A Review of HHN 33 (2024) at Universal Studios Orlando

Overall Event Thoughts

I wrote most of the house reviews a few days after the event but I'm finally writing this overall thoughts section a couple months after the event and I definitely feel that I have a good grasp on how I feel about this year. So let's start with what has been pretty unanimous amongst fans: this year isn't the best year, actually it wasn't that great. I think that's really a function of two things: 1. the year lacked any high end houses. We'll talk more about this later on but the year really lacked any houses (minus maybe one) that would land in my top 20, and specifically no originals (which are my favorite) and 2. last year was really good and our biggest point of comparison was last year. Maybe I'll write about this at one point but man, last year was so much fun. It had 3 original houses that would be a top house in a lot of other years (Darkest Deal, Oddfellow and Blood Moon) to go along with a great icon and a cohesive narrative with him. The fact that we got podcasts for (all?) the scarezones that all tied into Oddfellow at least a little was amazing. I loved the whistle that happened throughout the park loop and I loved that Oddfellow had the show and was miced up for interaction. Last year was my favorite year by a pretty good margin and so anything other than another top tier event, which this year was not, was naturally going to fall short.

To talk about the event as a whole necessitates talking about the lack of cohesion. There were at least 3 different characters/themes that were in use throughout the event: the weird arch monster (no, I'm not going to call it the fan/official name), the punk character/theme we saw on the house shirt and other merch and Sinister and Surreal. Yes, I recognize that even last year had different marketing focuses (Oddfellow and the IP commercials) but I think that's more a function of the IPs themselves drawing people to the event and therefore being the natural "face" of the event to non-fans. The rest of the merch throughout the event was Oddfellow and circus themed in a way that this year wasn't.

We'll talk much more about the houses in a quick second but just quickly, this year was a weird year in that it was good but not great throughout. Inisidious was my favorite and is probably my second favorite IP house of all time (behind Us from Hollywood in 2019) and lands solidly at the end of my top 20. The rest of the houses were good, definitely not bad but nothing stood out. I wish I could say the same about the scarezones. Torture Faire was a fun one and Demon Queens wasn't bad but the rest of them either were non-existent, lacking cohesion beyond brand name or too similar in look and feel to what was there in the past. We'll also talk about some other aspects of the event, let's run through them quickly: food (good!), tribute store (bad!) and premium events (amazing!)

Although I hate the need to disclaim any opinion that is less than overwhelmingly positive, I'm going to do it. I love love love this event. No joke, between dollars and credit card points and airline miles, I spent 5 figures plus attending the events in Orlando, Hollywood, Singapore and Japan this year. Any criticism I have of HHN comes from a deep love and desire for this event to be as great as possible. Because I really do love this event and hate to think about where my career could be if I spent all the time I spend thinking about HHN thinking about work!

With all that out of the way, let's get started with houses!

Houses

Museum: Deadly Exhibits

I tend to classify original HHN houses along two axes: whether the concept is dark or silly and whether it's played straight or more tongue in cheek. For example, Slaughter Sinema, which we'll talk about next is a silly concept played tongue in cheek. Major Sweets is more of a silly concept played straight. Museum is in my favorite corner of that chart: dark concept played straight. Think Dead Man's Pier, Nightingales Blood Pit or Puppet Theater: Captive Audience. To set the scene, we're tourists visiting a folklore museum which is excitedly opening a new exhibit on the Rotting Stone, an ancient European artifact that tends to bring famine and tragedy wherever it goes. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out to be taking over the museum which we find out as we look for a way out.

The concept is intriguing to me because it lets the event give us a huge variety of monsters and settings that we wouldn't normally see. A folklore museum would naturally have a ton of detailed, life size dioramas with copious mannequins, masks and clothing. We should be walking from exhibit to exhibit constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the museum exhibits that are changing into crazed killers. But unfortunately, we're not for much of the house. Instead we walk past what largely are paths with little hanging artifacts and signs. Instead of the huge variety of costumes from all sorts of different cultures, we seem to get three main categories of scareactors: guards, sentient Rotting Stone rock monsters and other characters that are the museum exhibits come to life that I was hoping for. Those other characters are without a doubt the strength of the house. I loved the mask section with the Easter Island looking masks moving up and down on the wall, distracting you from a boohole with a scareactor wearing one, or, my favorite section of the house, the Viking Ship we walk onto and meet the undead viking at its prow.

I understand what they were trying to go for in the wallpaper scene where the very wallpaper of the museum is coming alive (aka the scene where scareactors in spandex that blends in with the walls jump out at us), I concede that it can be an effective scare, like in the Weeknd house, and I also concede that museums do indeed have some hallways that are nothing but wallpaper is a waste of real estate. I'd rather see another diorama or maybe even better and more space efficient would be a picture scare similar to the mirror in Puppet Theater. We walk past several portraits until we get to one that jumps out of its frame and scares us. The way it is felt cheap and local amusement park haunt-esque, not up to the standards of the best theme park Halloween event in the world.

As you can tell, I fell in love and still do love this idea and I love this house for when it did execute on those ideas but I find it just too lacking to be my top house.

Slaughter Sinema 2

I'm not the target audience for this house. I never saw the previous one, although I really wanted to, and tend to prefer houses that are dark and played straight, which is basically the opposite of the Slaughter Sinema franchise. Instead this house is packed with silliness and tongue in cheek scenes, even though there are truly scary moments sprinkled throughout. There are 8 houses here: Mardi Gras Murders where a drunk, puking and engaged(?) frat bro is attacked and murdered by a pair of evil jesters, Heavy Metal Hell in 3D where a rebellious teenager finds out exactly what happens when they play that record backwards, Killer Kringles, where Santa, Mrs Klaus and elves have turned murderous, Night of the Undead Clowns, the not so final resting place of clowns reanimated with Bzzzcon chemicals, Hatchet & Chains: Demon Bounty Hunters, which is precisely what it says, Blood & Chum, where guests find themselves swimming with a very big shark, Mummy Strippers: Unwrapped, where a strip club visit goes horribly wrong and finally Zyborgs, where we find ourselves in future trenches hunted by alien organisms mad we've been mining on their planet.

