HHN 32 Review

Now that we’re home and I’ve had time to recover from the event, here are my thoughts on HHN 32 (What the heck is HHN?):

I loved it. I’m obsessed. Keep in mind that I’m not a person who typically gets scared by much of anything, and Halloween is my favorite holiday, so if you are a chicken, proceed with caution 😉

HHN Houses

The houses this year were all great in their own way, though we only made it through 7 of 10 (by choice- we could have gotten through all 10 if we weren’t so exhausted!). Everyone is going to have their own personal preference, and even though Jax and I usually have similar tastes, even our rankings varied.

Rachel’s Ranking:

1. Darkest Deal- great storyline, great scenes, great scares. We had a great walk-through of this house and the storyline reminded me of Devil Went Down To Georgia, so how could you go wrong??
2. Yeti- great storyline, great scenes, great fun. I think both of us laughed out loud more than once in the Yeti house. It’s campy and enjoyable. And Bear!! If you walk through this house and don’t fall in love with Bear, you need to see yourself out and come back with a better sense of humor 🙂
3. Stranger Things- I love the Stranger Things show on Netflix, so I have an emotional attachment to this one. The sets were great and really reflected the Upside Down. And the scenes with Eleven fighting Vecna, and Eddie Munson jamming on his guitar- so great. The demi-gorgon at the very end was also a nice detail.
4. The Last of Us- This probably would have ranked higher if I knew anything about The Last of Us, but I don’t, so it’s #4 for me. Good scares, good theming, great scenes. Really solid, but like I said, I don’t have any kind of emotional attachment to this one.
5. Oddfellows- If you don’t like clowns, this house will probably scare the crap out of you. It’s creepy, it’s fun, but I did feel like I wanted more out of it. Watch out for the lion- he got me!
6. Dueling Dragons- maybe we had a bad walk-through, but I didn’t think there were enough scares in this one. The sets are beautiful and it’s immersive, but I didn’t think it was scary. I did like the multiple endings though.
7. Chucky- I really like the idea behind this house. The first half is supposed to be a fake haunted house, but Chucky finds out Universal isn’t actually killing people, so he comes in to kick things up a notch in the second half. The animatronic at the beginning is really creepy, but a lot of the scares were dolls jumping out at you, which just didn’t quite do it for me. Honestly I liked how gory the second half was and the house is very “meta.”

Jax’s Rankings:

1. Yeti- it’s really funny with the bear
2. The Last of Us
3. Stranger Things
4. Dueling Dragons
5. Oddfellows
6. Chucky because it’s kinda stupid
7. Darkest Deal- he forgot what that one was so had to rank it last

HHN Scare Zones

If you go through the scare zones before the sun goes down, please go back through them in the dark. Totally different experience. I don’t know that any of the scare zones were overly scary this year, to be entirely honest, but they are still fun to walk through. Vamp 69 was interesting because you often couldn’t tell who was a scare actor and who wasn’t. The Zodiac actors had some cool costumes and interacted really well with guests. I noticed that when it was still light out, the scare actors pretty much left Jax alone, but once it was dark, they must have realized that he wanted to be scared, so they targeted him a lot more (which he loved).

Miscellaneous

HHN has a little bit to offer everyone, but we mostly focused on the houses and scare zones. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to taste snacks, look for the Megan horde, or watch the Nightmare Fuel show (which I heard is excellent this year!). I really wish we had gone a second night so we could have taken our time and been able to do it all.

However, we did get to briefly see the Death Eaters in Diagon Alley (and of course rode Gringotts). The Death Eaters moved very quickly throughout Diagon Alley. As a Harry Potter nerd, it was still fun to check that off my list of things to see. I challenged one to a duel, but he either didn’t see me, or was scared to take on an obviously superior wizard such as myself. I’ll let you decide which of those scenarios was more likely…