Last night my friend Megan and I went to Universal Studios Theme Park (LA) for their Halloween Horror Night.  We had such a blast.  I’m not embarrassed to tell you that I’m hoarse today from screaming.  The park erected five mazes based on characters and situations from Universal horror films including SAW: Game Over, My Bloody Valentine, Halloween: The Life and Times of Michael Myers, Chucky’s Funhouse and the Terror Tram Tour.

The temperature was a cool 60 degrees with an evil wind, so Megan and I stopped off at the City Walk Hot Topic to invest in these matching bat beanies ($18.99 each).  Throughout the night we kept saying it was the best purchase we’d ever made as we got increasingly frozen.  California girls do not like the cold.

The insanity begins moments after you enter the park when pig faced maniacs swarm you with chain saws.  Blood drenched go-go dancers cavort on platforms under a pyrotechnic display, but if you pause to watch you’ll be bait for more freaky characters whose only wish is to make you scream.

My favorite part of the night was the Terror Tram Tour.  It takes you to some of the staged scenery you’d see on the regular Backlot Tram Tour, but you actually get off the tram to interact with horrific scenes.  You walk right up to the front of the Bates Motel set from Psycho!  When two Norman Bates dressed as his mother crowded Megan, she screamed my name for help.  This was a mistake.  Now the Bates began using my name against me, following me down the path and saying it over and over menacingly.

The path also leads you past the War of the Worlds plane crash with the twist that a zombie outbreak has filled the area with seeping, horrific undead.  One part of the path has almost no light, and characters jump out at you from the bushes with no warning.  I was in heaven!

The regular mazes were fun too.  The Halloween maze was a little boring, but we spiced it up when we were made leaders of a group (people are let in in groups) after waiting in line for thirty minutes to get in and we made a wrong turn and exited the maze halfway through.  Everyone followed us right out of the maze and a clump of us stood there trying to figure out what happened.  We then entered a different spot in the wall, skipping at least one room and running into a different group who were trying to figure out where we had come from..  Basically there are a group of people somewhere in LA talking about the dumb blondes who couldn’t follow the maze properly.

Universal also has a special Bill and Ted Halloween show which parodies current popular culture phenomenon such as Twilight and the new Star Trek.  It was a lot of fun and a nice break from the screaming.

Universal Horror Nights was a horror junkie’s dream come true.

Last week I spent an afternoon in a local cemetery playing Wake the Dead.  If you’ve seen the 1991 film The Addams Family, you might remember the game Wake the Dead from the final minutes of the movie.  As part of their Halloween festivities, the Addams form teams who try to unearth the most deceased family members from the family graveyard.

I’ve adopted this game for one player, I simply try to beat my personal best score.  While collecting four skulls, a femur bone, nineteen assorted fingers and toes and a spinal column, my friend chronicled my escapades in a series of photographs.  Come to my Myspace page and click on the Wake the Dead album to see the others.

Thank you John Oligny for going along with the madness!