That's a lot of stories to be in one house! A lot of those details I included in the previous paragraph are only available in the trailers out front or by closely examining the houses during the daytime. For that reason, I find that these types of houses really live or die by the style of each room, something that gives the room a unique identity and makes it standout in lieu of the space or time generally necessary to tell a compelling story with characters we care about. For me, those are as follows:

• Mardi Gras Murders: There's a really strong sense of setting here in the motel with the flashing woman projection as well as the view down onto the parade route. And most importantly the monster designs are creative scary and unique.
• Heavy Metal Hell in 3D: Finally the return of a 3D house! A friend of mine brought along the Chromadepth 3D glasses and I got a chance to try them. I didn't think they added a ton but regardless, the style is so unique and interesting and I thought it was packed enough with detail to avoid falling into the "regional haunt" category that I think bad 3d houses fall into.
• Zyborgs: My favorite section of the house. I think sci-fi is horribly underused in the HHN pantheon and this carves its own unique look being some mix of Terminator with the trenches and battle, Tron with the neon light look on the monsters as well as Toy Story with the machines that look like Syd's toys.

Whereas on the other hand, the houses that fall flat to me are:

• Night of the Undead Clowns: The vibrant clowns were a huge contrast with the dull rockwork around them but I didn't think they had anything that visually set them apart from other clowns, especially given that they are supposed to be undead.
• Killer Kringles: The concept of Santa, Mrs Klaus and evil elves in an HHN house has appeared before, either as a corpse in HR Bloodengutz or making up nearly the entirety of the Christmas in Hell scarezone (where's the z, Mr Murdy??) and this section just didn't differentiate itself visually from those prior iterations.

Although the lack of story is a negative to many, I think that ultimately, it's a strength in that it gives a lot of concepts that lack the story or depth to anchor a larger house but have some unique visual style a chance to shine. Given that designers undoubtedly have tons of silly ideas that can't anchor a houses but will get a laugh/scream from guests, I have no doubt we'll see this concept again at some point!

Goblin's Feast

Following up on his fantastic Dead Man's Pier: Winter's Wake and Blood Moon: Dark Offerings houses from the last two years, designer Dylan Kollath is back with Goblin's Feast. Like most of the originals this year, details on this before it opened were sparse and so fans tended to see what they wanted to in this house. Unlike Mr. Kollath's previous houses which took places in soundstages, this one takes place in a new tent. Those previous houses received widespread acclaim for their great setting and the way that some sightlines went from scene to scene (think the way that the Blood Moon path curved around and could see the main courtyard with the maypole or the way the lighthouse in DMP was visible from all throughout the house), making the house appear much larger and more complete and full than they necessarily were. But with a paucity of space in a tent, even one that's larger than the older tents, Mr. Kollath couldn't use quite the same tricks. But that's not to say that it doesn't bear his fingerprints. Windows and openings are used to look from scene to future scenes in a smaller scale rendition of his earlier hits.

Although in my opinion, it doesn't quite live up to the highs of those previous ones, mostly due to the lack of scale present in those houses, this one absolutely is no slouch and is a very good house, blowing away my admittedly low expectations. In maybe the most interesting description I've ever written about a haunted house at a theme park, this house feels less like a story, the way you might find in Eternal Bloodlines of you or character X did A, B, C things, but instead it was more of an anthopological look at goblin civilization. We learn about their traditions: we're visiting on their Goblin's Feast holiday, which we think we're guests to but instead we're the food. We learn about their religious traditions when we walk through the forest to see the way they honor/worship their elders by putting their dead bodies in trees (as we apparently disrespect those elders). And more than anything, we learn about the class structure in goblin society. We visit the catacombs where the orcs, the enforcers of goblin society and therefore the lowest, get the worst of the scraps of the human meat and then eventually make our way to the castle where the king and other high class goblins get the catches of the day (if we weren't sure by where we stand on the totem pole, that's made pretty apparent when we walk past the cage with a human trapped inside begging for help next to the sign saying "catch of the day").

That description isn't to say that it's some boring case study you read about in Anthro 101 in college. It's informative and interesting without being academic and dry. It packs a good amount of scares too. I was concerned that the costumes would get repetitive but thanks to the huge variety of goblins, orcs and even a giant and the way they all look different because of their role or class in society, the scares are varied and unique. There are a handful of screens here to advance the story and the giant hand was a cool way to reuse the King Kong prop from the summer tribute store a few years ago. And who can forget the real star of the house, the high class goblin at the end who sees us escaping the house and nasally yells out "the food is escaping!".

Universal Monsters: Eternal Bloodlines

And now for the antithesis of Goblin's. Where Goblin didn't have a story as much as it was an exploration of Goblin society, the Monsters house this year pushes the haunted house format to its limit when it comes to storytelling. Our podcast episode for this house spells out the backstory which I'll relate here. Abraham Van Helsing was the preeminent monster hunter and the killer of Count Dracula but after his death, his son, Hans, takes up the family's mantle. He knows that Dracula's daughter is seeking the amulet of Amon-ra which grants unstoppable power and seeks to stop the monster before she gets it. Unfortunately for Hans, Dracula's Daughter proves too much and he dies in battle. As Saskia Van Helsing, Hans' brother and Abraham's daughter entombs her brother in the family crypt, she stumbles on her family's weapons cache and vows her revenge on the bloodline that killed so much of her family.

And that's where we pick it up. Throughout the house, we see vignettes that progress the story along: Saskia holding the crossbow for the first time in her family's crypt, the discovery of Frankenstein's Monster and the unlikely teamup of the Bride and Saskia, the final battle between Saskia and the She-Wolf, Dracula's Daughter holding Saskia's severed head and finally the Bride taking Saskia's body back to her family's crypt. Now these plot points are related in a variety of media; some are full show scenes with scareactors and animatronics (like Frankenstein's death) while some are projected media, like the battle between Saskia and the She-Wolf. Once you knew and could folow the story, be that by listening to the podcast or taking several runs through the house, it was so much fun, like watching a good movie and noticing details you didn't the first time. But if you didn't listen to the podcast or could only go through the house once, then the story would likely be incomprehensible unless you have eagle eyes. Without the backstory, the house felt a little choppy and disjointed, going from a crypt, to Egypt, to a caravan, to a manor and finally back to another caravan.

But ultimately this all gets into the philosophical how haunted houses should be approached. Are they art? Should the story require multiple walkthroughs and careful attention to grasp? I vote yes. I think haunted houses operate on two levels. The first is a basic scary level. Did it make me scared? If you're reading this article, the answer to that is probably no, at least speaking for myself after getting desensitized to the formulaic HHN scares. But the second is something beyond scares. Did it tell a compelling story? Did it set a good atmosphere? I'd argue that for this house, the answer is yes. It offers a commentary on revenge. In the podcast Saskia laments her brother's hot headedness that leads him to his demise and thinks herself better until she ultimately falls into the same path, including death. The repetition of the opening scene at the back end of the house drives home the cycle of revenge. We literally end where we started! After all "an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind".

