HHN Anniversary Years - What worked and what didn't?

[Tobias]

You really have to go to HHN to get a true understanding of which years “feel” right and which ones don’t.

This is very true, I say this as someone who previously lurked and could only watch videos, to now having attended the event for the past three years. No number of videos can truly capture the event, you have to see it in person to get the best sense of things. As an example of my own past stupidity, I infamously commented on the forums that a particular house looked rather repetitive and bland from a video I saw. The house in question? Scarecrow: The Reaping. Yeah, I was completely dead-wrong about that one.

Now that I've attended the event for three years straight, I really haven't seen any video that really captures a house. The closest was ThemeparkHD's video of Graveyard Games since they came close to capturing every scare and effect in that house, but even then, it still didn't capture the sheer intensity I had with every walkthrough of that house.

The vast majority of newcomers don’t care about the past. Universal isn’t going to spend a ton of energy on the past when they can just placate the minority who cares.

To use another haunt as an example, Knott's Scary Farm did an anniversary house for their 25th year in 1997, which featured scenes from mazes of years past. And what they discovered was certain scenes/themes didn't work out for the current audience as they did back then. And to this day they've never done another anniversary house.

I bring this up since for as much that some folks want the glory of a past house, you're never going to get it. Things change; set quality, scares and most importantly, casts. It's never going to be the same the next year, and AWIL is probably the shining example of that. When it finally came out, AWIL was a GOAT. But when it returned pretty much the same house a few years later, it was on the lower end of the spectrum. Didn't have the same cast, didn't have the same punch and the previous version was still fresh enough in people's minds that they knew it just wasn't the same.

The best you can do is give people a new house, a new angle etc. If you try replicating a house from the past as is, it's just not going to work. You really can't show people what made it good in the first place since ultimately this is all lightning in a bottle.

 

[shiekra38]

Back in my day they used to have Icons and bang on trash cans

Now ya'll have your fancy pedals and sound effects

 

[pumpkinbot343]

There was originally a point I was going to make, but then I forgot what it was; so here’s the shows that had for every anniversary year just for heck of it.