CALIFORNIA
California is shaking with terrorizing haunted houses. California’s featured cities of terror Los Angeles, San Leandro, and Pomona. Los Angeles: Haunted Hayride, Fear Overload, and Reign of Terror Haunted House are the scariest haunted houses in California. California is worth the trip to participate in some of the best review haunted houses.
Los Angeles Haunted Hayrides 6th season promises to be best yet with “Echoes From The Rift” bringing guests face to face with hellish abominations of apocalyptic proportion.
Hollywood’s favorite Halloween Icon will mark it’s sixth season by creating a giant year of new content. Located in Griffith Park’s Old Zoo area, the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride will become a portal to the planet’s deepest and most legendary rift, The Underworld. The abominations from below will rise in leviathan size proportion and give hayride guests the thrill of their lives. Larger than life portrayals of the seven deadly sins and their consequences will come out of the rift to play.
With the unprecedented amount of media and celebrity attendance in previous years, Los Angeles Haunted Hayride continually creates brand new experiences each year. This year in addition to an all new storyline on the hayride trail, two brand new attractions, House of the Horsemen and Seven Sins Sideshow will be added to the Purgatory section of Los Angeles Haunted Hayride.
The Crowd favorite, “In-Between” Dark Maze returns as a pitch black labyrinth that will send patrons into the darkness with nothing but the hands in front of them and a low voltage lantern that helps them to be seen rather than actually see. The creatures that call this home will do everything in their power to send you screaming through the emergency exit doors.
October 9th is the Annual Premiere Night including press, celebrities, and sponsors who will get to experience this year’s all new festivi-ties. Past celebrity attendees at the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride included Zac Erfron, Katy Perry, Demi Lovato, Jillian Michaels, Nikki Reed, Megan Fox, Sarah Hyland, Lucy Hale, Chris Colfer, Chord Overstreet, Stephanie Pratt, David Beckham, Emmy Rossum, Sarah Silverman, Ryan Gosling, Kristin Ritter, Giles Nissan and many more.
Los Angeles Haunted Hayride will be open from Oct 3-Oct 31. Visit www.losangeleshauntedhayride.com For a list of Haunted Houses in Los Angeles you can go here: Haunted House Los Angeles
Fear Overload Haunted Houses in the San Francisco Bay Area - located in San Leandro, California, Fear Overload is a high shock haunted house attraction. This October, Fear Overload brings you two brand new haunted houses, made by the creators of the 2011 haunts which were voted the scariest in California by HauntWorld. Fear Overload’s mastermind, Polanco, reveals information about one of their new haunted houses, “The closed-down Insane Asylum has been all over the news recently. After two officers were slaughtered in the asylum while investigating noise complaints, the town has been up in arms and frantically asking questions. But no one is brave enough to enter. This October, you have the chance to experience the unknown in this truly horrifying attraction” Polanco exclaims. “We specialize in the ridiculous.”</span>
In 2011, Fear Overload was awarded for its quality and scare factor. This year, they plan to take their haunted attractions to a new level of fear. “Our design team works all year long creating the most intricate scenes. And this year, we have far outstretched our limits.” Polanco ensures that his new scenes will send chills through your spine, should you choose to enter Fear Overload this October. For more information, dates, and tickets, please visit the Los Angeles haunted house website at www.fearoverload.com
KERN COUNTY CALIFORNIA HOSTS THE BEST HAUNT YOU’VE NEVER SEEN
by Tyler Davidson
If one were to pinpoint the epicenter of the haunted attraction in-dustry, a strong case could be made for placing it in Los Angeles. It’s not much of a stretch to think that the entertainment capital of the world could provide a haven for experiences that place so much emphasis on the suspension of disbelief. Hell, if anything, the City of Angels is oversaturated, with everything from driveway haunts to immersive theater to major theme park events getting in on the act.
What if, just a few hours north, there lied a “diamond in the rough”? A burgeoning haunt that could give any multi-million dol-lar Hollywood production a run for its money? One-hundred-and-twelve miles up the I-5 freeway is Bakersfield, the jewel of Kern County, known to some for its own colorful brand of country mu-sic popularized by the legendary Buck Owens. But to others, Ba-kersfield is the home of Talladega Frights, one of the best kept secrets in the haunt business today.