Putting aside the maybe story issues, I think that the house was beautiful with more room to grow. I have gotten used to the incredible opening scenes from Monsters houses past, from the incredible Egyptian scene from Legends Collide to Bride of Frankenstein Lives' scene of her lifting the beam off her husband to the Parisian scene from Unmasked. The scene here is much more quiet, lower scale and contemplative which fits the tone of the house but is ultimately out of step with the direction of the franchise. On the other hand, this is the first instance of a house being in the new tents so undoubetedly it'll take a couple years to grow into it. The number of characters kept the scares varied and I enjoyed the combined scene of Saskia killing a Bride of Dracula. And who could dislike the fantastic sliding scare of the She-Wolf that we've grown to expect from Monsters houses.

Although it doesn't quite live up to the heights of its predecessor, this house remains a worthy entry into the line of Monsters houses.

Major Sweets Candy Factory

The last two HHNs, we've gotten houses that take place in the Fast and Furious queue and outside tent. These houses have either had mixed reception (Blumhouse in 2022) or an outright negative one (Chucky from last year). These ideas were bad or mediocre on their own merits but the venue certainly didn't help. The layout with the large outdoor transition room between the queue and tents served as a natural-ish transition point for the Blumhouse maze between the Freaky and Black Phone sections but felt forced in the Chucky house from last year. I always said that I wanted to see an original in the space where designers could design a reason for that space to exist but fortunately or unfortunately, we ended up getting an entierly new layout for this original house.

Major Sweets Candy Factory is the sequel to the well received 2022 scarezone that took place in New York. In that scarezone, guests stumble on a local community parade gone horribly wrong due to tainted candy. Major Sweets, a candy manufacturer, brought his candy to the event that turns kids into murderers and now the kids are running amok through the streets. This house takes place before the scare zone and tells the story of the test run before the parade where local schools were invited out to Major Sweets' factory to try the candy for Major Sweets to ensure that it has the effects he wants. And that's where the house begins. We're invited into the factory by Miss Treats (a returning character from the zone) who tells us to ignore the crazed screaming playing in silhouettes in the window behind her. We travel through the factory to find ourselves getting attacked by hyped up kids before we find ourselves ambushed by Miss Treats and Major Sweets looking to take us out and "destroy the evidence" before their big parade.

Going back to what I said earlier about dark houses played straight, I think this falls on the silly houses played straight quadrant of the map. I think that the whole idea of the scareactors being crazed kids is just a little too silly for my personal taste which is why it scores lower on my list than a lot of other people. But I can also give praise where it's due. The venue is used much better here than in previous years. It feels like a purpose built venue without the weird transition corridor or any other smaller quirks of the old F&F location. The kids' costume designs are really interesting and varied and the addition of the Taffy character adds some much needed size and menace to the cast. I always love to see a continuation of old stories. If I had to give this house a couple of critiques it would be the lack of large scale factory scares. Factories are scary places and literally the embodiment of the idea of "just another cog in the machine". I would've loved to see massive sets and gears and conveyor belts with carnage in them to remind us that factories are not places to play around with regardless of whether their proprietor is a maniac or not.

Big shout out to the team for the 3 GATs throuhout the house. The first red button didn't do a ton for me since I swear the water spray wasn't working most of my runs but the GAT with the rat was so cool. Glad to see one of my favorite HHN ideas make its triumphant return!

Triplets of Terror

Let's get the bad news out of the way first, this is my least favorite original house and #9 overall on my rankings. This has been a confusing house for me from the beginning. To be totally honest, I was disappointed when it was released since I was hoping or expecting an icon house given how well Oddfellow seemed to do last year. That plus the questionable art used for the house. As time went on, that disappointment started to fade more and more and excitement started to grow as we heard more and more interesting rumors about this being gory, about how it might be the open concept house of the year and more exciting news. But ultimately, it ended up being where it ended up being in my list.

Before we go into why I didn't like it, I should mention that like I talked about earlier, there wasn't a bad house this year! Nothing was awful. Even this house was just okay which is more than you can say about most houses. I liked the idea of original slashers and I really liked how they seemed to give each slasher their own personality. It made them stand out from eachother which was a cool touch. The sets weren't as big as I would've liked in a soudnstage but they were interesting enough to hold my attention. The scareactors did as great of a job as ever.

I've had a hard time putting into words what why this is my least favorite house but I think I have it. It felt generic. So most modern HHN original houses aren't generic takes on overused tropes, they usually have some interesting twist to make them stand out. Like for example, Oddfellow last year wasn't just a circus house, it was also the story of this character searching for immortality and dabbling with the zodiac (although that house is as close as we've gotten to genericness). Spirits of the Coven from 2022 wasn't just another witch house but it had the whole 1920s spin on the idea even if the house didn't do enough of it. And finally, even Hellblock Horror wasn't just Yet Another Prison House but it was a prison with aliens! Now yes, I'm sure you're already pointing out in your head all the old ideas that were just cliche settings (Hellblock Prison, Shadybrook Asylum etc) but the event has moved beyond that and yes, I expect more at this point. That is how I would describe Triplets of Terror: failing to move beyond a generic suburban home invasion idea. I think they tried with the whole birthday angle but I thought it wasn't played up enough. The first scene was the birthday and the second to last scene was the birthday recreated with gore (another example of symmetry like we talked about with Monsters!) but it was easy to forget or miss that plot line with how little it was mentioned in the rest of the house. How would I have fixed it? I'm not entirely sure. Maybe had the triplets kill with birthday related implements? Point out in stronger terms that they went to the bakery to get the cake? But as it was it just fell short to me and felt way too generic for it to feel at home at HHN. And one last thing: I don't really like that podcast room after the initial scene. I don't think it was as fleshed out as I would've liked and felt a little jarring to see it once and never see it again. The fix to that issue is easy: make the narration through the house be the podcast narrators narrating us through!

But again, if this is the "worst" original house of the event, you know that it's a strong year!

