We’ll admit it: Our tolerance for Halloween horror isn’t very high. But the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride manages to strike a balance between slickly-produced scares and engaging ambience. Tucked into the creepy cages and dry hills of Griffith Park’s Old Zoo, it’s one of the few places in LA that actually feels like Halloween; the attraction ditches a scattershot collection of mazes for a fully-realized, twisted world. You can thank founder Melissa Carbone and her team at Ten Thirty One Productions for that; they spend nearly the entire year researching, designing and fabricating each installment of the hayride. This year’s theme, “Echoes from the Rift,” converts the park into a temporary purgatory crawling with apocalyptic demons and mythological creatures. In proper LA fashion, 150 professional actors fill the roles, pulled from a pool of nearly 1,100 who auditioned.
Carbone appeared on Shark Tank in 2013 and walked away with a $2 million investment, enough to turn the company’s Great Horror Campout into a touring production and to greenlight a satellite hayride in New York (Atlanta, Orlando and San Francisco are being tossed around as well). But even with talks of expansion, the team behind the hayride is firmly focused on its roots here in LA.
Time Out Los Angeles: Griffith Park and the Old Zoo is a perfect setting—even the dark drive up to the parking lot feels creepy. How essential is the location to the hayride?
Melissa Carbone: In every attraction that we do, we look for an environment that already has a creepy and haunting demeanor in its own right. We live in a city where rarely, if ever, do people go into the woods, and they certainly don't do it at night.
Time Out Los Angeles: Could you ever see yourself outgrowing Griffith?
MC: That’d be an awesome problem to have. We're almost getting there as it is. Typically haunted attractions will level out at about a certain number; we just don't know where that number's going to be for us. But we love Griffith. I think we're going to try to stay there for as long as we can, if not forever.
Time Out Los Angeles: What do you think keeps people coming back each year?
MC: We try to bring new ways of touching patrons—not literally touching them, but engaging with them. People will get off the ride and they'll have a creepy crayon drawing from a burnt orphan or they'll be covered with white foam because they were annihilated by a demon Santa Claus. Every year it's a challenge to outdo the year before—and I think this year we have done it tenfold. It's insane.
Time Out Los Angeles: Outdoing yourself doesn't necessarily mean making it scarier each year, right?
MC: We want it to be startling and haunting. The haunting factor is big. It's also the beauty of it. I think that our hayride trail is gorgeous—it's scary and it's horror but it's also beautiful. We want all of our creatures to look just right, and from a quality standpoint, we need to feng-shui the trail just so.
Time Out Los Angeles: On the one hand, this is a scary, gory attraction, but on the other hand it has a public commitment to the park system and being fur free—that seems very LA.
MC: It is very LA, but it shouldn't be. It should be very everywhere. Our objective is to have as small a footprint as possible. We have a zero waste goal, and we want to get to a point where the hayride is basically running on sunshine. The first thing that we did a long time ago was implemented a very, very extensive recycling program. We've always used recycled sets—nothing that you see at the hayride is something that we just pulled from lumber off of a shelf at a Home Depot and started building. When we have to use fuels, we use biodiesel. All of our production vehicles are electric or Priuses. A few years ago we went plastic free, so when you go to the concession stand all of our cutlery is made out of starch. We also serve plant-based food in the grub shack. We don't allow our cast and crew to carry things in plastic bags—we don't want plastic tumbleweeds. Typically Halloween is an environmental nightmare, and we don't want to subscribe to that.
Time Out Los Angeles: What should people be most excited about in this year’s hayride?
MC: We've created these larger than life apocalyptic creatures this year. People's perception of scale is going to be dizzy. We have a 40-foot hydra playing out a scene of eternal punishment. We have things of that proportion throughout the entire trail, like a Cerberus with three giant heads, and an epic creature in our finale scene as well. And this is the first time in the history of the hayride we've changed the finale. We decided it was time to put the clowns on the shelf and see if we're better than a one-trick-pony on that finale.
Time Out Los Angeles: The old finale, with the clowns and the sheet over the hayride, sets the bar pretty high.
MC: I know, don't stress me out. It's always the battle to outdo ourselves, and man, that finale scene is hard to outdo. People love it.
The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride opens this Friday Oct. 3 and runs Thu–Sun (plus the Wednesday before Halloween) until Oct. 31.