HHA 2016: Best Addition to an Existing Halloween Haunt

This category exists to recognize Halloween haunts that remain fundamentally the same from year to year (and therefore ineligible to compete again in categories where they have previously won) but which make notable improvements. (Last year’s winner was the Boney Island Yard Haunt for its then-new Enchanted Garden.) This year, only one possible contender stood out for us…

The Winner: Infected at Reign of Terror

The Reign of Terror Haunted House took home the Halloween Haunt Award for Best Professional Walk-Through in 2013. Since then, it has added two sections: the Fun House in 2015 and Infected in 2016. The latter featured zombie mayhem that reached its frantic peak in a narrow corridor that forced visitors into a Scylla-and-Charybdis situation: moving too far to avoid zombies on the left would place one within reach of zombies on the right, and vice versa. The only solution was to stay calm and thread the needle, hopefully without leaning too far one way or the other – not an easy task while ravenous flesh-eaters were lunging through holes in the walls. Though we wish that Infected had been a little more extensive, this one segment, with its animatronic living dead and snarling sound effects, was remarkable enough to earn the award for Best Addition to an Existing Haunt.