One last aside that I just need to talk about. What is it with people and that stupid dog that's shown up here and in Depths of Fear from a few years ago? Trust me, I love love love dogs. If I wasn't allergic, I would definitely have at least one. Seeing animals suffering makes me so sad and want to hurt whatever human is hurting them. But WHY do we care so much and why is there such a big ado about the stupid dog? If you haven't heard there's a (obviously fake) dog that's cut in half in this house and there are all these messages online about how awful it is and how people are skipping the house for it. Like if you are going to skip a house this is probably it but still. This is a haunted house and this is an event that has all sorts of human mutilation. Want a human being beheaded? Have it 5 different ways! Want a human attacked with a handsaw or otherwise disembowled? This house can do it for you! What about their intenstines used to spell out Happy Birthday? Heads crushed? Forced tube down their throat? Hell, there's even an entire section in a house this year dedicated to a monster that abducts and eats babies from their wailing mothers. Well, this event has it. There are a million and one different humans in horrific poses, most of whom would be considered innocents. Saskia in Monsters probably isn't (since she was hunting the monsters - which is the commentary on the futility of revenge that I mentioned earlier) but the idiot kid in Triplets didn't deserve to be murdered, he was an innocent. So why oh why do people not mind or even enjoy the gore when it's a human but do it to a dog and they lose their mind? I could understand if the dog is much more detailed than the (obviously fake) human corpses but it's not. If you can't tell that the dog is fake then I'd advise you to get to an optometrist ASAP. Sorry for the rant but it just boggles my mind. Seriously, this isn't meant as a put down. If you're bothered by the dog and I'm missing something, please let me know because I just really want to understand.

Insidious: The Further

I'm definitely an original kind of guy. I think IPs tend to fail in my eyes for two reasons. 1. some IPs just feel like a forced inclusion. I'm going to pick on the original Ghostbusters movie and 2019 house. I love the movie, please don't misunderstand me but I think it fails as a movie to base a haunted house on. We aren't introduced until the main villain of the movie, Gozer, until about 30 minutes in and we don't even get to a battle with Gozer until an hour and change in! Add to that the fact that although the two dogs are scary monsters, Gozer in her female form just isn't particularly scary. The house from 2019 was bad in part because of that, because too much of the house was full of Ghostbusters themselves jumping out at you because Gozer doesn't show up until later and because she's just not that scary. Side note: I despise the heroes jumping out at you idea in haunted houses. Give me monsters and villains, faux Bill Murray just doesn't scare me, I'm sorry. and 2. too often IP houses have a list of sets and scenes that you just have to have. Like you can't have a Hill House house without the main facade or you can't have a Stranger Things 4 house without "Chrissy Wake Up". Too often they're forced in and prevent the haunt from using more effective scenes even if they would fit it more.

Well, all that to say that Insidious doesn't follow either of those rules and is the best house of the year, even in the eyes of this IP sceptic. First, Insidious feels made to be a house. It features tons of the jump scares that haunted houses do so well and probably more importantly, it's packed full of monsters. Because there are all 5 movies represented in the house, you have monsters from all 5, including the Lipstick Face Demon, Bride in Black, Man who Can't Breathe and Key Face Demon. When you add in the myriad of supporting demons from the films you have a great assortment of monsters to jump out at you without having to resort to Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne or Ty Simpkins lookalikes trying to scare you. And second, the story just isn't told linearly here. There aren't a ton of scenes that the house has to run through in order that fans expect that prevents it from getting its own rhythm. Now of course, we see the most iconic place in the series: the Lipstick Face Demon's lair in the Further but it never feels like we're being dragged from scene to scene with "you guys remember when this scene happened? Huh? Huh?" Instead we're given the space to let all of these iconic demons haunt us with the settings as backgrounds instead of the main event. Actually that lack of grand scenes made this house really feel like a tent house which is rare for one of these soundstage houses.

And man, does this bring the scares. Let's go through some of my favorites. Obviously if you've been through you know I have to mention the curtain hallway. It was only two scareactors!! But the unique way that it was set up with the actors being able to service multiple booholes made it seem like so much more (actually, there was a similar but not quite as effective room in Cursed Scrolls in Singapore, see my review of the event for a review of that house!). Show any hint of weakness and the Bride in Black or Lipstick Face would pop out of all 2 of 3 of their booholes to haunt you. The finale was fantastic. We get a double conservatory scare with a couple of the different demons popping out of each side and then Lipstick Face popping out in front of you while you're distracted. I think my favorite underrated spot was the first Bride room with the body bags and long hallway. The scareactors my first couple times through did it so well. You'd just have come through the mannequin room and as you enter the bride room, you see the Bride standing still among the body bags. No problem, she's just a mannequin you say but as you walk past the hallway, you look to your left and all of a sudden she's running at you! Actually, that entire scene is great because it offers the scareactors freedom for how to play it vs just pop out of a boohole.

And man, that doesn't even get into the fantastic work the non-main demon characters did. The most I jumped at the event was in the baby nursery where the tongue demon popped out at me while I was looking at the window above the crib. And the soundtrack was dizzying and spinning and just set the mood so well. This house was two scenes longer than a normal house so it felt like it went on forever.

I could talk about this all night and it ended up being my favorite houses of the event. It was the house that I went through at 2am on my last night at the event. Exquisite and scary house. Not bad for the throwaway IP this year!

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

So after you read the last house review of me talking about how awful Ghostbusters in 2019 was, you're probably expecting me to hate this one too, right? You'd be incorrect! I expected to hate it but instead got the most pleasant surprise of the whole event. Let's take a look at it in light of the things I mentioned I hate about IP houses.

First, is the movie suited for a haunted house? To start with, the main villain Garraka is so much scarier than Zuul or Gozer from the original movie, especially when you consider that this house had him on stilts which gave him a real physical menace that was missing from the 2019 house. But I think the more laudable design choice from this house is the usage of past villains and monsters too. Did you like Zuul? Or the librarian ghost? Or Vigo from Ghostbusters 2? Well, you're in luck because they're all in the house! All those extra monsters give the cast a lot more variety than the 2019 one. This house still has a couple of the "heroes jump out at you" moments but they're much further and more far between than the original.

And second, there aren't as many forced scenes in this house. Sure, we make sure to get the firehouse shown (although this time with a great Garraka stilt scare) and the final battle scene and a scene with Slimer but it definitely isn't as bad as the original where there were so many scenes that fans expected to see, whether they were suited for the medium or fit the flow of the house or not. I think that's partly a function of the media itself too. This film gets by on the Ghostbusters name. I saw it in theaters and I'm not exaggerating when I say that I didn't remember big portions of the plot the next day it was so bland. But the film's weakness is the house's strength. We do generally follow the storyline from the movie but focus on different things. That includes some a good amount of time spent in the Ghostbusters research facility which is where we run into Vigo as well as the great frozen cold open room. There also is a sewer scene where the initial serpent ghost lives that is never shown in the movie. All this to say that the house and the movie are two different properties with only a moderate amount of connection. And when those differences are in service of making the haunted house better, I'm a big fan.

