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The Rice Thresher
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Marisa Levy thresher staff No, the boogie-man is not real. No, the man chasing you with a chainsaw will not hurt you. It is all make-believe. Or so I had to remind my full-grown, presumably mature 21-year-old friend as we made our way through three of Houston's scariest haunted houses. Though the weather was freezing and the rain never let up, eager Houstonians lined the Midtown streets to await their chance at a good, old-fashioned scare. Armed with little more than warm jackets and a sense of adventure, we waited in line among annoyingly affectionate high school couples, strange older men in their 40s and families looking to traumatize their children at an impressionable age. There is a definite hierarchy among the three haunted houses, a hierarchy, that if followed correctly, will give you the greatest bang for your buck. The Haunted Zone (2803 Fannin), a 3-D fun house, complete with demented clowns and neon-painted walls, ranks as the least involved and most whimsical of the houses. If you're visiting all three houses, it should be your first stop of the night. The haunted house can best be described as trippy, so this is the house ideal for anyone looking for a minimal fright or the best spot to enhance a night spent indulging in illegal substances. Though the majority of this house's appeal comes from the complimentary 3-D glasses, it is worth the time to anyone interested in a deviation from the traditional haunted house genre. Next door to the Zone is the Haunted Hotel (2817 Fannin). Touted as the most technologically advanced of the three houses, it boasts over $100,000 in animatronic creatures and mechanical enhancements as varied as an Exorcist-style Linda Blair to a tilting walkway furnished with goo-soaked skeletons that attack on timed intervals. Though this house seemed to be the most expensive of the bunch, the less expensive human characters and quick, unexpected surprises were the highlights of the house and more than compensated for the highly ineffective mechanical scares. The Haunted Hotel is by far the most unoriginal of the houses, but it offers a moderate fright to bridge the unusual atmosphere created by the Haunted Zone and the impending grand-scale scare techniques attempted by the Fear Factory. Finally, down the street from the other two houses is the pinnacle of the haunted house triumvirate, the Fear Factory (901 Rosalie). The Fear Factory is housed in a three-level rickety building perfect for such ghoulish purposes. Often too dark to see five inches in front of your face, the Fear Factory takes the traditional haunted house and makes it worthy of a $10 admission fee. The longest tour of the three houses, the Fear Factory experience is involved. Whether you are climbing up stairs or trying to avoid the sinister characters waiting to surprise you in darkened corners, you are constantly on guard and rarely find an opportunity to question the realness of the evil characters tormenting you throughout the house. If you can only visit one house, this is by far the best choice. The evening's success is completely dependent on the length of the line and the quality of the small group of people you are forced by fate to tour the house with. If the 13-year-old girls accompanying you squeal and hold their boyfriends during the tour, you'll be fine and the experience should be everything your $10 admission promised. However, if the 20-year-old gangster-rejects accompanying you (as in our experience) harass the house characters and complain that their $10 would have been better spent on crack, maybe you should move on to one of the other houses and hope for better luck. Either way, all three of the haunted houses in Midtown Houston will be open until the last weekend in October and offer a great diversion from the horrors of daily life at Rice.
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