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Viewing 1 - 2 out of 2 Blogs.
 Hayride entrance (used selective color in layers to reduce contrast of lit building and dark sky to make clearer)
Sorry, isn't gonna be well thought out or clever but our trip last night to Field of Screams was good. Going to try to include specific details since there are so many proprietors on the site, and perhaps some of the info would be useful. Since it was a Saturday, it was of course more crowded than we've seen before, even opening weekend in Mid-September. They were running a Battle of the Bands which I thought was to bring out more people for a mid-September opening, but very few people were paying attention to the bands. Despite the proximity of Millersville St U, age range seemed to be junior high and high school, very local. Brochures for FoS and Jason's Woods were both in the local Sheetz convenience stores.
They have improved the parking arrangement. Parking is free. Rather than driving between the queue and the entrance to the Hayride like last year, you now take a circuitous route around the property and enter through the back of the parking area, with many, many attendants guiding you forward to the next available spot in the line in an open field. All the field parking areas have lighting. For anyone who is familiar, it is very much like Knoebels' parking set-up, but there are even more attendants. To leave, you still drive between the queue and Hayride, but it reduces the traffic, delays, and danger there, and by the time a lot of cars are departing the Hayride will nearly be over.
So early in the season and coming off Friday's opening, the actors were still very energetic and not burnt out. FoS does a lot of things well, but I think their real strength is in the number of actors. I suspect if I could get the number of actors working on whatever day we visited for each haunt and put them in order, it would work out exactly as my preference list. FoS seems to have a LOT of returning employees. There were some noticeable updates, but all 3 events were basically the same.
On the Hayride it is the actors who make it. The effects are perfectly fine, clearly lots of planning, creativity and work go into them. The actors climb up the sides of the wagon, climb over the sides of the wagon, run up and down inside the moving wagon terrorizing people, and getting with an inch of patrons so that with the wrong move contact is a possibility. They hit you at the scene, and stay on, climbing along the sides of and inside the wagon halfway to the next scene before jumping off to run back to their places. There was one intentional incidence of contact when some jerk rider had his cell phone open for the light and the actor took the phone from him and buried it in the straw. BRAVO for that actor (although the loading operators should have issued that instruction, not leaving it to the actors)! Wish they'd gotten the jerk at the other end of the wagon who was texting! I don't know what they do to prevent the actors from getting caught under the wheels when they climb on and off, but it seems to be working well. The barn with the closing doors and the animatronic slaughtered piggies dropping in the dark from the ceiling to then be lit by strobes deserves specific mention. Normally I don't like animatronics much, but the hogs were excellent.
The primary Haunted House was good, although the chainsaw guy at the end seemed to be on break as we came out. The effect they do with crazed doctor and just a live actor's head screaming and begging coming up out of a surgical table with just a bloody spine and some guts "attached" to her head is magnificent. The house is just too long to describe it all. Electrified fence guy making sparks, flashing strobes in a black and white checked room with an actor clothed in black and white checks of the same size, etc. The pitch black crawl through is still classic. Unlike a lot of haunts, the actors seem to aim for the middle of the group, not jumping the gun and just spooking the first two or three people coming through.
The 3-D would have been better if there weren't so very many people waiting and they could've sent smaller groups through. We couldn't even all fit into the 'orientation' room. Our experience was also lessened by the horrible smart-mouthing male child behind us - middle school aged, one of those insecure ones with the continually running line of smart mouthed banter despite lack of response from his trapped audience. But it's astounding they can successfully have people traverse up and down 4 floors of 3D steps. Some milk crate sized box fell in the walkway in the worst possible place, a solid closet of clothing you had to pass through before a step up, slowing us down in the attic and actually creating something I would consider a hazard. Hoping someone fixed that quickly.
FoS has great customer service. Last year we made a rushed drive from Shocktoberfest to FoS to get there before closing, and they gave us the fastest directions and kept the ticket booth open for us a few moments so our group of 7 could make it in. The merchandise sales people were very helpful.
Now the bad - they use the usual paper 3-D glasses, unlike Scareworld's plastic (bless Scareworld for that). I reached through all the used ones to the bottom of the glasses box and located fresh, unused ones. THEY HAD TEAR OFF COUPONS ON THEM. I got my tee for $1 less than if I'd grabbed any old used pair at the top or could've gotten more of a hat/t-shirt combo. Of course, eventually all the glasses will be used and no one will be able to get those coupons.
I bought my ticket online in order to use a credit card - they had a $4.84 processing fee, and then they really were not set up to use the online tickets. The window they designated to initially process them was closed. They weren't scanning properly at each of the houses, so the numbers had to be manually entered, slowing the line. Hopefully that will be corrected shortly - it was their first weekend.
