The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride has had a long, spotty history. Things began to change last year when Creative Director of Thirteenth Floor took the reigns Jon Cooke. Despite opening night jitters the 2019 edition of Hayride was a success. We all looked forward to 2020 as the year that we would see even greater improvement with this storied seasonal attraction. Then COVID happened. all but wiping out the haunt industry in southern California. Would Cooke and co devise a way to scare?
They did. Admirably.
For 2020 the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride has created the Live Drive-Up Experience. Building on the mythos of Midnight Falls, a town where every day is Halloween, we are invited to the Midnight Falls Drive-In. The hour-long experience begins when you and your party arrive in your car at check-in for your time slot. Once inside the experience, we snake our way down “All Hallows Lane”, passing vignettes that be familiar to those who attended last year’s event.
You’re thinking, well how do you get scared safely if you are driving? The approach here is big, broad, and atmospheric as opposed to intimate and sudden. After all, as one group is heading into the drive-in, another is heading out, creating a pretty busy two-lane highway moving at a snail’s pace.
Guests arrive at the drive-in and are directed to a spot. All of the cars are parked one space away from each other to allow for plenty of social distancing and room for what’s to come. The screen plays trivia questions and commercials from hayride sponsors as we are directed to tune our radios to the Midnight Falls radio station carrying the sound. While we personally experienced problematic low volume from the broadcast, it didn’t matter as the needed sound was also played from speakers outside. Not a big deal.
The show begins and our Master of Scare-a-monies begins to host a horror short film fest ala Movie Macabre. The movies keep things PG-13 with a few swear words even bleeped. Between each forgettable screening, Monte shows back up on the screen to sing one of his delightfully twisted tunes. Monte is the highlight of what’s on-screen, that is for sure. But then again, that’s kind of the point.
As the 40-minute film plays, monsters creep and crawl around the drive-in outside. Essentially, the trick is that they want you focused on the screen so the monsters can attack and attack they do. These aren’t the types of scares you normally get. Instead, they are the slow burns with the occasional startle. You might be engrossed in what’s playing only to feel the cold stare of a ghoul just 6 feet from your car. Again you have to understand that the Thirteenth Floor team had to create a totally new monster for this season.
The show concludes and we are directed to safely navigate out as another batch of 80 cars filled with horror-hungry haunt goers are making their way in for the next show.
Is the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride 2020 scary? I would call it fun. Considering the almost insurmountable obstacles that the Hayride team faced this year I would call this a huge accomplishment and an unqualified success. The fact that they have persevered in bringing the atmosphere and spirit of Halloween to fans when nearly all of the rules have been changed (sometimes on a daily basis), I can’t help but have a tremendous amount of gratitude.
I would also like to point a few other things out. The talent was amazing. There wasn’t one moment for us where we noticed a drop in energy or engagement. Let’s be clear, it’s nearly impossible to scare someone in a car, at least the driver anyway. Drivers in a spot with mirrors that look in nearly every direction so to get past that phalanx of visibility is impressive. However, one issue was that I seemed to see the same monster sneaking up to my car every so often trying another way to scare me. Perhaps there could be better rotation but for the most part, the talent gets high marks. Also, I was very very impressed with the organization of it all. Traffic Management and crowd control were precise and I felt extremely safe.
In the end, I smelled fog, I saw monsters, and I got to feel at least for an hour that it was Halloween again. Nicely done.
