Shortly before the season started, word came out that an ownership and name change was happening at Carnage Haunted House. Carnage had been a mainstay in the central Ohio area since 2017, known for a quality show anchored by kick-butt sets and spirited actors. But, it would henceforth be known as …Scream! Short, sweet, simple.
Before you ask: no, nothing here is based on the movie series of the same name, and Ghostface does not make an appearance. Instead, the two attractions inside Scream are The Bayou and The Entity. (Seems like they have a thing for short, sweet, and simple.) A wicked voodoo priestess with a taste for souls has cursed the Louisiana swamp creatures in The Bayou and set them against you. The Entity is starting to possess a hospital and its residents, and the takeover is most definitely hostile.
We have visited Scream/Carnage several times in the regular season and for off-season events. It’s always been a great time and a lot of fun. The fun is sometimes campy and a little wacky or goofy, which is a good thing, but also frequently turns on a dime to exhibit a nasty edge. The Bayou displays a little more of the fun side, and The Entity tends a bit more toward the horrifying, but they both mix all those elements together for a strange and tasty brew.
Without further ado, let’s see if Scream was worthy of the title!
Final overall score for each attraction –
The Bayou: 8.62
The Entity: 8.49
The fun got rolling with a bunch of actors who were clearly having a blast themselves, and their pleasure was infectious. We enjoyed their lively performances, marked by big energy and an eagerness to go off the wall or over the top – which made the ones underplaying and doing more subtle characterizations even more affecting. Many of them peppered us with off-the-wall comments and improvised further based on our reactions.
The Bayou: Pig Boy took over the role of voodoo cabin table-setter in the absence of the voodoo queen that evening, explaining in an amusingly weird, squeaky voice and riffing on Mama Voodoo’s typical rhyming style, that she was “out snatching souls, but you’ve got me and that’s so much fun – now, for you, the curse has begun!” Pig Boy’s childlike demeanor, manic clapping and laughing, and jumping-up-and-down excitement over sending us out into the bog to get murdered added up to an irresistible personality and a fabulous start to the weirdness.
Grandma ordered us to take a seat at her table – over and over, until she was screaming it – and try some homemade maggot pie. Mmm-mm! The slaughter shed maniac slammed down a hammer with enough force to shatter bones while demanding our skin.
Lots of memorable characters populated the graveyard. A quiet lady in black beckoned us forth with a tiny little candle in hand. A vampire glided ninja-like through the maze-ish crypt area, surprising us again and again. A mourner, possibly a widow, asked: “Are you staying here with me forever? We’re not even married!”
The Entity: The doctor showed up repeatedly, fuming and fussing: asking us why we were disturbing the patients in the mental ward; in maternity, telling us “The babies need feeding and you’re the food”; and crying out, “Always fear, there’s a proctologist near!”
The maintenance worker channeled Oprah: “You lose a head, and you lose a head, and you lose a head!” A bendy person pretzeled their body onto a nursing station counter and sprouted before us at eye level.
A pregnant lady popped out a baby that bounced on the floor toward us, while another actor exploded into gales of deranged laughter. A clown in the psych ward, pasting lipstick all over their mouth, kept saying “I’m a clown” and following it up with a disturbing laugh, and nearby, a catatonic patient held a knife to their teddy bear’s throat.
Queue actors included an axe murderer with frosty hair highlights and blood-spangled butcher’s apron, and a bright candy-colored clown with poofy pigtails and freaky contact lenses.
The Bayou: Pig Boy popped with glowing neon body paint and resembled a carnival barker with a tall hat and long jacket. The lady in black was a gothic vision in long lace gloves and sugar skull makeup. The graveyard bloodsucker embodied a stylish New Orleans vampire in a feathered hat and cape.