FoS must make a decent amount of change through sales of merchandise. They have about 9 different tee-shirt designs, one long sleeved t-shirt, 1 standard sweatshirt, and 2 hoodies. Those were all very well-priced and very good quality for the price. They advertised a design change, but it was a very small change to the design, just different color theme - just enough to get loyal fans/employees/locals to buy this year's instead of just keeping last year's. There are branded key rings, gooey eyeballs, skeleton keychains, blood syringe pens, and light up necklaces, balls, earrings, wands, etc. They also offer photos in a spooky setting for sale (like amusements parks do for coasters), but that appeared to be closed.
Unlike a number of Haunts, I don't have a lot of suggestions to improve it. Smaller groups going into the 3-D house would have helped, but with the length of the queue that probably isn't a possibility. Plastic reuseable 3-D glasses that fit better than the cheap plastic ones would be an improvement, but that is a sizeable investment (if anyone knows where I can just buy a single plastic set to carry with me, I'd be grateful). There were some sliding panels that weren't manned that could have been. A number of the scenes/actors don't seem set up for the classic Pickel "scare people forward" approach, which probably slows down throughput. That's good for the experience, but may slow the queue down or limit the number of people FoS can service in one night. The food isn't great, but I've had worse at Haunts. Portapotties are always terrifying, but running plumbing out there like at Shocktoberfest would probably be prohibitively expensive, and people still left the Shocktoberfest bathrooms gross anyway.
Hope this is written ok, too tired to re-read for typos, duplications and word choice. Hope some of this info is helpful.
I've posted this elsewhere, but thought it would fit here.
We visited Scareworld last night (10/08/06). Last year, it was our favorite 'haunt' of the season, but we were less experienced in the realm of all things choreographed and Halloween. I was excited in advance, but had some trepidations: Had we been raving for a year about a strip mall parking lot temporary haunted house in a depressed region of Wilmington, DE that might actually suck? Our travels this year had taken us to more events, such as Field of Screams where the Den of Darkness and Hayride kicked ass. Shocktoberfest's 3-D attraction had us jumping, even if the other events were somewhat of a let down. The Halloween Park House of Terror was really long, well-designed, and extensive, and they had the unique and fun House of Doom. But we'd just visited another mall parking lot site made up of tents supported by inflated balloon pylons, that stank. Big, fresh, dead skunk on the road kinda stink. Could one parking lot haunt be SO wretched and another so extraordinary?
Umm, yes.
Bought our tickets (you have to buy the whole 7 House kit & caboodle in order to get 13 Floors, reportedly the best of their houses - you don't want to miss that). $30 - ok, same as Shocktoberfest, 7 events not 3, but all of the same indoor variety without a monotomy-breaking hayride. But really, if you weren't going to be really scared, weren't going to really enjoy yourself, would you voluntarily sit jammed in with dozens of strangers wearing too much dime store cologne in hopes of hooking up with some clingy screetching spooked chick, on wet hay on the floor of a trailer with no seats? Hay rides do not come with Purell. Next to screaming children who are too young to be out that late but whose parents can't or don't have the good judgement to find a babysitter, parents who may assault you should you let slip a vulgarity in one of your (hoped for) frights? A good hayride is a magnificent thing, but they are few and far between with no guarantees. Other than wishing you had Purell.
On the topic of Purell, as soon as I got passed the chain link fence, I had to find a Portapotty. There were plenty, easy enough to find, but getting in wasn't going to be that easy. We had immediately attracted the attention of a fur-covered, mouth grated something. "Where are you going?" he asked, 2 inches from my face. "Huh? Where are you going?" Not a good thing to do to a woman who has to pee. But my bladder & I survived. Our new friend followed us and visited us many times during the evening because underneath all the blood and armor and weapons, the monsters at Scareworld are friendly (and have a great work ethic).
We decided to do the houses in order from those we were least likely to enjoy to the known winners. Last year the foggy, strobed, chain-linked 'Insanity' hadn't done much for us. This year, in the Cellbock version the fog wasn't quite so heavy and smelled less petrochemical, so no headache aftereffect. There were more actors to guide the way and/or spook us - aha! my second shriek of the evening! I lost count of the shrieks shortly thereafter. There also seemed to be more animatronics. Still not my favorite, but a vast improvement and a good start to our two-hour journey down a very dark path.
Next came the Butcher Shop. I'm not a big fan of gore. The actors made up for what the theme didn't do for me. One of them REALLY got me. The great thing about the Scareworld actors is they hide well and are persistent - they don't just spook you once and run back to their places. Since I'm a scare-resistant old lady, a couple of the actors even seemed to do a little 'success' dance when they got me. They seemed to truly enjoy their jobs. I truly enjoyed the job they did. The attendants also did a great job of separating us hard-to-scare old folks from the screaming (and punching, but more on that later) teenagers. The Butcher Shop was rather short, but more than did its job.