An IP house that doesn't fall into those two traps is light years ahead of the typical IP. And maybe even more surprisingly for the franchise that brought the horror comedy genre into the limelight, this house brought the scares too. I saw my RIP tour guide almost get knocked onto her butt by the initial firefighter in the frozen room and the massive Garrakas were as menacing as scareactors get. I personally am also a big fan of the scares right after the exit portal which this one had.

Overall, it was a great IP house, the biggest surprise of the trip and I think cracked my top 3!

A Quiet Place

We talked about good IPs, now let's talk about one that didn't quite do it for me. I will admit that going into this house, I thought the movie was boring. I made it through the first one but didn't really have any desire to do the second. The prequel was yet another movie of what Dakota from Cathode Coaster calls rustic horror of the abandoned metro area. Some sort of the event happened that caused mass deaths of humans and those humans have left behind their cities in more or less the same state as they were when the crisis happened. They have the same exact shots and just the same look and I'm so tired of them. But I digress... Although I will admit that I was intrigued for this house after listening to the behind the scenes podcast. But the number one question to me was how to create a typical HHN haunted house, which thrives on loudness and uses it for scares, with a movie that emphasizes its quietness. Some IPs just don't fit the formula HHN uses and this is one of them. It needs modifications of that formula to most accurately capture the essence of this universe. If this was an "original IP" style house set in the same universe and actually the sounds we make and the sounds made around us attract the monsters, I think that would work well but not the book report IP house we got. But putting that fundamental issue aside, let's evaluate what we got.

My criticism really centers around the characters themselves. There are way too many "hero" scares. I'm sorry, the old guy that screamed in the first movie isn't scary when he's standing in a well lit place off the path. John Krasinski signing "I love you" at us isn't scary even if he at least jumps out. And the Death Angels were big disappointments. These puppets just kinda slid on rails at you. They didn't have any sense of heft behind them and couldn't get as close to you as actors can. Honestly I think the best puppet, or at least the one that got me the most was just the arm in the basement scene. They lacked the menace that I expected and I just didn't feel any sort of fear when they slid at me.

And the house truly did feel like vignette after vignette without any sort of connection between them and designed as almost a walkthough instead of a haunted house. The worst part to me was the scene with the two monster show scenes on either side of us and the little girl with her hearing aid feedback on the mic above us. It just didn't have any scares, there weren't any actors moving or threatening us. We were just walking through the movie that was minding its own business. That was the worst of that idea, don't misunderstand me but I think overall it just felt like a disjointed series of vignettes that sometimes we observed and other times interacted with.

The peak of the house was actually one of my favorite scenes in the entire event, especially in the context of the event as a whole. The last couple years starting with Graveyard Games, then Hill House and Bugs (I can't remember if there was one last year, I don't think so), we've had a blackout tunnel which was blacked out but with spatial audio around you, It provided this eerie moment of building tension where you wait for a classic HHN jump scare to instead find a more skin crawling creepy instead of the jumpy kind. And they finally paid off that effect this year. You enter the house straight into a black tunnel and I, being the HHN nerd that I am, am expecting a spatial audio tunnel only to be shocked by a death angel that popped out to your right. In the context of the event, that is truly an A+ scene. And its lesson is one that I wish the event used more. I think this house should've been much more experimental. Now I don't know what that would look like but the premise of the movie just doesn't seem to translate to a traditional haunt so I'd like to see them zag instead and go a different direction. Monsters that dropped everything to go after people talking? More spatial audio to distract us with sounds in the distance only to catch us off guard with a death angel next to us? I'm not totally sure but something other than what we had.

So yeah, this was unfortunately my #10. After reading all that I expect you to be surprised when I tell you that I still think it wasn't awful. I didn't hate it, it was just alright. Much better than Chucky last year!

Monstruous: The Monsters of Latin America

Tone is always an interesting aspect of haunted houses. Tone obviously is the feeling that the maze instills upon you beyond the scares. The best HHN houses have really palpable tones. The best one I've experienced was Dead Man's Pier Winter's Wake. That first room of the house didn't have a soul in it other than you but it instilled this tone of forlornness with the lightning, the lighthouse and the (relative) quiet of the score. But not every house with good tone has to be sad or scary. More tongue in cheek or silly houses frequently set the tone from the facade or first scene. This year think about the opening of Slaughter Sinema. It was impossible not to watch that Zombie Strippers trailer and not get the sense that this was going to be something silly. Scary, sure, but ultimately silly in a scary way, which only got confirmed when the first scare is really getting puked on by a random college kid in Mardi Gras Murders. In my experience, tone really gets set in that facade and the initial scene. If those are mismatched, it can lead to confusion where the house can't decide what it wants to be, scary or silly.

I have that long digression to lead into Monstruous because that's exactly what I feel went wrong here. I went through the house in Hollywood last year. It was a lot of fun, probably my #2 of the year! (Don't take away my HHN nerd card when I tell you that #1 was Holidayz in Hell!) As I've mentioned multiple times, I like dark houses and it checked all the boxes. In Parisian in Hollywood, it was claustrophobic and gory and just a lot of fun. So I had high expectations going in. And from the very beginning I was disappointed and had the stage set for confusion. That facade in Orlando was wonderful. It was moody and atmospheric with the night over the mausoleum. We know what we're getting into walking into that tomb. Only to get in and to experience a La Muerte who seems more concerned with singing like a drunk guy than warning us about our death. And that's the way Muerte acts throughout the entire house. Talk about tonal whiplash. The facade and all the monsters are played so straight and then Muerte is singing like it's drunk. Muerte just took me out of the entire experience every time I came across him and he was serenading me. I've heard explanations that range from "that's part of the culture" to "he's laughing at you going to your death" but they all just come up short. Hollywood didn't have it and the house was better.

If I try to ignore that tonal mismatch, the house was just alright. The Tlahuelpuchi characters were much more human and much less animal like in Orlando this year vs Hollywood last year which made them much less scary. El Silbon was undoutedly the star of this house like he was in Hollywood. The whistles sent a shiver down my spine and seeing that big stilt walker pop out at you is a scare that really sticks with you. La Lechuza has the great animatronic again but in Orlando she didn't have a ton other than that. The end actually had two of the best scares of the house with the El Silbon head and the Meurte stilt walker.

