The idea of how theme parks/haunts handle sensitive ideas and situations is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Comparing mediums like games and film to haunts, another important distinction is context. In the former cases, creators have more artistic freedom to infuse their work with more thoughtful ideas and artistic expression. There’s nothing fun about watching a film like Come and See and Paths of Glory, they are miserable, horrific experiences. But the important part is they don’t need to be fun, they’re trying to say something else. Whether they succeeded or not can be debated, but at least they had the opportunity to say something meaningful with their medium.
Haunts, especially corporate ones like HHN, don’t have that luxury. You need to please rights holders, keep people moving through the house in a conga line, and provide a fun enough experience that nobody’s complaining they didn’t get their money worth at the end of the night. You can’t exactly dig into the inherent politics of a situation since that’s only going to anger people. For most situations, that’s totally fine, not too many people are going to have problems with something like Killer Klowns or Scary Tales or a Bigfoot shows up. Where issues really arise is when dealing with incredibly sensitive topics, something that Universal has tried and failed at handling in a sensitive manner on multiple occasions.
Legacy basically covered some of that in his post about how the event has handled war. It’s why I think you’ll never see a prison house like Hellgate done in a straight way again, policing and the prison system in America is way too sensitive a topic for HHN to ever effectively handle (I know RUN was technically set there, but that was a Running Man rip more than anything). They do continue to use insane asylums and freak shows as settings, however, which infuriate me to no end. I understand how it can be fun for the actors to play “crazy” but all it does is reinforce the stigma of mental illness as violence in this country which in turn is used to explain away the disturbing patterns of things like school shooting which have deeper, more complex roots while making those with mental illnesses’ lives worse.
I know people cite slippery slopes as reasons why HHN shouldn’t ban houses, but I think it’s a reasonable ask of Universal to show discretion in the types of scenarios employs. My barometer is this: if the nuance and context lost converting your idea into a house creates a situation where a decent segment of the population will be alienated, whether due to stereotypes, emotional triggers, etc. it shouldn’t be a house.