The West Coast continues to be the prime destination for Halloween haunts and events that horror hounds from all over the country flock to for a reason. From original immersive theater such as Haunted Delusion to regional theme park haunts such as Howl-O-Scream and Six Flags Fright Fest, plus local LA destinations including Dark Harbor and LA Haunted Hayride, Halloween is alive and well.
It’s thanks in part to Knott’s Scary Farm, which has served as the blueprint impacting the theme park world with over 50 years of operation, predating Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights (which started in 1991). It has really shaped Halloween culture across the country and the kinds of events you can visit now.
While yes, spooky season has become its own fandom for those who embrace it all year long as a lifestyle, it’s not entirely reliant on modern horror franchising. Halloween has always been about ghost stories and putting on masks. So while there is a huge movie and television presence within the subgenre of haunts, it’s one that would still thrive without it. And that proof is in the original work haunters put into their experiences.
Knott’s Scary Farm nears 55 years at this point of largely sticking to traditional storytelling based on cultural horror folklore. It has its own Green Witch, an icon of sorts, alongside all sorts of goblins, ghouls, ghosts, zombies, vampires, and even aliens. Hey, they’ve covered a lot in half a century.
Recently io9 was invited to attend this year’s festivities and got to experience three new mazes with fun mythologies that really represent how Halloween is often bigger than Hollywood. There was Zoo, a maze that took guests through a demented labyrinth of humanoid animal experiments. It was very Island of Dr. Moreau. Then, Cinema Slasher rips both as a maze and literally (as in, the screens you walk through). It’s a parody of a campy horror cinematic universe that comes to life in a theater, complete with a popcorn bucket mascot who chases you with a knife. But our favorite of all was Mary.
If you grew up going to sleepovers that would go from yapping about crushes to descending into the chaos of “Hey, let’s summon Bloody Mary” in the bathroom mirror, Mary really captures the horrors of what saying her name three times in the mirror can set off. In keeping with the park being ahead of the curve in immersive aspects within the mazes, this one had a fun level of interaction where if you said her name in any of the rooms with mirrors while going through this maze, it would activate her horrific presence.
Similarly, Six Flags Fright Fest, when it’s not relying on The Conjuring Universe, has the potential to live up to the legacy of what’s now its sister park (thanks to its merger with Knott’s owners Cedar Fair). In past years we’ve seen really well-executed houses such as Willoughby’s: Resurrected, which is a spacious build of a kooky Victorian manor haunted by a slew of spectral entities. It, along with Six Flags’ other houses, just needs the energy and production quality seen at Knott’s Scary Farm. We hope that dream collab comes true as the brand teams continue to meld together into a bigger spooky season superpower.
Immersive entertainment continues its reign on the West Coast for this reason. Sleep No More is gone on the East Coast—it’s since been replaced by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Masquerade—but Haunted Delusion is still LA’s premiere immersive theater staple. In the early 2010s, creator Jon Braver ambitiously began to produce plays with a huge participatory component for attendees with the premise of stepping into an ARG-esque scary storyline. As a returning member of its captive audience year after year, I can’t get enough of Braver’s powerful living horror stories.
Past years have introduced lost vampire children discovering they can force-push vampires onto the ceiling (via killer wired stunts) to save their coven mother in His Crimson Queen and crazed fans who break into an author’s home in search of a lost manuscript as the writer’s world of horrors comes to life in Lies Within. No one is doing it like Braver and co.
This year’s show is an atmospheric tale inspired by Dante’s Inferno and produced in conjunction with Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group, where Braver also serves as the director of immersive entertainment. The play takes place in the heart of downtown LA and transforms a historic building in the city into the nine circles of hell.
Thirteenth Floor’s own Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor, a haunt that takes place on Long Beach’s iconic docked ship, boasts lore inspired by nautical hauntings and real-life ghost stories of tragedies aboard the ship. It’s really delightful wondering if you’re seeing a person in makeup or a real-life haunt on the ghost-filled ship.
The company also recently collaborated with global superstars Elvira and Janelle Monáe with their own inventive flavors on Halloween mazes at the LA Haunted Hayride.
It’s so exciting to see these queer icons in modern pop culture who are their own curated brands of sexy, spooky, and scary. Monáe, who’s long been known for her epic Halloween costumes, produced a version of her annual Halloween event as a maze where you walk through “Monáe Manor” and encounter all sorts of twisted terrors and even sometimes the singer (last year she roamed her own maze with a chainsaw).
This year Elvira joins in the fun with “Elvira’s Trick or Treat Mayhem,” a maze narrated by the mistress of the dark herself. In it she’s a radio host who echoes through the experience inspired by her horror comedy puns and glamorous spooky energy.
Then there’s Howl-O-Scream, which is newer in the game. It’s based at SeaWorld San Diego and has driven its own stake into the scare scene with original mazes at their parks inspired by bayou creatures, alien invasions, and nightmare brain experiments. Both Howl-O-Scream and Dark Harbor feature immersive hunts for speakeasies within their mazes to raise your spirits. Both also use original stories to create their own creepy canon and try their hand at having hidden gems like the secret speakeasies within the universe of their mazes.
In past years, Dark Harbor even had a frozen ice bar where you got to meet a butcher from one of the haunted houses—the backstory was that they a penchant for chilling spirits of the drinkable persuasion. In the ice bar, there were walls of real ice with (fake) chopped-up body parts to look at while drinking vodka from an ice shot glass.
As these attractions show, horror experiences don’t need to lean on pop culture franchises to create memorable frights. More often than not, original haunts offer more grounded horrors that feel festive and truly scary. Suspension of disbelief can come much more easily in a maze or immersive experience with really well-executed and performed interactions.
The studio-quality haunted houses, especially on the West Coast, have begun to feel a bit overproduced; it’s starting to feel more like they are walk-through marketing boxes strung together with black hallways where a masked performer jumps out at you from their boo-hole. It’s tired, and no one wants to pay a lot of money to stand in line for hours for that anymore.
Fans want to feel like we’re actually in it, like there could be a real ghost in the Queen Mary‘s boiler room with us, or that Bloody Mary could break through our mirror thanks to Knott’s Scary Farm, or as if we’re really crossing the river of lost souls with death at Delusion. Those are the kinds of fun, original, genuine frights that make Halloween endure as one of our favorite seasons.