EVENTS: Halloween Horror Nights 2009 - an opinion

I've lived in Orlando for over 5 years now, and have gone to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios for just about every one of those years. I love it. I love the great haunted houses, I love going through the scare zones, I love the attention to detail - and it's for all these reasons that HHN 20 is kind of a letdown this year.

To be fair, it's hard to do a Halloween event as massive as HHN, but when you're asking people to pay $70 to get in, plus pretty much requiring that they shell out an additional $40, $60, or $75 for the express pass if they hope to see more than two houses - you had better make it an unforgettable experience. And to that end, this year is kind of lame. Let's take you through the houses:

Wolfman: By far, this is the best house this year. It's lengthy, the sets encompass both the gothic architecture as well as the immersive feeling of being in a fog-drenched nightscape, and the audio design - full of wolfy snarls and shrieks - is top notch. Sadly, none of the other houses use the theme as a diving board for creative scares as well as this one, so it's all downhill from here.

Dracula: Gothy fangs and lots of blood don't make up for poorly-conceived scares (yeah, I totally didn't expect you to pop out at me from behind that coffin) and bad memories of Francis Ford Coppola's film. It's Dracula, for god's sake - this should have been more engaging and less reliant on "boo". The best part are the hallways with portraits of shapeshifting people - more of a focus on transformation and encroaching evil (do scareactors even chase people anymore?) would have helped.

Frankenstein: They recycled those Fly teleporter pods for Frankenstein? Sorry, that comes off as cheap, not an homage. And this is indicative of something that bugged me throughout: a lot of the effects and makeup seemed cheap (I mean come on, does Disney have sole rights to the Pepper's Ghost effect? No. Use it.). Masks? The best you can do for a Frankenstein's monster is a rubber mask?

Leave It to Cleaver: And speaking of masks, all this bizarre paean to wholesome cannibalism has going for it is creepy masks. Seriously, an entire house and we only see one person getting chopped up? Lame.

Saw: Biggest disappointment of the night. The house was not fully stocked with scareactors, so whole sections went by where I thought "I'm pretty sure someone was supposed to jump out at me from there." Also, it's frickin' Saw! I want to see entrails shooting across the room at me, not some person crying themselves to sleep in a cage. The best part is at the beginning, where a video camera puts you on the wall of TV screens alongside other victims.

The Spawning: I didn't go into this one, so it could have been good, but chances are it's just rubber monsters.

Chucky: Aside from the spinning tunnel at the beginning, this one was another blown opportunity. There's a part where you walk through boxes of Chucky dolls and nothing happens. Your anticipation isn't rewarded by something actually jumping out at you, and while you can pull that maneuver off in the movies you can't do that in a haunted house. People want the release and pay over $100 for it.

Silver Screams: This one is actually pretty decent as they did a good job of capturing the feel of an old movie theater and populating it with well-positioned scareactors (I finally saw some actors ganging up on people as they passed by). Try and hit this one.

The scare zones were also light on scareactors when I went, which is just a shame. People are, again, on average plunking down over $100 each to get into this event, so the least that can be done is make sure there are enough scareactors to properly scare the poop out of the customers. I love Halloween Horror Nights (it's one of the reasons I love living in Orlando), but this year was a pretty big letdown for me. I hope next year that I get more than rote haunted houses and cheap rubber masks on the actors - anything less than an otherworldly experience just isn't worth the money.