One of the haunted attractions that Harknell and I are looking forward to this year is Nightmare NYC’s Killers 2 haunted attraction. We reviewed last year’s installment of Killers and the prior year’s Fairy Tales show.
These guys always do something special that gets better every year. Let me educate you as to why:
Nightmare NYC is not your traditional “run from played-out chainsaw man” haunted attraction. This is a theatre experience that happens to be in haunted attraction form. They put a lot of work into custom props and narrative. This video talks about the preparation for their Vampires show that happened before Fairy Tales.
We love narrative. Nightmare NYC always stands out from the other haunted attractions because they are not afraid to be original and they aren’t afraid to get inside your head for the scares.
One of the reasons we liked their Killers show last Halloween is because they did not take the easy route. After Eli Roth’s Hostel and the SAW franchise did very well in the box office, you might expect a show like this to just be a bunch of torture porn about serial killers.
You’d be dead wrong.
The opening scene of Nightmare: Killers was with one of the mothers whose child was killed. Perhaps Nightmare: Killers’ greatest success was getting the viewer to question why they were here in the first place. Why are Killers glamorized? Why does this happen in our society? Right away these questions are planted in your head. If someone started off wanting to see something like Eli Roth’s Hostel movie that scene was a pretty epic troll that made a very serious point. It also made it scarier.
Nightmare NYC is one of the few haunted attractions that I do not have to refer to my own blog to remember what happened.
The reason I started blogging about haunted attractions for Halloween is because we just love this stuff but could not keep straight which haunts we had done without writing them down. Many haunted attractions have the same name and use the same props and stunts. Branding and narrative is something that many don’t quite understand yet. Nightmare NYC gets it.