By: Gracie Swind, Contributing Writer
Saint Leo University finally got their taste of blood at Howl-O-Scream this Sunday night on Oct 28, 2019 after inclement weather caused the trip to be cancelled last Friday.
This year’s events mark Howl-O-Scream’s twentieth consecutive year running and the park certainly went all out. Scare zones littered strategically throughout the park meant you couldn’t go far without meeting an actor covered in blood or wielding a chainsaw.
Tigris makes its Howl-O-Scream debut this year, drawing just as many screams as the scare zones and haunted houses.
Horror extended even outside the designated scare zones. There was one area between the Meat Market and Little Nightmares where an in-depth description of how to slaughter and quarter a pig, complete with graphic meat-slicing sound effects, was playing over the loudspeakers. It was about as appetizing as one might imagine it to be.
However, the scariest part of the night was found far outside any of the haunted houses or scare zones. With limited selections for food and wildly expensive prices for drinks and snacks, explicit meat-ripping noises weren’t the only challenge when it came to eating at the park.
That being said, the actors were good and the costumes and staging was excellent. Hell on Wheels was especially immersive, with some actors even riding motorcycles around.
Immersion was disrupted, however, in some parts of the park, as Christmas decorations have already started popping up in preparation for Christmas Town this November. Some overlap can be forgiven because of the tight turn-around between the two events, but even so, the nativity scene just outside the slaughterhouse was unsettling in an entirely different way.
Thankfully for guests who weren’t in it for the scares, ride lines were generally reasonable all night long. Cheetah Hunt wait times capped out at about 45 minutes and Montu, Cobra’s Curse, and Tigris were practically no wait at all.
Howl-O-Scream actors terrified even the brave lions of Saint Leo University; leaf blowers seemed to be their ‘weapon’ of choice.
Unfortunately, there were some ‘dark areas’ where there weren’t many lights or decorations, but the next scare zone, ride, or plaza was almost always in sight regardless.
“It’s been a tradition for a good while now,” said Ashley Vega, a social work major Senior, and the organizer of the event. “[we’re] definitely going to keep the tradition ‘cause Halloween Horror Nights and Howl-O-Scream are something that students actually really enjoy and the tickets are always sold out really fast, so [it]definitely will continue throughout the years.”
Vega went on to recommend Howl-O-Scream for students who might not be up to conquering Universal’s frightful fair. “I think Halloween Horror Nights is definitely…scarier, I think the effects are way…better, but I think some students don’t really like to be scared as bad as Halloween Horror Nights so, Howl-O-Scream…gives them that [middle-ground] for people who…enjoy the scare, but not as much,” she said.
If you’d like to try your hand at a Halloween theme park experience but don’t want your socks scared off, keep in mind that actors tended to prefer small groups to larger ones; pairs of two or groups of three or four were their key victims.
Howl-O-Scream featured a wide variety of chilling thrills, ranging from the family-friendly Día de Los Muertos to the PG-13 Fiends show.
If you’d like to go and be relatively left alone or scare-free, keep to a large group or follow closely behind other large groups. Watch the bushes for hidden actors, walk in the center of your group through the scare zones (as the actors tend to attack from the sides), and listen ahead for other groups being scared.
“Definitely go at least once – get the experience; I went my freshmen year terrified, and I was like ‘I’m not gonna go again,’ but here I am, a senior, and going,” Vega mused. “Definitely [I think that going] once would be a really good experience for someone to do.”
