Website updates for 2023 will begin before the end of the month.
We are back from our most recent excursion. So far this year, we have gone through twenty (20!) haunted houses. Most recently, we visited Halloween Horror Nights 32 at Universal Studios Florida as well as year three of SeaWorld Howl-O-Scream.
Though these haunts look great, and have actors at every turn, the Universal haunts had a scare level of about zero. You are walking through them in a continuous “conga line” chain of people, so every scare is spoiled ahead of you. We didn’t get startled even one time during our seven hour visit, nor did we hear anyone else scream except for twice from chainsaws in a scare zone. Beautiful sets, great sound, wonderful costumes and makeup … but it’s really just walking through creepy sets with folks acting out to pre-recorded sound clips. If you are looking for scary, I do not recommend, but if you like scary looking things, it’s top notch.
SeaWorld’s offering, however, startled us often through the much shorter evening — mostly due to their scare zone actors hiding in the shadows and bushes and such. They were in many unexpected places, and it was a really good time. The haunts were not anywhere as fancy as Universal’s, but the actors got to do their thing — they could talk, yell, bang and follow you — just like we are used to at “real” haunted houses around here. It was a much funner time overall, but the food offerings were not nearly as good as the tons of speciality booths at Universal.
Now that we am back, and kind of burnt out on haunted houses, attention will turn to … haunted houses in Des Moines. And around Des Moines.
I do not plan to renew the index software I’ve been testing the past few years, and my old haunt index script I wrote does not integrate with this WordPress blog website, so I’ll be doing everything manually like I did when this site started in 2010. This will just make it take longer 😉
I have a few more tasks I need to take care of first – including a visit to try to fix some zombies at an area haunt and two haunt articles to update/write for some other sites – then we’ll see what needs to be done here.
More to come…