But in total, the tonal shift in the house was just too much and kept this house from being the star that I thought it was in Hollywood and really should have been here.

Houses Overall

In the years I've been attending (2019-present) the usual formula for HHN Orlando houses go like this:

1. Great, Top 10 or 15 house
2. Great, Top 20 or 25 house
3. Very Good House
4. Good House
5. Good House
6. Good House
7. Mediocre House
8. Mediocre House
9. Bad House
10. Bad House

Man, those highs are so good. It's houses like Darkest Deal or Bloodmoon from last year to Dead Man's Pier from 2022 and Wicked Growth and Puppet Theater from 2021. But the lows are usually pretty low from Chucky last year to Spirits of the Coven and Hellblock from 2022. There are usually a stinker or two that I'll do once or twice and then not feel obligated to do it again. Then a bunch of varying levels of good but not great in between.

This year is different. I think Insidious is Very Good but I don't think it's a GREAT haunted house whereas my other top houses from this year fall into a Good ranking. This year lacks top end. There's nothing that blew me away and clearly isolated itself from the rest of the houses the way some of the ones I listed in the paragraph above. But there also were none that I think fell to the depths of Bad. I thought Triplets and AQP fell into the Mediocre category. They had their redeeming qualities but ultimately fell short as concepts. How you choose to evaluate this year with respect to houses really hinges on how you think about quality distribution. Are you okay with a little more of a bimodal distribution of great houses but also awful ones? Or are you looking for more of a normal distribution with more houses clustered in the middle?

Personally, I prefer the stars and scrubs approach. I find that bad houses are ones that I can be comfortable skipping which makes my event smaller and gives me more time to focus on the great houses. I believe there's also psychological research to prove that we tend to remember the peaks of experiences more than we remember the run of the mill, which could explain why I vividly remember walking through Puppet Theater from 2021 but less so for walking through Texas Chainsaw Massacre from that same year. But I also readily admit that not everyone may share my opinion. If you prefer a normally distributed year, then this year was heaven for you.

With that digression in mind, I give this year of houses a C with this final ranking:

1. Insidious: The Further (B+)
2. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (B)
3. Museum Deadly Exhibits (C+)
4. Slaughter Sinema 2 (C+)
5. Universal Monsters: Eternal Bloodlines (C)
6. Major Sweets Candy Factory (C)
7. Goblins (C)
8. Monstruous: The Monsters of Latin America (C)
9. Triplets of Terror (C-)
10. A Quiet Place (C-)

Scare Zones

Duality of Fear

If you've read anyone's other reviews for this zone, I'm sure you got the gist of it. This just wasn't much of a zone. We saw Sinister and Surreal milling about sometimes through the night and then a handful of chainsaws for each of the characters. The Sinister ones were a bunch of shirtless guys whereas Surreal had characters dressed in her signature purple and blue. Well, I guess the characters and then the iconic HHN arch. When Sinister and Surreal were out, they were a ton of fun to have around. Just like Oddfellow last year, I loved the interaction they could have with their mics and I liked the way that they played off eachother. I saw them both on top of the arch as well as on the ground.

The issue that I and everyone else had with it was that it was just too little. Add a couple of stages or props for Sinister and Surreal to interact with like Oddfellow last year. Make the icons permanent residents of this zone. Whatever you do, just give us more. This felt more like the chainsaws that used to roam Springfield vs the scarezone that we were hoping for, especially given the icon status of the characters.

Demon Queens

It's funny to me which zones got podcasts and which ones did not. Duality of Fear got a podcast even though you probably actually could've taken a long blink and missed the entire scarezone but Demon Queens didn't which had by far the highest concept that needed the most explanation. So to describe the scarezone, we walk into Hollywood past these ethereal looking purple props. They bring to mind alien worlds or other dimensions. Initially we're met by these purple and teal hooded characters but eventually they give way to a more broad variety of monsters. The 4 standouts in this zone are so obviously the titular queens. They had the most work into their costumes with some really exquisite makeup. Like seriously, this is probably the biggest case of pictures are worth a thousand words that I have. And every so often, Surr3al came into the zone and would take the queens onto the big float in the middle where she would give this huge monologue about fear.

I guess I can put together what was going on if I think about it. We seem to be visiting some dimension as shown by the portals on the set dressings of this zone. And the queens seem to be the rulers of this realm and they seem to represent our fears. The queen with all the eyes is paranoia I seem to remember. The rest I'm less sure about. I think that the idea for this zone is so interesting that it begs for more detail. Actually, I'd love to see this as a house!

This zone grew on me as the event went on. One of the first nights I went, I only saw the grunts when I walked by and it left a really bad impression of the zone in my head but thankfully over time I saw more and more of the queens. I thought that the makeup and costumes of the queens in particular was the most interesting of the whole event. Side note: I met one of the makeup artists for the paranoia queen and she asked me to send her some pictures I took of her creation so on the off chance you're reading this, please email me at josh@hhngraveyard.com! I would've liked to see a little bit bigger props although I understand that the parade limits what they can do and I'd like to see a little more variation in the grunt costuming. I understand that the whole point of grunts is that they don't outshine their master but still. Otherwise this ended up being either my #1 or #2 scarezone and a long way removed from where it started at the bottom of my list!

Swamp of the Undead

The Central Park scare zone never really does a ton for me. And that's no fault of the characters or the zones but more the setting itself. This zone is always so so crowded that it's hard to really get much time to spend here without feeling like you're in the way. This year I was very thankfully able to go for the first two weeks of the event which gave me plenty of time to experience it. And I wasn't as thrilled as many. I'm tired of zombies. I think that they're played out and quite frankly just not very scary.

I will say that these zombies were a little different. The bloatedness and swampiness of them added an interesting twist to the concept but they just weren't different enough for me. On the other hand, the props here were more interesting than they have been in the past. I especially liked the twitcher animatronic of the guy being eaten by alligators. Also shoutout to the zombie that kept peeking at me while I was eating next to the LatAm booth.

