The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride is going big this year. Real big. “We have leviathan-sized creatures, a 40-foot Hydra, a 25-diameter skull that’s exploding out of the ground, it’s going to be incredible this year,” creator Melissa Carbone told me upon a recent visit to the 30,000-square foot warehouse that the Haunted Hayride calls home in its off season.
This is the attraction’s sixth Halloween for the event and, like in previous years, it will be returning to Griffith Park’s Old Zoo Area, the location of this summer’s Great Horror Campout (an experience I survived that Carbone was behind as well).
“Every year, the biggest pressure is to outdo our previous year,” Carbone said. “Every year, there’s new technology and things that have never been done in this space before. No one has ever made it rain blood in a live attraction space before. I saw Evil Dead [the remake] and that last scene where it’s just raining blood…I thought that was so cool. I was like, ‘We’ve got to make it rain blood this year!’ To make it pour blood, stop and do it again every 90s seconds for the next wagon, we’re doing that.”
While the warehouse I toured – situated just outside of downtown Los Angeles – was absent of the red stuff, I did encounter many of the mammoth creations Carbone and her team are at work on, including the monstrous three-headed dog Cerberus and an equally giant eyeball. In another section of the warehouse, actors are in rehearsals on giant stilts that allow them to sway back and forth. They’ll be costumed as vultures that will descend out of the darkness and prey on hayride attendees.
In any closed-environment haunt, creatures of this size could not exist. “We have a lot of space to build,” said Carbone. “There are restrictions with fire and pyrotechnics, so that’s a bummer. But the only restriction we really have is the space there is in respect to our riders, because we don’t want to be too far back from them. When you create an attraction in a contained maze, you have more freedom with lighting and smoke. So, it’s tricky, but we make it work. The ambiance and demeanor of the woods, you can’t beat it. I think we go through more fog than anyone.”
Carbone says May is usually the time of year things really start revving up in terms of preparation. With partner Keith Greco, she’s collaborating with a cast of 150 people (a big increase since the 35 they started with in year one) and a 12-member special effects team. “We fabricate all ourselves, we have two new scare zones – House of the Horseman and Seven Sins Sideshow. And, this year, we brought in Rashaad Santiago – the season 6 winner of Face Off to create some of our monsters with us. He’s helping us with our Horseman kings.”
So, what is keeping the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride alive? After all, it’s a massive undertaking (Carbone equates it to a month-long theme park experience) and Los Angeles has seen haunts come and go.
“Our philosophy is a little bit different – there are two main pieces,” Carbone explained. “We bring attractions into an environment where they haven’t been done before. So, in a city like L.A. there is not an abundance of people spending their night in the woods. Let’s put people in an environment that’s already creepy before we put our fingerprint on it. The second part is that interactive experience. We want people to be part of the attraction. We’re not touching people, but we interact in another way. Like last year, we had people who were burning, they were glowing with embers and stuff and they would walk up to people and hand them a creepy crayon drawing. So, people were getting off the wagons with crayon drawings. It’s super engaging.”
The Los Angeles Hayride runs October 3rd to the 31st. For ticket information and more, visit the official website.
