliar with, was a fun bit of improvised heart surgery. As huge fans of Poe's work, this is a favorite of ours from year to year, and as long as they run it, I don't imagine that'll change.

Maze Ranking: # 3

Pinocchio Unstrung
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Still blinking, Jason's still sad. This is offset somewhat by my favorite facade, with its giant moving puppet arms.
My personal favorite maze from year's past, moving down a bit in the rankings only because The Tooth Fairy was that awesome. Pinocchio Unstrung goes along with the premise that the Blue Fairy gave Pinocchio life, but never made him a real boy, transforming him into a twisted, bitter puppet obsessed with making himself real by flaying people and wearing their flesh. Pinocchio on its own is one creepy story, and every creepy bit from the original story is twisted into something dark and worse here, making it a pretty awesome and scary maze. Twisted puppets, donkey-men, giant crickets hiding in the bowels of a monstrous whale. Consistently one of the scarier and more fun mazes, I cannot recommend this one enough.

Maze Ranking: # 2

Dead of Winter
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This maze is pretty unapologetic about its lack of facade.
Dead of Winter is a new maze this year, and a pretty high concept one at that. Billed as a well lit and low temperature maze, it's essentially played as a twisted version of Frozen, where a bitter snow queen has unleashed an army of undead Vikings upon the land. I was excited for the maze at first, but a little underwhelmed by the final product. It was bright, and cold, but its setting in a mirror maze was a bit odd, and it wasn't as well lit as boasted, still relying on a fair few dark corners for scares. Combined with the fairly low population of actors (probably because of how cold this maze is), and I'd call it one of the weaker mazes of the night.

Maze Ranking: # 8

Black Magic
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It was a pretty hot night; can you tell?
Black Magic is another maze that goes back a few years, and it's one of the better ones. Set in a magic theatre beset upon by evil spirits after a seance of Houdini goes horribly awry, it's thematically one of the better pulled off mazes. The magic theatre sets combine to create a colorful and horrific environment where spiked walls close in, mutilated magic assistants stalk the halls and a giant hat with an even bigger, vicious rabbit leaping out of it don't seem out of place. While not one of the scarier mazes, it was definitely one of the more fun ones.

Maze Ranking: # 4

The Gunslinger's Grave: A Blood Moon Rises
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Since much of Knott's Berry Farm has an Old West theme, it makes sense that they'd have at least one Old West maze, and The Gunslinger's Grave does that job. It just doesn't do it very well, unfortunately. Set in an Old West town beset upon by werewolves, it's not particularly scary, and the werewolf population is strangely limited given its premise, with most of the scares being pulled off by creepy(ish) western archetypes. Probably the biggest problem I can see with it is the fact that most of the maze is set outdoors, which is weird for a maze, because one of the things most good mazes do is completely control your environment, making you lose yourself in this world they completely create for you. When you can see the sky, remember there's an outside world, and see and hear roller coasters in action around you, that illusion and the fear it creates kind of disappears.

Maze Ranking: # 9

Special Ops: Infected - Patient Zero
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One of the highest concept attractions I've seen at any theme park Halloween event, Special Ops: Infected - Patient Zero has an interesting premise on paper. Led around in groups of about ten people by a squad leader, we're given laser guns and made to fend off zombies as we accomplish missions in Knotts' Camp Snoopy area. While this sounded a bit large a concept to pull off on this level, and after some skepticism from the experience earlier in the night getting the tickets, I was pretty pumped to shoot some zombies once 10:00 pm rolled around.

And, well, that only really lasted for a few minutes. While the initial part of the excursion went well and I killed a fair number of zombies, the ambiguous description of how zombies could hurt us, combined with the ease of dying and the difficulty in coming back from the dead, left me unable to do any of the shooting and video game fun that one would expect from such an experience for close to half of our run. For half the time I was just wandering around with a useless gun, getting yelled at occasionally by our "squad leader" and watching everyone else have a great time. No doubt I missed some important rule or didn't take a full opportunity to recharge my weapon, but I think in designing an experience like this, they made it too easy to fail and not easy enough to live out the kind of zombie video game experience that you'd expect in something like this. Perhaps if death only meant being disabled for 15 seconds or so, I'd have different words for the experience, because while I was alive, this was quite a bit of fun, and because of that I would still highly recommend this experience.
And so that was our Knott's Scary Farm experience. Despite my complaints above, this is still a very fun and worthwhile Halloween experience, and is one of those ones that you must do once in your life if you live in the LA area. Before signing off on this topic, though, I have one more thing that must be added:
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Long Halloween Tip # 7: There's no better way to end a night at Knott's Scary Farm than some boysenberry funnel cake.
It's a scientific fact.
Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween Diaries - Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights

9/20/2015

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(For those new to this article series, please check out my introduction to The Long Halloween.)