Enter the Blumhouse

Yeah, let's get it out of the way. This is a corporate synergy zone. It's cheap and easy and promotes one of the biggest sources of horror IPs for the event. I think we heard all that criticism of the zone and more in the leadup to the event. But I think what got missed in a lot of that is how much fun this zone could be with how great the stable of characters the zone had to pick from. And we kinda got that! So the walkaround characters included the Uncle Sam and Betsy Ross purger and other various purgers, the Blissfield Butcher and Millie from Freaky, Tree and the Bayfield Baby from Happy Death Day, The Grabber, Finney and Vance from Black Phone as well as Megan from Megan. Although some of the characters were a little bland, I thought the Uncle Sam and Baby characters were great working the crowd. The former being a little more playful and the latter a little more intimidating.

What I thought was a little strange was the way that some of the more slight characters like Millie and Tree were in the crowd while characters like the Butcher and Grabber manned the stage. I understand putting Megan on the stage. It keeps her up and away from foot traffic and more accessible for mass picture taking. Maybe that logic could hold for the Grabber too but I think that that character would've been more intimidating in the crowd. And doubly so for the Butcher. I think Millie is much more iconic of a character from Freaky and the Butcher would've been a much scarier character in the streets.

I think that in addition to that quibble, it's fair to criticize the zone for the lack of story or cohesive explanation for what the characters are doing there. Yes, it's a mashup IP zone so no, I'm not surprised but I can still expect more from a zone. But I think this just about met my high expectations and ended up being a super fun zone, even if it didn't end up at my nubmer 1 spot.

Torture Faire

(Lots of pictures incoming, this zone was so easy to photograph!)

We talked about Surreal's zone a while back, now let's talk about Sinister's. This zone is themed to a Rennaisance Fair gone terribly wrong. Some of the attendees are victims who run around the zone screaming for help while the rest of the attendees seem to be the instigators doing the torturing. There are so many costumes that make this zone stand out to me. I love the wizard with his manic energy, the plague doctors and the witch. Maybe even better are the little stages or booths throughout the area. The little jester on the brazen bull stage was so cool and interactive. And the character in the booth I had the most fun interactions with since he could talk. And that big set of armor standing next to the booth got so many people!

In an interesting and obviously intentional bit of symmetry, this zone also has a queen (and a king), a stage and a little show with its respective icon, Sinister. Sinister would come up and talk while the king and queen roamed around the area and the executioner showed off some of the kills on the stage. I'm usually not a huge fan of the New York zone. I think that with such a huge space, it's so easy for the props and scareactors to kinda get lost in the crowd. That's especially true when you had a zone like Vamp last year where half the guests in the zone are wearing similar clothes to the vampires. This year it's much more obvious, at least until a pyramid head hat becomes the latest fashion trend.

I just think that this zone is so big and there's so much going on that it seems unbalanced compared to Surreal's zone. I would've liked to see the Central Park scarezone be some sort of Surreal adjacent scarezone to even it out a little bit. That way, both icons could've had their own signature scare zone(s). But putting that aside, I thought this was the best zone in New York since I've been going to the event although Sweet's Revenge from 2022 was a close second.

Scarezones Overall

People have spilled a lot of ink about the scare zones this year as a whole. There are all these rumors from some insiders saying that budgets were cut because of Epic, others that say that that's balderdash. As I've mentioned before, I think all of these comments are in the context of following up the year that we had last year. Last year we had 5 scare zones that either had a direct link to our Icon Dr. Oddfellow (like his signature scare zone) or the show at the beginning of Jungle of Fear to a vague connection (Vamp - at least the podcast mentions it) to an ideological connection (Oddfellow found his power in the Zodiac realm). After such a detailed cohesive set of scare zones last year, this year we got a mixed bag. Torture Faire and Demon Queens are the standouts that are most reminiscient of the ones last year given their link to our icons but Swamp is unconnected as is Blumhouse and finally Duality is basically nothing.

Although some may disagree, I don't believe that the zones are worse in and of themselves than they have been lately (minus Duality) but after last year's event, we expected something similar which we didn't get. I would wager that next year's scare zones are received much better whether or not they actually are or not after we're another year away from a fantastic HHN 32. I give this year a C for scarezones overall. With that being said, this is my final ranking of scare zones for this year.

1. Torture Faire (B+)
2. Demon Queens (B)
3. Enter the Blumhouse (C)
4. Swamp of the Undead (C)
5. Duality of Fear (F)

Shows

I didn't see Nightmare Fuel. I've seen it before in past years and none of the reviews from this year made me think that it would be substantially different so I skipped. Good show the first time you see it but tiring the 4th time. Hoping for something new next year.

The Icons

Their proper names are Sinist3r and Surr3al but I'm going to refer to them as Sinister and Surreal or S&S to save the poor 3 key on my keyboard. I think to properly evaluate them you need to evaluate both the idea behind them and the execution so let's do that.

The idea is a lot of fun and feels really reminiscient of past years to me, especially Lady Luck, in that it's a set of characters that can be tied into any of the houses. Whereas Lady Luck was "in" every house since every character made a choice of some sort, S&S could absolutely be "tied into" every house since they're really just basic horror types: gory and gruesome horror and more cerbreal or mystical horror. For example, Triplets of Terror is an obvious Sinister house with all the violence and slasher elements whereas Surreal could be involved with Museum given that it's a little more mystical.

The execution is less so... The only two attraction integrations we got was the two scarezones: Torture Faire for Sinister and Demon Queens for Sinister. Instead of the wonderful Oddfellow podcasts we got last year, we got a single podcast that even mentioned S&S for Duality of Fear and the introduction of them to fans was via a Twitter thread? It was just so weird of a push given that these characters had such a starring position at the event with them literally looming over us as we enter or leave depending on the time. And unfortunately we need to talk again about Duality of Fear. I love the idea of a "choose your own path" scarezone which is what we got the poor man's version of. The Sinister minions generally hung out in front of the walk past Minions off to Torture Faire and the Sinister ones did the same on the path to Demon Queens. A couple extra props to flesh out the characters a little more would've gone a long way I think.

If we're lucky enough to get icons next year, I hope to see their integration look more like 2023 with a cohesive narrative of the scare zones, if not the houses. I hope to see the character's story given to us in some media beyond a Twitter thread or a morning of podcast. These iconic characters and their stories really are what set the event apart for me and so I hope to see them remembered in the future.

The Tribute Store

I adore tribute stores. I think that because they're not haunted houses needing to create claustrophic spaces that scare people and don't need to push though as many people as a house, they can really load up on details and tell a story in a way that you can't with houses. I hate to keep going back to last year with everything but wow, that tribute store in 2023 was just about perfect. It had a really unique visual style (actually 3 of them!) to go along with the effective frame story of being in a comic book. I especially loved the continued development of the Boris Shuster character who had been established in previous events. There's a reason why the Part 2 of that Shuster story was a popular ask from fans for this year's event!

