Haunted Trail in Holley Review (2016)

The first thing that needs to be said about the Haunted Trail in Holley’s cast is that they have the best clowns this review team has ever seen’ and we have seen a lot of clowns. The Marionette is unsettlingly gleeful, the ghillie suit monster seems capable of teleportation and a certain monster convinced us that they were simply a set piece before almost scaring us out of our skin. With 35 actors, there are no empty spaces to stare at and every scene is fully utilized by the characters within them. Some of the dialogue is a bit predictable, but the mad gleam in each actor’s eye, as well as their familiarity with their surroundings and usage of their space, makes each one a treasure. The final actor will help you find the exit at high speed!

The budget may be small, but the output here for special effects is pretty tremendous (considering the materials). All of the props and effects are reclaimed pieces from Craigslist and other second-hand organizations, but they are all utilized perfectly. Day-glo pieces are effectively placed and ingeniously created. Sound effects are byproducts brought about by set pieces and actors. There’s no big budget animatronics, but this isn’t the setting for that. The lighting is a bit dim in some places where the setting deserves brightness. On the other hand, there’s so much detail packed into every scene that even perfect lighting wouldn’t expose it all.

The theme of the Haunted Trail is well explained by the guardian of its gates. It is a series of sets created to exploit some more-common and some of the rarer phobias. One scene actually managed to seriously unnerve one of our more staunch reviewers and was something we had never before seen in any of the haunts we’ve visited. There are the more common scares available (clowns, unnerving children, ghosts, and bugs), but they are executed well and with a true love of bone-chilling horror. The rooms may not be connected to each other, but they all relate back to this central theme of terror.

Without a doubt this was some of the best redirection scares we’ve ever seen. Haunted Trail may be small, but it packs a lot of bang for your buck. There are some jump scares, as is expected, but the general focus of the house is to draw your eye one way before throwing terror at you from another. Some of the scares are a little more expected than others, but ultimately, there’s a lot here that you never see coming until it’s too late. The haunters here are also very good at spreading the attention over the whole of your group instead of focusing on the front or back participants.