I kind of mentioned this in the Hellbilly Deluxe scarezone thread, but it really feels like there's a tension this year between the old HHN and the new. Or maybe that that tension's been there for a while, but it's kind of coming to a head. And bear in mind I'm not really advocating for either/or! It's just something I've observed that's happening.
Like, old school HHN had a grime and sleaze about it. It was more squarely aimed at 20-somethings who would never go to MNSSHP: It emphasized sexy half-naked dancing of both sexes at Bill and Ted's, and it sloshed booze around left and right via jell-o shot nurses and full bars spread throughout the park, it embraced blaring heavy metal and later offputting dubstep, it had haunts full of dead bodies and squirty gore, it licensed z-grade slasher films full of torture scenes to line its houses. Heck, as recently as last year they had Chucky out making fun of guests via an insult comic.
But as time's gone on it feels like HHN has moved away from that. Again, this isn't a judgement call (I'm sure people will argue for the old or new ways just as fervently) but more just an observation. Increasingly it seems that HHN has aimed at a sort of PG-13 family friendly approach to horror. It's cleaner, with bigger and more accessible IPs and less exploitation-y baggage. It's less "sexy dancers and heavy metal" than "saleable monster iconography and electronica." Less "mosh pit" and more "Halloween party." Jell-o shot nurses got replaced with popcorn nurses, then disappeared altogether. Sexy dancing in Bill & Ted gave way to AOV (which is also amazingly awesome, but again, different). Blood-soaked slogans like "True Fear Comes from Within" and "All Jack'd Up" gave way to clean retro-styled slogans like "Maximum Screamage."
And again, there's pros and cons to this! A more family friendly, accessible event is *not* automatically a bad thing! Getting kids hooked on horror is good, having the event be a big success so they can dump more money into production values is good, casting a wider net so we get food options and specialty beverages and merch is all good! Making the event a big tent event is not automatically bad! But it is a _different_ thing than longtime fans are probably expecting because a big tent means shaving off a lot of the offputting b-horror edges some fans expect. And this year you can feel that divide *really* sharply, with various IP houses (namely Stranger Things, Ghostbusters, and Killer Klowns) getting the primary marketing and merch push and having a very different tone than the grimier bits of the event. You can see it in people complaining that Strange Things or Ghostbusters are too not-scary, while other people insist a certain scene in Depths of Fear goes too far. Hellbilly Deluxe and HOTC start to stick out really awkwardly when other IP holders refuse to be associated with them. There is, in short, a friction between the new style and old style of stuff this year, and it's super apparent.
What I'm interested in, more than anything, is how Universal decides to solve this identity crisis - is HHN going to be the PG-13 Halloween party it's slowly becoming, or are they going to run out of accessible IPs to grab a big tent audience with and retreat to a more exploitation/grindhouse/horror focused patronage over time? Are they embracing a moment of cultural tension where horror has entered the pop culture lexicon (however temporarily) or is this a fundamentally new direction for the event?
Regardless, I don't think it's a "scary/not scary" divide. Both Stranger Things and Ghostbusters as houses have plenty of jumps. The question is really the tone of the house and the content surrounding the jumps - is it enough for a house to be scary by having a Ghostbuster jump out and say a line from a movie, or do you need a dark room coated in gore and blood that has a mosnter come out and scream to make that same jump "scary?"