The Entity: Most get-ups here alternated between appropriately bloodied and gored doctor or nurse scrubs and filthy patient gowns. In the psych ward, the clown’s pasty face contrasted with the lurid red lipstick for a repellent effect, and another long-term inhabitant struggled against the bonds of a straitjacket. The most striking presentation came in the form of a dark-robed figure whose face was entirely shrouded in darkness.
Scream Haunted House is located in Columbus, Ohio. We experienced minimal difficulties in locating the site. A minor hiccup occurred when we took a wrong turn, but we’re not sure if that was on GPS or us. Signage on the way in is somewhat small and limited, we take it from local ordinances and such, but our destination became obvious once we saw the first ‘haunt this way’ sign.
Parking is in a standard retail lot; the venue used to be a bowling alley. We went through a metal detector and a wanding station immediately before the ticket table. From there, roping and signage helped us make our way to the attraction entrance.
This was one of the smoother and more obstacle-free walkthroughs we’ve been to this year. In fact, the whole thing is ADA compliant and accessible by standard-sized wheelchairs.
The website has all the goodies: online ticketing, calendar, FAQ, and directions – hey, we should have checked that out before we left for the place! They’re also present on several social media platforms, but it looks like those are still branded to Carnage right now.
The best proof for Scream providing an immersive experience? For as long as we can remember, they have let it be known that there are movie Easter eggs hidden in many scenes. Every time we’re there, we swear we’re going to find some of these Easter eggs. Then, the action starts, and we forget all about it. That’s the long story short. The short story long is:
The exterior is kind of just a building with some signs and banners (both Scream and Carnage; as we said, the transition took place not too long ago). But once you open those doors and stride in, the magic starts to happen.
Props of Jack and some of his buddies from The Nightmare Before Christmas stood in the foyer. Further inside, the awesome lobby and queue rocked our world with pumping music, a dazzling light show, video screens, photo ops, roaming actors, and tons of props.
A separate chamber housed the entrance area, which contained a ‘spell well’ (throw a coin into the fountain and speak a magical incantation rather than a wish, we think?), vines and branches, hanging decorations, a large video monitor, a number of doors representing different sections of the attractions, and a personable and charming door person in costume and in character. We felt pretty pumped so far!
The intro area had us hungry for more. We tramped through a realistically done outdoor area with wooden fencing and an outhouse, on our way to the marvelously detailed voodoo cabin.
There, Pig Boy did the exposition and set-up duties in an admirable, highly entertaining fashion – ending with calling down the priestess’s curse, accompanied by a switch to black light that activated their own body paint as well as symbols and images drawn on the cabin walls. It all culminated in Pig Boy opening a hidden door and calling all the cursed creatures to come and get their grub on because victims/foodstuffs were on their way, then sending us down an intensely cobwebbed hallway to our doom. That’s the way to start a haunt!
The rest of the walkthrough delivered some remarkable sets, energetic actors, and a few surprises along the way to keep the immersion going. The brief interlude/queue reset took place on a neat city street scene with barber and butcher storefronts. The butcher shop had human heads and skinned animals going around and above in a looping, suspended conveyor belt line.
Some scene-to-scene sound bleed was a minor distraction, while a few scene scenarios took us out of the moment and had us scratching our heads – like, what was that boat doing in the graveyard? Maybe it was one of those Easter eggs we never get around to finding…
The exit led us to a merch booth past a very cool, very long 3D clown wall. We got glasses to check out the art at our leisure – it was nice to be able to take our time and look at an unbroken tableau instead of seeing it in bits and pieces while trying to navigate around inside an attraction.
Scream put in an exemplary performance on the effects front. Well-done lighting, lasers, fog, detailed scenery, a soundtrack that included Nawlins jazz, running water features, and some fantastic animatronics and actormatronics all figured into the excellent effects here.
The Bayou: Sets fully played into the low country setting. A really cool laser swamp featured spiders and hanging egg sacs, with nighttime swampy sounds of owls, bugs, and the like. We walked over the swamp water surrounded by boats, Grinchy-faced fanged fish, an ogre/sasquatch animatronic holding a severed head, and running water.
