October Horror 2013: More Haunted houses: Screamer's Hollow & Fright Nights at the Fair

Screamer's Hollow
Screamer's Hollow is an outdoor park-style attraction with a loose "Village of the Damned" theme that is staged on the grounds of the Sterling Renaissance Festival.  Though most of the festival grounds are roped off.  They've got a maze, a walk-through, and a hayride through the nearby apple orchard in addition to the base "Village of the Damned", with the walk-through being the weakest thing and the hayride being surprisingly fun.  The maze was very intense and though sparsely populated, very effective at being scary.  I think one of the standout parts was the Village itself.  During the night, they use the stages around the grounds to set cute little Halloween themed plays and tell ghost stories around campfires.  I wish they did a little more with haunting the festival grounds, and had a few more actors wandering around the Village part to make it feel a bit more village-y...fog machines wouldn't go amiss either.  But all in all, very good.

I originally wanted to go to Halloweekends at Sylvan Beach, but due to my inability to read both Screamer's Hollow and this were only available Saturday night.  So as consolation on Sunday we went to:

Fright Nights at the Fair
This is a small haunted park in the New York State Fair fairgrounds, specifically a small building near the farm expo portion by the parking lot.  It was pretty cheap looking and had the traditional midway food trucks. They had 5 walk-throughs of various themes and a 3D hayride.  All the walk-throughs were actually surprisingly scary, making tremendously effective use of non-shouty actors and strobes of differing frequencies to keep things scary and tense and only startling at a few times.  The hayride, however, was crap.  It was a short, well-lit, ride in a tractor-pulled trailer where the seats were all facing inward around a few of the extra buildings with panels with those diffraction 3D neon painted panels.  At random points small groups of masked actors would board the trailer and shout at someone, stand around awkwardly, then jump off.  I think they could've made it work even with limited actors and the well-lit setting if they had made actual sets there instead of panels, worked in a good story, and rehearsed their actors a bit better.  As it stood, it was pretty lame and I actually entertained the notion of jumping off the trailer and wandering back to the main building so the ride would be over quicker.