The NJ Halloween Horror Company is located at the Sussex County Fairgrounds in Augusta, NJ. It's a couple hours north of my house, but a few of my North Jersey friends had seen ads for it and were quite excited about it, so I made the trip up to check it out with them. We arrived at 7:25 (it was set to open at 7:30) and were greeted by an insanely long line of cars that spanned from deep inside the fairgrounds, down a long driveway, and spilled out onto the adjoining street. "It must be awesome," I thought, "since there are so many people here already!" I had the next 30-40 minutes to think about how awesome it would be, because we spent that whole time sitting in the car as the line moved incredibly slowly - generally about one car length every 60 to 90 seconds. We later learned that the speed (or lack thereof) of the line was caused by an asinine policy of collecting entrance fees from the cars before they parked. So instead of letting people park and then walk up to pay cashiers at a window, there was just one person out there taking money and giving change to cars before they could even park. After finally parking, we were greeted by another long line. It took at least another half hour of standing outside before we even got into the building. Before the haunted house walkthrough portion, the line took us by a collection of dozens of statues and life-size replicas of famous characters from horror films. If I were taking a brisk walk past these replicas, I may have thought that they were pretty decent. But since we spent at least another 45 minutes in line going past these statues, we had quite a few minutes to stare at each one individually and it became painfully apparent that they were terrible. A lot of them looked like whoever was sculpting them was hardly even trying. The Michael Jackson Thriller statue was fat and blue, Mulder (from the X-Files) looked like Dustin Hoffman in a wind tunnel, Stephen King's Carrie had giant meaty hands and no legs, and Hellraiser looked like a second grade class project. Without exception, all of the statues were laughably awful. Finally (at around 9:20) we were let into the "haunted house" attraction. I'm currently trying to decide where and how to begin describing it, but I'm just getting angry as I think about it. Unquestionably, this was the worst haunted house I have ever had the misfortune of visiting. After nearly two hours of waiting, we were rewarded with a walkthrough that lasted four minutes at best. It was incredibly bright inside, so there was no way for the sparse haunters to successfully hide from you and have any remote chance at surprising you. And the brightness only made the crappiness of the props even more obvious. They were of the same quality as the horde of horrendous statues. As we entered the last room on the short journey, I had a tremendous feeling of remorse, having just wasted a large amount of time and $12. And then something magical happened that made my night almost worthwhile. There was a sheet-covered chain link fence to our left with a guy clearly standing behind it (the sheet didnt even reach the ground, so his sneakers were kinda obvious). As we walked past it, he sprinted out from behind the fence wielding a large, plastic knife and then tried to make a tight right turn to come towards us. But physics had another idea. His speed, his turning angle, and the lack of traction on the smooth cement floor resulted in him falling directly onto his face at full speed. My three friends and I all simultaneously pointed at him and burst into uncontrollable, uproarious laughter. After a moment, we tried (unsuccessfully) to compose ourselves and exited through the door to our right. The young man picked himself up off the floor and then chased after us, yelling. He came all the way outside trying to redeem himself in some way, but we hardly noticed because we were still laughing so hard. A group of kids who had just left the haunted house asked us what was so funny, and we did our best to recount the haunter's tale of face-smashing woe. "At least you guys got your money's worth," one of them told us. We assured them that we had not. After our whole group was through the house and caught up together outside, we realized we'd blown over two hours in that hellhole already and decided to cut our losses and skip out on the hayride and get the heck home. In short, DO NOT EVER GO TO THIS THING. Ugh.
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