The Darkness 2022
The Darkness is widely considered one of the greatest haunted attractions ever created. It is nationally renowned, being on many major industry lists for best haunted houses. Focusing on being the cutting edge of haunted attraction design and technology, The Darkness lives up to their reputation, while having some flaws that hinder the experience at times.
One of the highlights of The Darkness is the absurdly impressive set design that is up there with Universal's Halloween Horror Nights. A trip through The Darkness is a tour through all of your nightmares, brought to life in frightening detail. Some scenes are also just so awe inspiring that it is easy to forget that you are in a haunted house and instead get lost in exploring the details. One room that did it for me was a castle-like corridor, with rain pounding on the glass on both sides of the extravagant hallway. A mixture of physical sets that is beautifully put together down to the tiniest details and screen projections is what made this room fantastic, and that is true throughout the house. Even the 3D section of the house is the best designed version of a 3D house that I have seen anywhere.
The incredible sets are further helped by a fleet of animatronics and tech-laden props. It feels like it is almost a showcase for other haunts on what is capable of being done with technology The size and scope of some of these just need to be seen to be believed. There are some devilish figures that loom upwards of 20 feet above their victims. Video screens and projections are used to add further depth into scenes. Most impressive, tech is used to make scenes feel more lifelike. An example of this is an ice cream truck being driven by a clown. Now, I have seen the outer shell in other haunts, with a video screen showing a clown driving the vehicle. What sets The Darkness apart is that guests go into the back of the vehicle, which is shaking and moving around, making it feel like you are really trapped in the back of a van being driven by a maniac. Things like that help to create an immersion that is hard to touch. The final touch to make these scenes feel alive is a small but good group of actors that are dedicated to trying to get the scare.
Talking about getting scares, we come across the major issue of The Darkness, which is the way it is set up made it hard to get scares. At the beginning of the attraction, groups are pulsed through every minute or so into the house proper. However, with the set design being the way it is, it leads to a slow moving conga line of people quite quickly into the house. Even worse, when we were inside, there were multiple points where the entire line came to a standstill. While this does allow for seeing the great sets for more time, it hurts the overall flow of the house. The actors that are inside have a hard time getting scares when the line doesn't move for sometimes a minute. It leaves it with them either trying to scare the same people, or being spotted way in advance by people behind in line. The constant start and stop was hard to get over, but not as bad as what we would see later that night at Lemp Brewery. It honestly hurts because this one issue is what hurt our overall impression of the house, which is a fantastic house that is a proof of concept of what strong set detailing and prop work can do to elevate a haunted attraction. However, the core concept of a haunted house is getting scared, and while the environment is certainly primed for it, the actors have a hard time to finish the act when the crowd control is so off. Still, this is one of the most beautiful houses you can do on this planet, and is absolutely worthy of its praise.
8 / 10
