Coulro's Circus Mayhem: 2019 Review
Coulro’s Circus Mayhem, Pacoima, CA
Greetings, folks! This is no April Fools; we have another retro-haunt review today! This piece was originally going to go up yesterday, because many of my Halloween enthusiast friends online have been posting about making March 31st “Coronaween” since everyone’s stuck at home, and who knows, Halloween might actually become a casualty of COVID-19 if people don’t take the self isolation orders seriously, and the pandemic spreads even farther and more devastatingly. But unfortunately, I ran out of time, so it becomes a non-prankstery April update instead.
It’s okay. April marks halfway to October anyway.
By my estimation, this is our last review of an actual haunted maze for the 2019 season (excluding catch-up I intend to do for the mazes and scare zone in-depth reviews of Dark Harbor last year). I do have additional retro-haunt updates to come, but they’ll be batches of yard haunts similar to what we did for the Santa Clarita Valley and Corona last year, grouping the display haunts together into one update instead of featuring the rest individually.
Welcome' to Coulro’s Circus Mayhem! it’s a short and completely home-built maze in the back of a family liquor store.
Today’s attraction is not the longest or most elaborate or most sophisticated home haunt. In fact, it technically isn’t a “home” haunt at all. Coulro’s Circus Mayhem is a non-commercial haunted house constructed off the alley behind a mini-mart in Pacoima, CA. Yes, the Pacoima that we jokingly use as a generic location for ourselves whenever we want to name a random and funny-sounding city. That Pacoima. Located on Van Nuys Blvd. just southwest of Tamarack Ave., the haunt is accessed off an alleyway leading to a nook behind the La Reyna Mini Store.
The night I arrived, on Halloween Eve, the weather was already blustery and a little ominous. This made for the approach to the maze an enhanced sort of uneasy, as the windy evening created a dramatic atmosphere in and of itself. It even took me a little while to find the haunt initially, because I was looking for a house. Instead, after eventually making my way around the corner from where I had parked my car on Tamarack, I found a simple set of blackout walls crowned by a menacing giant clown head, marking the entrance to the maze.
Peekaboo!! Clowns see you!
The second thing I noticed after taking in the scene was a group of school-aged children clustered together, just hanging out. I asked one of them for a person from the maze who was in charge, for me to speak to, and it wasn’t until I was greeted by a maniacal carnival ringleader that I realized, “These are the people from the maze!” Their ringleader, Francisco, was the oldest of the crew. And while he looked to be college-aged (actually mid-20s), the rest looked to be in high school or elementary school!
I’ve never been against kids working a Halloween maze. If people want to make it a family affair, all the more power to them! And we’ve certainly covered a decent share of young haunters doing some great things despite still being in high school. But it’s still relatively rare to see a haunt comprised of almost entirely school-aged children. And as Francisco explained it, they were all motivated by a common enjoyment of Halloween and haunted attractions and wanted to try creating their own. In the absence of a home they could work on and transform over a couple of months, they were able to use the back of a family commercial property to install their craft instead!
The maze itself was relatively short and featured a mix of built walls and draped dividers (like a circus tent labyrinth), but it had some creative touches too. Hidden scare compartments, low-hung clothing forcing guest to duck under obstacles, and an apparent dead end were some of the nifty techniques employed to add some creativity to the experience. And though the ambiance itself was less developed than some of the other mazes of the season, there was a clear passion and love for crafting even a relatively simple haunted house maze for anyone passing by to enjoy. It’s haunts like this that demonstrate a pure appreciation for the holiday.
You can’t have psycho clowns without chainsaws. It’s just against the law.
Coulro’s Circus Mayhem is located at 13406 Van Nuys Blvd, Pacoima, CA 91331 and was open this past October 30th through November 1st. Though definitely one of the most DIY of the amateur haunts we visited last year, it holds its own charm for the passion that these young haunters poured into it and the shear self-enterprise of it all. Kudos, guys!
Architect. Photographer. Disney nerd. Haunt enthusiast. Travel bugged. Concert fiend. Asian.