But this year really missed the mark and actually regressed from even years past! My criticism has to start with the theme of the store as a whole. Like I mentioned in the AQP section, I am so so so tired of the "Rustic Horror" look. Think post apocalyptic, abandoned buildings. Descendants of Destruction, Last of Us, AQP and now this store all have the same look. I'm so beyond sick of it (and so not thrilled that Last of Us is rumored to come back in part 2 next year) and so this store was already starting off behind the 8 ball for me. And then the store failed really hard at being a store, especially at the beginning? That room with Ghostbusters merch was always so crowded and congested as a result of the layout selected. It's double ironic that the room in the Tribute Store that was supposed to be a store was so awful for shoppers. Add onto that the fact that instead of giving us story and details about a character that we care about, we instead got a story centered around Bathilda/Batricia, a throwaway character from a scare zone last year that fans adopted. It almost felt like it was trying to capitalize on that fan interest to sell merch and to be fair to Universal, the last time they did that was Lil Boo and look how that went! We're still getting Lil Boo 3 years after the event he was at, and he actually made it out to Singapore! But this year it didn't really work for me. I struggle to elaborate why the story fell so flat for me but it did.

Like other aspects of the event, I think this year only looks bad in light of a stellar year last year. As I think about this store more, other than me personally hating the theme and the store element not being great, it really wasn't that bad in a vacuum. But regardless, I hope to see the continued story from last year's store in next year's one!

Food

Thankfully, the food at this year's event lives up to my very lofty expectations for how HHN food should be! Similar to last year, there are booths set up all over the park themed to the various houses. They all featured unique food and drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. I want to talk about a couple of the standouts here:

• The Ghostbusters Booth: if you think about food at the event this year, then the Ghostbusters Stay Puft Smores and probably what comes to mind. They would sell out of these pretty quickly so you'd really need to come early in the night if you wanted one. And I usually did most nights! Not only were they exceedingly cute but they were delicious. The marshmallow was usually nicely flamed for flavor and the chocolate and graham crackers were great compliments. But it wasn't the only item I enjoyed at the booth. Both of the corn dogs ended up being amazing! The plain Korean corn dog was about what I expected from a Korean corn dog whereas the mint one was a big surprise! It was sweet without being too rich and just small enough to not make me sick of it. All of the food and drink items here knocked my socks off!
• The Last Key Cake Pop at the Insidious Booth: I would get this red velvet cake pop nearly every night. I love red velvet and I thought it was incredible!
• Pizza Fries: It's back again for another year and it is just as good as ever! This time it felt a little more saucy than past events which is right up my alley!

Premium Scream Night

And the last section of this review is probably my favorite night of HHN of all time: Premium Scream Night! When it was announced there was a ton of grumbling and uncertainty from fans. How dare Universal ruin the sanctity of opening night! How dare Universal be so nakedly money hungry with such an expensive night after continuing to raise the price of tickets! How dare Universal not tell us how much capacity it's going to be capped at! Even with all the uncertainty, I still ended up buying tickets the day they came out. Actually, funny story, I expected it to be so competitive to get tickets that I had a friend in a non-Pacific time zone order it for me if it dropped before I woke up for the morning (which it did). And obviously to anyone who paid attention, tickets very much did not sell out! Actually, it was the best night of HHN that I've ever done.

I knew I was in for a treat the minute I walked in the park. There was a Facebook post going around that event was going to open at opening time EXACTLY so I didn't bother being there any earlier than opening time but it actually opened a little early. By the time I got there around the original opening time, I expected crazy crowds walking through the scare zones to the houses given that presumably only the craziest of us would spend an extra $300+ for one night of HHN and given that those people tend to get there at open/do stay and scream. But the scare zones were nearly empty! Okay, maybe it's just good luck. Got to my first house and basically walked in even with the pulsing of crowds. And that continued all night. I didn't wait more than 2 or 3 minutes for a house all night! And that's with somone in my group that wasn't moving as fast as I was. We ended up doing 25 houses in the span of the night.

Gotta talk about the food situation too. Every one of the booths and some of the park restaurants (like Richters and Mels) were open with free grab and go food and non alcoholic drinks. So you could eat as much as you wanted to all night for the price of your ticket! And oh did I take advantage of that! It was so nice to just walk around the park in between houses and run over and grab a little snack from a booth as a breather in between houses.

And finally, the night really enhanced the scare zone experience. The scare zones in Orlando are just always so crowded that you never have time to really interact much with the scare actors. Maybe take a picture or two with them, maybe have a quick couple sentence conversation but nothing beyond that. Maybe if you stay until 2am on a quiet night. But this night, there were so few people that I had multiple characters crowding around me at any given time, almost the opposite of what normally happens! Sometimes they'd follow me around, sometimes we'd have in character conversations. But it was just such an amazing, immersive experience that really shows what scare zones can be when they're at their best!

Overall, the even exceeded my wildest dreams for what it could be! I heard different numbers from different people but allegedly it was only 33 to 50% sold which is why the crowd level was so unbelievably low. Was chatting with a friend who reacted as if it were a foregone conclusion that the night or nights would be coming back again. I'm not so sure! On one hand, the word of mouth after the fact was crazy. All the vloggers and people that went put out videos or reviews just like this one highlighting just how insanely awesome the night was. So I'm sure those people that were on the fence for non-money reasons would probably come for a hypothetical follow up next year. But on the other hand, if this was an experiment to see if there is demand at the price point they proposed, then I think they got their answer. Does that disqualify them from coming back next year at a cheaper price (unlikely) if they decide that the demand was too low and word of mouth won't get the numbers to where they want? No, of course not. In their eyes that would devalue the product. But we'll see where it all goes! In any case, this night was incredible and truly, if you missed out, you really missed out. This was the best night ever of HHN in my 5 years of attending the event.

Final Thoughts

I led this review with my thoughts about the event so there's not a ton more for me to say here. To call this event anything other than disappointing would be to lie. Now is that the intrinsic fault of the event due to bad houses or scare zones? Or is it the fault of our heightened expectations following the banger of a year that was 2023? Yes. Both are true. I think with some more coherent themes, a little more improvement in the scare zones and some tweaks in some of the houses, this year could've been just as great. But you can only judge what you're given, not what it could be. And for that reason, I give this event a C overall whereas least year gets an A. I hope and expect to see a sharp improvement next year!