Graveyard Games - This one I'm reasonably confident in, at least as far as my personal enjoyment goes. Ghosts get me in a way that most monsters don't, and generic humanoid ghosts in an unlit crypt with maybe a surprise or two thrown in as they catch the teenagers sounds like a great, simple, back-to-basics kind of house. All this house needs to do is be dark and spooky and have scare actors on-point with the triggers and timing, and I think I'll have a reasonably great time. No muss, no fuss, just a lot of jumpscares. I don't expect it to win house of the year or tell a great story (unless you use the Facebook chat stuff, I guess) but I expect it to be good at cutting to the chase and making me jump.
Yeti: Terror of the Yukon - The Swamp Yeti was one of the best scares in the fantastic Slaughter Sinema, and it was a natural choice to sort of break off into its own thing. I'm a little sad we're ditching the 80's b-movie cheese and presenting it as a straight horror maze, but HHN always does really well in making "burly men" threats seem credible by taking 6+ foot tall actors and putting them in platform shoes to make them feel even larger (last year's Swamp Yetis, AVP's Predators, and Freddy Vs Jason's Jasons all vouch for the creative team's ability to make "large guy charging at you" scary). That said, I don't know how much of the premise was what made the Swamp Yeti work versus the design of that particular scare itself, and a lot of how truly great this house ends up is going to depend on how they can build a setting and a world where a giant snow monster is hunting us rather than just repeating "big guy in a fursuit jumps out" scares over and over. Still, even if that's all it brings to the table, I think it's sure to be an okay ride.
House of 1,000 Corpses - Of all the film franchises we have this year, this is probably the one best suited to be turned into an HHN house (and not just because it's already been one in Hollywood). If there's one thing HHN loves it's to adapt popular iconography as literally as possible, and that movie is loaded to the gills with it - whether it's Captain Spaulding's Murder Ride, Tiny busting in on the robbers, the various torture and creep out scenes in the house, or the crypt full of mutant experiments and Dr. Satan himself, it's basically a collection of easily adapted, immediately recognizable, and often iconic horror beats. I don't know if it's going to be the _best_ house this year, but it's one that I feel confident saying will at least be _fine_. The only real knock against it right now is the fact that the rumors place it in the tent behind Men in Black, and that location has sort of notoriously difficult to squeeze good jump scares out of.
Universal Classic Monsters - I really don't know what to expect from this. It's an original house based around the loose idea of a more spooky redesign of the Universal Classic Monsters. We're not getting the Hollywood version and its associated Slash music (as far as I know) which means I don't think we can use that as the basis for what they're doing on this coast. I expect good things (the last time we had a Universal Classic Monsters house, Universal's House of Horrors, the black-and-white themed house was pretty great). But also I have no other information to draw any conclusion on than "There's going to be a house featuring Wolf-Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, etc." I have confidence these monsters will do well (and I expect this is where we'll see the American Werewolf puppets this year, and I love them), but I don't know anything else beyond that.
Stranger Things - I really expected the first house to be one of those "pretty to look at, not particularly scary" houses. To my surprise, though, they leaned hard in on being a straight horror house, and it mostly worked. There were one or two bits that never landed the way they wanted (the lab techs never seemed to get anyone, and it felt like a house design issue) but none of them involved the Demogorgon, which proved actually pretty frightening. Assuming they repeat that horror-focused approach for seasons 2 and 3, I think we could get a lot of scary bits here (especially all the Season 2 demodog stuff and some of Season 3's body horror).
Us - Here we're really starting to get to the houses that could go either way. On one hand, it's a movie that is very much up HHN's ally - lots of iconography, varied yet enclosed settings can be comparatively cheaply mocked up (tethered underground, mirror maze, generic California house, a slightly nicer house, Lost Boys pier at night), and human antagonists that don't require expensive special effects to realize. The house of mirrors bit alone could be worth entry, and if they manage to have that score playing while you're hunted in the dark underground... it could be really memorable. On the other hand the house risks the Halloween 2 problem of throwing more or less the same scare at you over and over. Also, the film's most creepy and iconic image - the Hands Across the America stuff - is both not a jump scare and also expensive to reproduce (as unsettling as it is, they're not going to pay 4+ people to stand in that stance for shifts, and they don't tend to do a ton of mannequin work in that vein for some reason). So if it pops up at all it's gonna be in the "family holds hands, then scatters at you" bit, which is cool, but undersells that lingering image.