While most Halloween events tend to wait for October, a few of the bigger haunts (and some odds and ends smaller ones) begin quite a bit earlier, in mid-September. Which, for us, is great, because if it were up to us we'd do Halloween year-round. Probably the first to open is also a strong contender for our favorite every year: Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights.
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Or as it's become known in recent years, The Walking Dead: The Theme Park.
Featuring a number of mazes, scare zones, and their infamous "Terror Tram" mostly based on licensed properties like hit movies and TV shows, they've got the benefit of a major movie studio's team of production designers and special effects technicians to make this one of the highest quality Halloween events in the country (so I'm told), and every year we've gone has been consistently great. In every year we've gone there has been a very heavy presence of The Walking Dead, featuring a maze, a scare zone and the themed Terror Tram, and after a while it's started to get monotonous. This year they've scaled back The Walking Dead's presence to just a maze, as well as scaling back the event as a whole (featuring 6 mazes to last year's 7 in the wake of Universal's House of Horrors attraction being torn down).

While this year's event features some stranger choices for maze themes and will be difficult to top last years amazing An American Werewolf in London maze, we're excited as ever to see what they've got in store for us.

BUT FIRST! Some general notes and tips to enhance The Long Halloween experience!

NOTE: For the sake of this series of articles, the term "maze" will actually very likely never mean maze. The terms "maze" and "haunted house" are pretty interchangeable from everything I've seen, though from what I can tell "maze" is usually used by larger events and theme parks when they are running a number of haunts. They are usually straightforward and offer little in the way of getting lost, but hey, you never know, they might surprise you.

Long Halloween Tip # 1: When it comes to Halloween events, always consider comfort a top priority. Wear practical clothing that you can move around freely in and shoes you wouldn't mind standing around all night in. While most haunts won't touch you (though some will), quarters are often dark and tight, you don't want anything that can get snagged or tripped on. For this reason, my wife always ties her hair back, wears small earrings (to avoid snagging) and leaves her purse at home when we're at a haunt. As a corollary, a lot of bigger Halloween events will have pretty impressive security, often just a shade below an average airport. My advice is to take everything out of your pockets but the essentials, and leave everything they could consider a weapon (even ballpoint pens) at home.

LH Tip # 2: Arrive early! Lines at Halloween events, especially the bigger theme parks, tend to get absolutely insane, sometimes hours long. If you're at an event where you have a timed ticket, this isn't usually a problem, but if you're at a free for all like at most theme parks, the earlier you're in, the better. The line may still be pretty bad, but compared to the 3 hour waits you'll get later in the evening, getting there at opening can really free up your night.

LH Tip # 3: Weigh front of the line options. Most theme parks and a lot of smaller haunts have options to skip these lines for an upcharge to your standard ticket price, and while these are usually timesavers, they aren't always necessary. At a lot of smaller events, if you've a timed ticket, or get there first thing, front of the line upcharges will just leave you out a few bucks. At theme parks and other larger events (like Queen Mary's Dark Harbor), they're often worth it, though do the math to find out what's most convenient for your budget, as some places have an upcharge that's like a 20-30% add-on, while others go close to doubling the ticket price (I'm looking at you, Knott's).

For the record, Universal Studios is consistently one of the best values when it comes to their front of the line tickets for Halloween Horror Nights, and fairly necessary given how obscene the lines can get.

LH Tip # 4: Hydrate! This may just be a Southern California thing, but most haunts get pretty damn hot due to the number of people and special effects crammed into small areas. You're going to sweat like crazy, so be sure you've got water on hand at any time, or at least know where to get some.

LH Tip # 5: Have fun! If you're not, why are you even doing this in the first place?
The Halloween Horror Nights 2015 Experience
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As always, the people behind creating the ambiance at Halloween Horror Nights were at the top of their game. While there were fewer mazes and scare zones than there were last year, they were all still exquisitely done. The Dark Christmas and Exterminatorz (spelling aside) scare zones were true standouts, with their twisted mix of evil Christmas characters and anthropomorphic and oversized vermin respectively.
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Like I always say, it's hard to do a bad evil Christmas scare zone when you've got enough Krampus' walking around.
The Mazes
While Universal still operates as a theme park during Halloween Horror Nights, you really come for the mazes, and while this year had some odd choices for maze subjects, it turned out to be a really solid year (as always).

