As we arrived at Scare House a bit after 7:30pm on a Thursday, the omens were good for a highly professional haunt. Their commercial building (it looked like a bank but was really a former school) loomed massively over the street. As we went around the block to the entrance, a massive line of hundreds appeared in view. Everyone was excited and eagerly anticipating the wonders that must lie inside.
The natives got a bit restless, though, since the wait dragged on for a long time. A VERY long time. Scare House’s management intelligently sent a guy out to entertain us while in line. Unfortunately, his tone was loud and he sounded like a homeless person heckling us rather than someone trying to entertain. Most of us thought that was exactly what he was, since his highly professional makeup job was next to invisible in the dark.
Once inside the building, we were greeted by friendly people, but our wait simply to buy tickets at the booth stretched on to infinity. It took us about half an hour from when we started to line up to when we were able to purchase our tickets.
After we bought our tickets, the line continued on through a room where we were introduced to Steve, a paranormal investigator, who seemed to exist to sell us shirts. He seemed a little puzzled about why he was here and why there were so many people looking at him. Old horror movies were exhibited effectively on a large projection screen, but the wait continued to drag on. All in all it took about one hour and twenty minutes to get into the main body of the haunt.
It was clear that huge effort had been expended on set decoration and making the haunt look nice. If you want a visually stunning haunt with a lot of different scenes, all meticulously prepared, this is the place for you. It looked more like a museum or an art exhibit than anything else.
We really enjoyed the art exhibit aspects of this place, but when it came to scares most of the rooms didn’t have any. The occasional anamatronic, easily recognizable from the catalogue, came up and tried to frighten us. But the average room was just a static exhibit with beautifully prepared props but no actors or anamatronics.
The actors were good - we’d like to give a shout out to the farmer, who fooled even our best spotters - but for the 50-odd rooms there were not nearly enough of them. The actors’ performances, costumes and makeup were highly professional.
But a strange thing was noticed - the actors didn’t seem all that keen on scaring us. The talent was there, but the small rooms left them little freedom of movement, and without freedom of movement there was no drama. It’s impossible to leap out at us when you’re already inches away.
Actors would occasionally follow us from room to room but there was little intimidation factor since they were sharing the narrow corridors with us and really couldn’t engage with us in any meaningful way.
All and all, we liked Scare House, but it was not the sleek cinematic tour de force promised by the advertising and web site. We do recommend it to people who want to enjoy slick artistic scenes of terror without the fright and intimidation factor that many people seek in haunted houses.
1 comment:
Just a tip, we went in 2008 and the line was HUGE! When my wife questioned a worker at the front of the line, they told us we could pay an extra $3/person and go to the front of the line. So we did and were in and out of Scarehouse in 45 minutes.
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