Huge gator head and snake head actormatronics – the snake emerging out of a laser fog wall! – had us oohing, aahing, and getting the hell out of the way. We passed country shacks and display cases of taxidermy and skeletons, many of them seemingly unknown creatures or cryptids. And we got squirted by an animatronic skunk!
Two other animatronics we have to mention: A spasming granny figure hit us with a heavy arterial spray from stabbing herself with a knitting needle, and a smoking reaper turned side to side above a voodoo doll jabbed with stickpins. Awesome stuff!
Two cemeteries made an appearance, one a ‘normal’ set-up and the other a fantastic New Orleans-style, decaying, above-ground layout of crypts and tombs. Prime real estate for moody low lighting, gargoyles and statuary, and plenty of actors’ hidey holes.
The Entity: Gory props abounded, with bodies lying around every corner in various states of bloody devastation, amputation, and disembowelment. Even the medical staff couldn’t escape that fate, as we saw a nurse on a chair who’d managed to hang on to only her upper torso. A lady with a pulsating blob of nodules glistening with pus coming out of her abdomen was one of the sickest things we’ve seen this year. Yay!
We also noticed a brain with eye stalks suspended in a jar, an electrical fried smell accompanying a charred corpse in a furnace (there were several other disagreeable odors throughout, as well), and some pipes with smoke wafting out of them in the maintenance area. In the maternity ward, mutant baby props crawled on the walls and animatronics slammed against the viewing window, all while we were serenaded by recorded whispers, plinky jack-in-the-box music, and infant cries.
As we moved along this attraction, we noted the black tendrils and tarry substance from the entity progressively infiltrating, spreading through, and infecting the whole hospital.
21. How scary was it? (35% of score): 7.9
22. How well did they provide scares to everyone in the group? (15% of score): 9.55
23. How predictable were the scares? (25% of score): 8.7
24. How well did they provide a wide variety (types) of scares? (10% of score): 8.25
25. How strong was the ending / finale? (15% of score): 7.6
Did we scream at Scream? Oh, yes!
Numerous jump scares presented themselves through animatronics and actors leveraging props, devious hiding spots, and their environment. A few examples: the doctor splashing us with water from the autopsy table; the hammer-wielding lunatic who wanted our skin that spooked us coming and going, taking advantage of the circuitous gotcha-and-gotcha-again floor design; the maintenance worker who pounded a wrench on any surface that would make a big noise; and the straitjacketed patient who charged at us full-tilt until suddenly being stopped short by the chains set into the walls and attached to their hands, in another noise-boosted fright.
The settings helped along frightfulness, from the lantern-lit cemetery and gorily damaged bodies in the hospital to the disturbing skin shack and numerous taxidermied animals.
Creepier scares came courtesy of the eerie cemetery scene with quieter but no less spooky characters like the lady in black and the vampire. But the most creeptastic one was the ending wraith-like figure who pursued us slowly and silently toward the exit.
We counted lots of phobias along the way. They included snakes, spiders, bees, and bugs, alligators, burning to death, dolls, insanity, hospitals, possession, birth defects, and graveyards …not once, but twice.
We got through Scream in 29 minutes, split between The Bayou at 16 minutes and The Entity at 13 minutes. Against the general admission charge of $35.19 ($27.32 base, plus taxes and online fees), it came out to a 0.82 minutes-per-dollar calculation. It’s lower than the one-minute-for-one-dollar ratio result where we feel most satisfied, but a reasonable number for the high-quality haunt at hand, especially the sets, effects, and entertaining characters.
Fast pass is available, and a special VIP pass includes a boatload of extras like skip the entire line access, a free t-shirt, a drink, and snacks; see the website for details.
So, Carnage is now Scream. More changes, and more noticeable changes, may come in the future, but for right now, it seems it’s the same fun and enjoyable experience it’s always been.
3770 Refugee Road, Columbus, Ohio 43232