On to the Dungeon of Darkness, new this year. Uh oh. Inflateable black pylons holding up a tent. Just like the bad haunt we visited Saturday night. This does not bode well. And due to the full moon or the ambient light in the parking lot shining through the tent roof, we can actually SEE a little as we struggle to make our way through the maze of black rubber(?) walls. Crap. Yet because Scareworld kept us further from the exterior walls than the previous haunt, had far more detailed scenes with visual stimulation and longer paths through them with many hiding spots, and possessed either excellent actors or actors with excellent training, the Dungeon of Darkness was a success. Could the birthplace of Ryan Phillippe be a haven for budding actors? At least if making a jaded 40 year shriek in fear is any indication. I don't cling desperately for dear life to the guy in front of me (unless perhaps I'm hoping to remind my husband of the big, strong, protective he-man he is, but that's another story, isn't it?), or dash through like the squealing girls in most Haunt videos. Usually ghouls leave me alone because I don't respond a lot. Not the Scareworld actors. Only one guy with a chainsaw has ever gotten a response from me. Perhaps it was the full moon, but the actors hit my scare threshold again and again. Admittedly, at this point my nerves were frayed enough that houses and scares start to run together, so the remainder may be more vague. Overload was setting in.
After the Darkness, we figured our eyes were up to the stark contrast of the 3-D Toxic Freakshow. Unlike every other event this season, Scareworld gave us plastic, not paper, glasses. Yippee! Plastic glasses stay on your face much better wth less fussing than paper, whigh gives you more time to pay attention to the Clowns. I never liked clowns much, and "It" sealed that deal. But last year their 3-D attraction hadn't done much for me. This year was better - not as much sheer terror as some of the other houses, but some definite jumps and intimidation. I was a little distracted that my nail polish was fluorescing bright yellow. One's own nails are not supposed to glow bright yellow. Unless perhaps I really have had too much exposure to the infamous toxic chemicals in Delaware's water.
Our next stop was the Catacombs. This was the winner of the night, and the site of my two biggest scares. If you have to do something silly like buy the 1 or 5 house pass instead of all 7, this is the house not to miss. There was actual physical contact here, but only because I jumped two feet off the ground when spooked. The netting inside and overall theming and detail was amazing. This was another house where we had an enjoyable interaction with the hostess while waiting our turn.
My favorite from last year was Amityville Nightmare, which was reincarnated as The Mansion. It was still good, and one of the scenes was still the very best setup I've ever experienced and had me scared for more than an instant last year, but I expected it this time. Don't let that deter you - you won't. However, I thought I recalled lots of actors popping out of the walls last time, and they just weren't there this year. And the suspension of disbelief failed a couple times. There was a 3 inch gap between two of the exterior walls, giving you a nice view of chain link fence and parking lot. And in one of the places an actor was supposed to pop out of, there were the voices of two actors talking (women, of course, with one lecturing rather vehemently or pedantically to the other). It should be thrown in here that in Darkness, there was a technician with a light fussing over equipment that should have been hidden. It was a slow night, and I guess if they had to mess with stuff this was the time, but I like my Frights intact and surreal.
Finally, 13 Floors. Where is everybody? No one taking tickets? We wait. Behind us, a wall of Security approached a pack of teen males. The wall of Security surrounded the loudly unhappy and unpleasant teen male and escorted him out. We heard something about 'quietly' and 'charges' along with the jerks expletives. Hmmmmm. Eventually, a horribly attractive, All-American lacrosse-player looking guy in a polo shirt comes out and tells us the house is on a break. Ok, I guess all employees should get those, especially the kind who have to scream every 2 minutes. He suggests we go watch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the giant screen. I'm hungry, ok, but it's a Sunday night and it would be nice to get home. Worth mentioning that all the food people, security, and everyone else was very pleasant and friendly.
Our pelted pal returns, we ask the obvious questions, and it turns out the profanity guy had punched a clown in the 3-D house. Come on guy, if you don't want to be scared, stay at home! Mr. Pelts said he had been slugged when working in the Butcher Shop, but it was purely accidental and the patron's reflex - the guy was then completely apologetic and guilt-ridden through the rest of the house, so there was nothing to pursue. The clown-puncher was just being obnoxious about it, and it sounded like there was some injury. What kind of insecure bone-head must someone be to punch Bozo, even Bozo on PCBs, and then put on a show of bravado about it?
We made our way eventually into 13 Floors and onto their $30,000 piece of equipment (come on, you can figure it out). It was better than Halloween Park/House of Terror's because it was in a scene, although the actress wasn't as good. My companion, on the other hand, really got me by stretching out in the pitch black and touching my hand when there shouldn't have been any touching. The sheets were the most intense part, and we must have caught one of the bloody actors off queue, because he just didn't do anything at all. However, he was about the only one at Scareworld who didn't.
When we made it outside, 3 State Police cruisers were still in the lot, and teen girlfriends were still defending the jerk's violence. Real men just don't punch clowns.
Catacombs was definitely the best. But all the houses were good in their own fashions. My two least favorites would have to be the Cellblock and Butchershop, but even those had their moments. Scareworld is right up there with Terror Behind the Walls and Field of Screams. Don't miss it, strip mall or not. Maybe you can get your oil changed while you're doing the houses.
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