Halloween: Michael Myers Comes Home
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Halloween Horror Nights has always specialized in mazes based on movies that feel like you're actually walking through the movies, and this year's Halloween maze was no exception. Based off of the original John Carpenter classic, and one of my favorite horror movies of all time, this was one I was greatly looking forward to, and it did not disappoint. From walking into the dilapidated Myers house, seeing the clown-costumed young Michael Myers holding a bloody knife at the top of the stairs, to the finale of Dr. Loomis shooting him through a window, this was a nearly scene by scene recreation of the film in the best ways possible, with a few trippy scenes thrown in to throw you for a loop. Unlike most Horror Nights mazes, this one was relatively bloodless in keeping with its faithfulness to the film, and would have been a strong contender for one of my favorites of the night.

But it won't get close to that spot.

Why's that?

Because the iconic Halloween theme was mostly absent for the maze. When most mazes keep full soundtracks from their films to really suck you in, this absence was distracting.

Major, major foul.

Maze Ranking: # 4 (if just for the lack of theme)

The Terror Tram: Survive the Purge
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I'm putting this in with the mazes, even though it's not really a maze and I won't rank it, because it's one of Universal's signature experiences.

Every Halloween season, the Terror Tram takes us to the familiar backlot sets like Bates Motel and the plane crash set from the recent War of the Worlds film. Then instead of driving around, as usual, they let us out to follow a path through these sets and get attacked by monsters hiding within. It's a fun experience, but lacking in a lot of repeat value as, well, there's only so much they can do from year to year to make this experience different, aside from a new paint job and characters. While the last three years have been themed to The Walking Dead, this year they themed it to The Purge, a theme that works well for the Terror Tram, as it can fit in the crazy randomness and violence of the purge quite well. While the actors were very enthusiastic this year, I don't have a whole lot to add here other than saying we had fun, so I'll continue.

This is the End 3D
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Oh man, I really can't say how much I wasn't looking forward to this maze. This isn't anything against Universal Studios or the movie This is the End (which I found enjoyable in an unmemorable sort of way), it's just that this didn't strike me as maze material. It didn't have, from what I could see, enough set pieces to make solid maze scenes out of, and, well, just wasn't scary. To top it off, the fact that it would be this year's 3D maze, a concept that usually means gaudy paints and wackiness and not a lot else to remember it by, and I wasn't that excited for it.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find this actually a pretty fun maze. I don't remember the movie much, but the scenes from it they had were recognizable and fun. The 3D effects were actually pulled off quite well and fun, with their giant demon heads and day-glo Satans popping in their environment and actually proving a lot of fun. The only thing about this maze that struck me as weird was how the f-word was bleeped out in every quote from the movie they used, which was weird not just for how many times this happened, but for the fact that it wasn't ok to say this while you could cut a person in half and have people eating their guts in the same maze.

Maze Ranking: # 5 (a lot of fun, but the rest of the mazes were better)

Alien vs. Predator
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Special Note: This picture was from last year's HHN because this year's maze not only didn't have a facade, it didn't even have a poster like this maze from last year.
One of the standout mazes from last year's Horror Nights was Alien vs. Predator. It was an awesome maze featuring a battle between the two iconic movie extraterrestrials, including top notch special effects, amazing costumes and puppets, and some of the coolest scenes I've ever seen in a Halloween maze. When I heard they were doing it again this year, I was excited.

When I went through it again, I was kinda underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong, the maze itself was every bit as amazing as it was last year (you can't go wrong ending a maze with a 16-foot-tall Alien Queen puppet), it's just that the lack of freshness just didn't do it for me. I would still highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't gone through it before, but if you attended last year's event, you can easily skip this one and wouldn't miss anything.

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Like this 2 hours + line.
Maze Ranking: # 6 (only because it offered little new; this is still an awesome maze otherwise)

Crimson Peak: Maze of Madness
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Guillermo del Toro is one of those directors I keep telling myself I need to familiarize myself with, because I've always enjoyed what I've seen. Pacific Rim was stylized goofy done right, and Pan's Labyrinth was one of the coolest and most stylish movies my wife and I have seen in recent memory. So when we saw the trailers for his newest film, Crimson Peak, we were both quite excited.

When we saw there would be a maze for it at Halloween Horror Nights, we were intrigued, if a bit wary.

The maze itself is an awesome experience, full of bizarre monsters, well pulled off jump scares, and some really cool gothic sets. The only problem with it is that this movie hasn't come out yet, so we really can't judge how good a job it does at interpreting the work. Still, it gives a lot to look forward to, and was a trippy, weird maze.

Maze Ranking: # 3

The Walking Dead: Wolves Not Far
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So I'm a bit hefty to be a walker. I'll go for a cheesy picture anytime.
The Walking Dead mazes have become something of a tradition at Horror Nights, and not always a welcome one from what I've heard online. That being said, this year's maze is probably the best of The Walking Dead mazes they've ever done. Taking inspiration from the recent fifth season, this maze brings to life some of the more memorable and grisly scenes from it, including (but not limited to), the gruesome butchers and trough scenes from Terminus, the horrible and weird melted zombies of Atlanta, and the gruesome death of Noah in the revolving glass door.