“We’ve had to work hard keeping ourselves on our toes be-cause there aren’t people in our immediate market pushing us,” says Mike Wilbur, co-owner of Talladega Frights and an admitted competitive spirit. “We don’t have competition to deal with, but we have the challenge of keeping fresh and new, and that’s in-ternally what we have to do.”
In 2008, Wilbur was heading up the then-brand spanking new haunt, staffing the attraction with high school drama students. A local magazine editor by the name of Dana Martin interviewed Wilbur for a cover story on haunts, setting off a chain reaction of events that began with Martin’s own daughter becoming an actor, and ended with Martin eventually becoming business part-ners with Wilbur in 2012.
“We make a good team because we specialize in different ar-eas,” says Martin, a writer with a knack for the kind of details that make Talladega Frights a uniquely immersive experience. Since 2009, the creative process has begun with the two co-owners sitting down and imagin-ing what has “happened,” so to speak, in the context of the story.
“[Wilbur] built a hotel one year, and I asked him, ‘What do you think hap-pened in the hotel?’”, Martin explains. “And he had the framework for it, but he didn’t have the details or the names or anything like that, so what he would do is, he would tell me the gist of what he thinks happened, and I would go in and fill in all the details and the blanks, and we would create this backstory. And that’s still what we do to this day.”
This February, when the haunt opened for the Friday the 13th / Valentine’s Day weekend, the backstory began at Green River High School, where students and teachers alike roamed in various states of decay. From there, the narra-tive moved on through a litany of jaw-dropping scenes, including a junkyard straight out of a fever dream, with giant pillars of fire shooting into the sky, not to mention a truly unsettling tribute to Buffalo Bill of Silence of the Lambs infa-my (complete with Q Lazzarus’ “Goodbye Horses” playing in the background).
Once Wilbur and Martin have a complete backstory fleshed out, it is pre-sented to their true secret weapon: A cast of characters practically chomping at the bit, which has numbered anywhere from 60 to 110 in the past. And just like a miniature army of Method actors, they devote an ungodly amount of time and energy to exploring their varied roles in the story.
“Over the summer, we’ll hold actor workdays,” says Martin, “and I will have actors come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Dana, can I just go sit in my room for a while, so I can get a feel for it and get some ideas?’ And then they’ll go disap-pear.”
“This is a lifestyle for them when they come out here, and they want to make it the best they can,” adds Wil-bur.
The intensity and the physicality of the actors, young as they may be, is what sets Talladega Frights apart from their far-away competitors; a would-be captor slams his victim to the ground in the junkyard scene, brandishing an aluminum baseball bat, while ravaged cheerlead-ers contort themselves on a school bus, bending back-wards over the seats to intimidate hapless guests.
“They can’t rely on just their words,” says Martin. “It has to become a whole body experience, really, to become as realistic as we expect it to be.”
So what does the future hold for Talladega Frights? Well, for one, a minor change in scenery. As of this writing, Martin, Wilbur & Co. called the Kern County Museum their home, but for Halloween 2015, they’ll find a new home. The idea is to grow and expand into a new locale that will allow them not only to continue terrorizing the brave souls who enter their haunt, but to continue offer-ing entertainment options for the whole family; believe it or not, this includes an event called Christmas Town, an all-ages holiday spectacle boasting light shows, ice skating, and other less-than-terrifying activities.
Ultimately, Mike Wilbur and Dana Martin consider themselves to be part of the entertainment business, and while Talladega Frights is as scary a haunt as you’ll find on the west coast, Dana explains that fear isn’t necessarily the endgame; fun is.
“I know a lot of people come through, and you’ve seen this in other haunted houses, they’re not gonna be scared, they don’t wanna be scared. But as long as we feel like they’ve been entertained, if they’re having a good time and they’re smiling when they come out and they feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth, I think that we feel successful.”
More Information about Talledega Nights Can be found at Talledeganights.com