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subbyenbywitch · 2 years

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[theme park review] universal’s halloween horror nights 31 (2022)

we made our triumphant return to halloween horror nights! honestly i’m pretty sure we’re gonna try to do this basically every year if we can.

so, yeah! they opened the gates for halloween horror nights about half an hour early (my understanding is they open it basically as soon as they’re ready, so they oftentimes end up being a little early) and it took us a while to get through the line. the lines for the halloween haunted house and the weekend haunted house (more on that later) immediately exploded to over an hour wait for both, so we headed for universal monsters: legends collide.

we passed through some of the scarezones on the way there, but didn’t really stop to enjoy them because we figured we were better off getting in a line as soon as possible after opening, but i still got to be adorably (and kinda flirtily) shy & scared when some of the scare actors jumped at me, so that was cool.

while we were queuing up for the universal monsters haunted house, the sky just absolutely opened up. a few people in line whipped out ponchos, we were equipped with umbrellas. the rain honestly did kinda suck in the sense that it sometimes limited how much we could interact in line, but we also knew it would likely drive some people away and make some of the lines shorter, so that kind of changed our strategy for the rest of the night honestly.

in spite of the umbrellas i did get pretty soaked waiting in line for this one, but eventually we put away our umbrellas and put on our masks (the pandemic is still a pandemic no matter what certain presidents who shall remain nameless have said, y’all) and made our way inside.

this mashup of three monsters didn’t have an obvious, epic story like last year’s bride of frankenstein house, but it didn’t do anything to dissuade me from the belief that the universal monsters house is just always going to be a must-see house every year. and honestly the story that it did have wasn’t half-bad, it might’ve even made a better monster mash movie than house of frankenstein or house of dracula? dracula basically preys on wolf man’s strange desire not to be a werewolf by sending him an anonymous letter about an amulet that can control the power of the sun while the mummy is woken by a high priest to protect said amulet. dracula is hoping to exploit the confusion to steal the amulet for himself to give himself the power to prey in the day as well as at night.

as always the scenery and costumes were just phenomenal. in addition to the just generally great production values of the setting, there were specifically some really cool anubis statues. i’ve mentioned before that usually my strategy in these haunted houses is to hide behind my partner to encourage the scare actors to see me as a weaker target and bully me, but since the universal monster houses are less about the spooks and more about the awesome scenery and attention to detail, i ended up deciding to take the lead for this one.

and yeah, even though he’s hardly one of the hotter werewolves out there, i still totally shyly waved or threw heart emojis at some of the wolf man scare actors we came across. no shame here.

by the time we got out it was just pouring rain, and in spite of our umbrellas we got pretty soaked, but we also saw that all of the haunted houses had unbelievably short waits, so we decided to rush over to the halloween one. i think the wait was something like 35 minutes, when it has pretty consistently been averaging over an hour even on slow nights. what a seriously charmed couple of days at theme parks. our original plan had been to do one of the licensed haunted houses (which ended up being universal monsters) at the beginning of the night and then save our longest line (probably halloween) for the end of the night. instead, here we were just over an hour into our night and already about to knock out two of what should have been the longer waits.

i’m going to be honest, even though i love halloween and i was sure they were going to do a good job, i wasn’t actually super excited for this haunted house? it kind of mirrored my experience with the beetlejuice house last year. like, again, i knew it would be very impressive and i would like it, but my thinking with these always ends up being more or less “they’re just going to recreate some of the best scenes from the movie, right?” and my inclination is always to think that i’m going to get more out of the houses that aren’t based on licensed properties or the universal monsters house where it’s based on a licensed property but they’re explicitly telling their own story, right?

there is certainly a lot of truth to that, but wow were my expectations for this house not nearly high enough. they just nailed this one. which makes sense because they for sure threw a ton of resources at it, but i’m still just beyond impressed with how they not only recreated a lot of the best scenes from the movie but just really, truly made you feel like you were there, like you were a part of them and actually experiencing them. the scare actors were on point. seriously, this was just incredible.

also after the recreation of the opening scene where a clown-masked michael kills his older sister, they had a title card??? like, there was this pitch black room with the actual freaking title card from the movie brightly illuminated and it was conceptually adorable but also just damn impressively moody and i actually just cannot believe how effectively they translated this movie into a theme park attraction. i’m actually in awe. i know they do this with at least one of these movies every year, but it’s still hard not to feel like “how did they do that???” every single time.