However, my personal favorite scene from the maze is a fairly cliched one you'll see in a lot of mazes that this one managed to make feel fresh. Oftentimes in mazes you'll find a hallway with hanging rubber corpses you'll have to push through, and once you've seen one you've seen 'em all, generally. However, one of the final scenes this year took place in the back of a truck full of hanging half corpses (the Wolves of the latter half of the season), and there was just something about the setup they did this year, with so many hanging half corpses, all swinging wildly from the people pushing through, with occasional jump scare walkers bursting from the walls, that made this scene fresh and exciting instead of cliched.

Is there a possible way of saying it was the best done hallway of hanging half corpses I've ever seen without sounding like a serial killer? Because if so, this is it.

Maze Ranking: # 2

Insidious: Return to The Further
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Oh man. Oh man oh man this was an awesome maze.

Have you seen the Insidious movies? If no, I would enthusiastically recommend them. They're not the freshest or the most innovative ghost movies of all time, but they're a lot of fun and exquisitely handled haunted house stories, which line them up excellently into becoming haunts. Universal did an Insidious maze a couple years back, and it was a lot of fun, but we weren't expecting a lot new to be added in this year's maze but for some upgrades from the most recent movie.

We were wrong. So very wrong in so many ways.

I could go into detail here about everything they did and did differently, but that'd be doing a disservice to what is an utterly fantastic maze. As with the others of this night, the scenes in this maze felt straight out of the movies, which is nothing new, but this had possibly the most enthusiastic and utterly insane actors I've seen in a Universal maze, especially for the character of the red-faced demon (if you've seen the movies, you know who I'm talking about). There were times he'd appear literally from nowhere, getting in my face and screaming, hissing and leaping for me, getting me to nearly fall to the floor screaming at the top of my lungs (I'm a screamer at Halloween, so sue me).

One moment with him will likely make one of the great moments of our Long Halloween history, as we were mesmerized by a special effect in the maze where an ordinary hallway melted away into an alternate dimension hellhole, and while we were distracted he leaped straight in front of me and scared the hell out of me.

This is a top notch maze from a top notch event, and one of the best I think we've ever seen.

Maze Ranking: A well-deserved # 1 for the night
So, ladies and gents, that was our Halloween Horror Nights experience. As always, this experience was a blast, and an excellent way to kick off The Long Halloween. Stick around next week as we take on one of the other big theme park haunts, and start exploring some of the new independent haunted houses Southern California has to offer.

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween Diaries - Introduction

9/15/2015

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If you’ve been around my blog at all, chances are you might have seen once or twice that I kinda like horror. I’ve written about it a few times on this blog (and am in the process of writing my first dedicated horror novel now), watched more movies in the genre than I can count, and have adventured to more than a few horrorish locations in my life (The Winchester Mystery House, Sleepy Hollow and the Monroeville Mall from Dawn of the Dead to name a few). I’ve even been lucky enough in my life to have found a partner who, while she didn’t initially, would ultimately share my love for the genre, to the point where I proposed to her on Halloween while we were both in costume.
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It’s hard to tell since she tore my mask off, but I was Ghostface from Scream, and she was Carrie. Incidentally, the guy who took the picture was dressed like Jason from Friday the 13th. It was a good Halloween, is what I’m saying.
Our mutual love for horror and the Halloween season has brought about a tradition for every year of our marriage that we’ve called The Long Halloween (a name which admittedly comes from our mutual love for Batman). For the month of October, and, well, some of late September too (because this area is awesome), we do our best to hit as many haunts and Halloween related events in the Los Angeles area, and given the large number of Hollywood people and haunt fans in the area, we get a lot to choose from. We’ll hit up theme parks and professional haunts, escape rooms and local haunted houses, displays of jack-o-lanterns and plays and whatever else seems cool that we can find the time for. It’s what we look forward to every year, and this year, dear readers, I’m bringing you along for the ride.

Yes, that’s right, while I’ve written some about The Long Halloween in the past, this year, for our Fourth Annual Long Halloween, I’m going to be sharing the entire experience on this blog, with pictures and reviews, tips and recommendations and amusing anecdotes for all the adventures we have. There will be occasional celebrity guest stars (well, less celebrity, and more our friends and family, but we love ‘em enough that their celebrities to us), screams and good times to be had all around.

Will we survive The Long Halloween? Stick around and find out. The adventure begins this weekend…

Thank you for joining me this Halloween season, and as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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    Matt Carter is an author of Horror, Sci-Fi, and yes even a little bit of Young Adult fiction. Along with his wife, F.J.R. Titchenell, he is represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, CA.

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