How do you celebrate the 30th anniversary of Halloween Horror Nights? Easy – you do an anniversary house (yes, another one).
As the name might (kind of) suggest, SCarey: Horror in the Heartland will be a celebration of the event for its landmark 30th year, specifically focusing on Carey, Ohio, the real-life town that has served as the fictional basis for much of Horror Nights’s mythology. Over the course of the past 12 years (and, through retconning, for six years even before that), some two dozen mazes and scare zones have been set in – or have otherwise involved – the now-infamous location, and SCarey looks to be something of a greatest-hits encapsulation of most of them. (Here’s to hoping that the 2018 entries of Slaughter Sinema, a haunt, and Twisted Tradition, a zone, pop up!)
On June 12, park guests began to notice the “Welcome to SCarey: Horror in the Heartland” house facade being put up near Men in Black: Alien Attack! Two days later, the Halloween Horror Nights Twitter account seemed to make light of the situation with a tweet of rushing water that said “its [sic] just a little leak.” At any rate, we are happy to share now that, yes, this is an official house, and we hope you’re as excited about it as we are!
A classic in HHN lore, Carey is a real village in Ohio (about 90 minutes north of Columbus). As the story goes, Carey was the hometown of one of the Art & Design team members on the original (or at least very early) Halloween Horror Nights team. The designers chose its rural location and small-town feel to inspire some of the creepier settings of their ideas, in theory focusing a type of “origin” story that would build on itself over time, and so it has. Through the years, a number of HHN houses or scare zones have been set in this sleepy little haunt, which makes its inclusion for this diamond anniversary year both fitting and exciting.
Scarey: Horror in the Heartland will join Beetlejuice, The Haunting of Hill House, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Universal Monsters: Bride of Frankenstein Lives, and HHN Icons: Captured at Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights, which runs for a record-breaking 42 select nights, from Friday, September 3 to Saturday, October 31.
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