it was still raining when we got out but wait times were nevertheless starting to go up. but the last licensed house we wanted to do still had about a half hour wait so we decided to jump on that before it got longer. and then all we would have left for the rest of the night was original concept houses, which would be a huge, unexpected load off.

the horrors of blumhouse was much more the kind of experience i expect to have in the haunted houses based on licensed properties. it did a great job of recreating scenes from both movies it’s based on, sometimes in pretty clever ways. mashing both movies up into one house was a pretty good way to get mileage out of both of them, because i don’t think either one could have carried a house on its own honestly. but as much as i appreciate the effort that went into this one, it just wasn’t that scary? and unlike the universal monsters houses, it doesn’t really offer anything else to make up for its lack of scariness?

i don’t know. probably the fact that we did it right after the fucking incredible halloween house didn’t do it any favors, but at the end of the day this one just really didn’t leave much of an impression on me. it was fine.

the only licensed property haunted house i haven’t mentioned yet was the weekend: after hours nightmare, and i’m sure it’s great because they probably put a lot of resources & effort into it but it was nevertheless a pretty easy skip. neither of us listen to the band, the overall concept of having a haunted house based on an album seems kinda weird tbh, and word of mouth had this as one of the longest lines every day so it was basically the same situation as stranger things in 2019 or that other netflix series neither of us watched last year.

so that just leaves the always-awesome original houses! of those, we only missed out on dead man’s pier: winter’s wake and descendants of destruction. both of them sounded pretty up my alley (especially dead man’s pier), but we only had time for so many!

the ones we made it to kicked ass as always, though. the first one we made it to, as the rain was starting to truly calm down, was fiesta de chupacabras. the story here is basically that a village is luring clueless tourists in so they can kidnap them, kill them, and feed them to the chupacabras to avoid being preyed on themselves. there’s some fantastic bondage & murder imagery going on throughout, which if you’ve been following me for long you know i’m hella into because i’m that kind of a weirdo. i kinda wish the villagers had more explicitly threatened us with the same fate, but it was pretty heavily implied! also the chupacabra animatronics were fantastic.

next up was spirits of the coven, which it will likely shock no one is the one i was the most insistent upon not missing. the general idea is that it’s the 1920s and a bunch of witches are running a speakeasy that lured in men to be kidnapped & murdered to be used as ingredients in their “witches’ brew.” obviously i don’t love the heteronormativity there, but whatever! the setting was awesome, the costumes were awesome, and as long as they also accept enby victims i love the implied peril of the whole thing. and there’s even some great bondage imagery towards the end with some of their victims’ eyes & mouths sewed shut! gnarly.

after this the rain basically stopped and they finally started to run the scarezones again, so as we were making our way through the last few haunted houses we started taking our time going through all the scarezones because honestly they’re just as fun as the haunted houses in their own way? i don’t have any specific notes on any of them, but yeah they were all on point as always seems to be the case!

we were both running out of steam when we made it to our penultimate haunted house, bugs: eaten alive. i find bugs genuinely gross & creepy irl, while i oftentimes find giant & monstrous bugs super hot, so i knew one way or another this house would probably be quite a bit of fun and i’d probably feel some kinda way about it. it ended up being weighed more heavily towards the latter, especially with the last few stretches of the haunted house taking place in this absolutely awesome set with this huge honeycomb and some badass web effects.

last but very much not least was hellblock horror, which as its name implies is a house whose concept is that a bunch of monsters are locked up in cages and, rude oversight!, i’m not locked up with them??? okay this is a rather silly & dumb quibble, but i would’ve liked a lot more restraint imagery given the theme of this one!! but oh well. on a positive note, one of the last rooms is dominated by a single huge cage with a swamp yeti inside of it and despite there being plenty of other people in the room the monster made sustained eye contact with me while i cowered cutely, so yeah i think i won halloween horror nights?

seriously, though, i had a blast as always. well, to the extent that a sample size of three can be described with words like “always.” i’m so profoundly glad this has become a tradition for my partner & i, and i’m already excited for the next time we go!

#halloween horror nights 31 #halloween horror nights #halloween #universal studios #universal monsters #theme parks #dracula #the wolf man #the mummy #halloween movie #halloween 1978 #freaky movie #freaky 2020 #the black phone #witchy #witches

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