Depths of Fear - Another "totally could go either way" house. It sounds like if any of the original houses are comedy houses this year (or at least have a goofy, b-movie sentiment to them) it will be this one. Neon green goo eggs infecting/murdering/transforming scientists deep under the sea sounds like the opportunity for some dank dark corners (cool!), body horror (cool!), and maybe even some deep sea creature inspired makeup/puppets (very cool!). I can picture failing pressurization doors as alarms sound, and power flickering while water (or what you hope is water!) drips from above, and creepy scenes where the mouthbrooders stare back from the dark as a distraction from the real scare that's right next to you. So if the stars align it may be surprisingly great, campy fun. On the other hand, it might be "drippy walk through the halls of the amazing green-zit people - now with extra squirty effects!" At which point... Sure, okay. Whatever.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space - This is almost certainly going to be a comedy house (I don't see how it could ever have been anything but). So it's not the lack of scares that concerns me, per se. Mostly I just want it to lean hard into the comedy and absurdism. The entire chase through the ship captures what you could do with a house - an almost cartoon-like space that made no sense and that they seemingly control, being at once funny but also vaguely offputting/threatening. I want them to capture that - the weird surreal cartoon logic that makes Killer Klowns hilarious. I'd really want something closer in tone to Penn & Teller's Nuked Vegas or Asylum in Wonderland. Which also brings me to the conclusion (and this will be wildly unpopular, I'm sure) that this probably should have been a 3D house. Still, if it manages to be a goofy fun comedy house with the occasional light jump scare, I'm game. Really, I just want to laugh or jump, and I just can't shake the nagging feeling that this house is going to be confused about how to do either.
Nightingales: Blood Pit - I am still confused by this. The whole joke with Nightingales was that it was something of a pun on Florence Nightingale - like her, they were nurses, but _unlike_ her, they were secretly monsters that fed off of the dead and dying and became fat and happy during World War 2 as so many injured people rolled in. It played off of fears of war and of doctors and the crudity of old school field triage. But by setting it in the gladiator pit that pun kind of disappears? There are no nurses caring for the wounded in the gladiator pit. The gladiator pit was full of slaves sent to fight and/or die. So the pun is gone. Which leaves us with monsters robbed of their whole gimmicky existence. Now they're just... I guess like vultures, but for human mass deaths? Do they even have/need a disguise anymore? It sounds like a gore-heavy house that doesn't know what to do with its monsters, having robbed them of the only context in which they made sense. I'm willing to be surprised (and maybe I will be!) but this is just so incoherent an idea that I have low expectations for it.
Ghostbusters - I still don't see how this house works given what we've seen in leaks. When they made the announcement, in my head I pictured a 3D or neon black light house - something that was a little bit comedic and playful and let them get away with costumed actors as "ghosts." But that leaked Slimer picture more or less confirms that they are going for a *very* literal recreation of the original film. That represents.... problems. Much like The Shining, the film is set largely in well lit hallways. And worse than The Shining, the monsters are almost all things that necessitate special effects - transparent inhuman looking ghosts, devil dog puppets, giant Stay Puffed Marshmallow Men. The only thing that's basically "person jumping out at you" is either Gozer or maybe Tully jumping out of his apartment thinking Dana's on her way home. The rest (to fit with the aesthetic they're going for) largely have to be Pepper's Ghosts, puppets, giant unmoving setpieces, or some other tricky, hard to pull off technical wizardry. My expectation here is that this falls in with The Shining - a bunch of cool set pieces that let you feel like you're walking through the movie and a decent tribute to fans, but not quite functional as an actual haunted house. That, or the house named "Ghostbusters" is going to be awful light on the ghosts.