We're a town with screenplay jumpstarters on the brain. Thousands of SoCalers can instantly recommend the best time for a fictional first date, the best twist in a crime story, the best ending to a romcom.
And if those screenwriters had to pick a location for a hayride that's taken a turn for the very scary? Well, they'd put it someplace like the Old Zoo, in Griffith Park, which has a name, and look, which lend eerie atmosphere.
Los Angeles Haunted Hayride has lived up to -- or do we we mean died up to? -- its highly inventive Southern California setting for the past half decade, via creepy rides, theatrical shows of the foulest bent, near-total-darkness walk-throughs, and mirthfully macabre actors summoning the giggly screams out of visitors.
And the al fresco fright night is gearing up for its sixth outing, which debuts on Friday, Oct. 3. Three new attractions have been announced for the event, which is doning a rift-from-the-Underworld, seven-deadly-sins-y feel for this year, like a vampire might don his cape.
Spooky.
On tap among the trees of the Old Zoo? An "experience" introducing guests to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Theatre Macabre, an In-Between Dark Maze (you're given a low-voltage lamp and sent into a very shadowy labyrinth), a 40-foot Leviathan, sway polers (an astounding sight), and lots more stuff aiming to tingle spines.
Meaning that the Haunted Hayride is way, way beyond the hayride perimeters, by this point, which any screenplay-smart SoCaler would tell you is exactly what a scary spot needs to do, to up the ante.
Consider the ante up as one of LA's premiere Halloween destinations clip-clops, horseman-style, into the autumn of 2014.
