The Fleshyard & Perdition Home present Harvest of Horrors

Frosty’s Forest, Chino, CA

This year, thanks to the healthy and safety risks stemming from the Coronavirus pandemic, there aren’t a lot of walk-through mazes around town. On the commercial level, traditional haunts have either called off the season (Knott’s, Universal, Dark Harbor, Six Flags), pivoted to an alternate format (L.A. Haunted Hayride), been cancelled outright (Reign of Terror, seemingly Into the Black), or heavily and expensively invested in a significant amount of building infrastructure and safety protocol in order to jump through hoops to meet strict conditions for opening (The 17th Door). Here and there, though, you’ll find something close to a traditional haunt, and today, we’re going to look at one of the few haunt mazes popping up for this year: the Harvest of Horrors.

This endeavor is actually a collabo effort between two familiar and veteran names: The Fleshyard and Perdition Home. Adam, Brandon, and Trevor have long had a history of working together. Adam originally assisted his friends in their longtime Brea home haunt before branching out on his own with The Fleshyard four years ago. But the band is back together again—at least for this year—as the trio have partnered up to create an open air haunted corn maze in Chino over at Frosty’s Forest.

Ghoulish creatures lurk both inside and in front of the Harvest of Horrors.

The Pumpkin Patch

Located just off the 71 freeway, on the corner of Chino Hills Parkway and Ramona Avenue, Frosty’s Forest Christmas Trees and Pumpkin Patch is one of those seasonal establishments that pops up during the fall to sell future jack-o-lantern’s and stays on to offer evergreens for the Christmas season. Right now, Frosty’s is in its autumn mode, which means it’s a sprawling commercial pumpkin patch with a corn field area that offers some photo ops and exploration. There’s a food area with ample covered, outdoor seating, and plenty of parking. And at least on last night’s visit, the venue seemed pretty darn busy! Though there is a $5 admission just to get in, many visitors were passing through, getting their taste of Halloween.

Frosty’s has a pumpkin patch, of course. Not a literal real one. Just a place with a lot of pumpkins available for purchase and take-home.

There’s also a corn “maze” with assorted photo ops at stops along the route, allowing guests to pose with a unique scenelike a dinosaur, a giant Frankenstein, a jack-o-lantern creature, and even a dragon.

The Maze

The Harvest of Horror maze, however, is tucked away in the back, southeast corner of the property. Go through the main entrance gates, turn left, and follow the trail back to what initially looks like a dead end with some port-a-potties. There isn’t necessarily a lot of clear signage, but the keep walking, and you’ll eventually reach your destination. But first, make sure you purchase a ticket on site at the ticket booths back at the entrance.

On the Friday night of my visit, I found a decent sized line already formed for the maze. This was partially because the queue was being held for the scareactors to go on break, but it was also a sign of the popularity of the maze in a much more bustling location than some of the Fleshyard’s past hosts. Beyond the front of the line, screams could be heard from the last few guests filing through the maze before monster break time. It seemed that most of the guests were enjoying their venture into the dark, desolate fields, and finding the maze sincerely frightening.

Early on into the maze, it’s clear that there are plenty of horrors, and the guests appear the be the ones being harvested!

Eventually, I was able to take a couple of runs through the maze myself, after the attraction had reopened. And a legit haunted corn maze this was! Rather than build a familiar, contained, tight network of walls and flats on a field like a traditional haunt, the Harvest of Horrors was literally a winding path through a cornfield, with assorted scenes popping up here and there carrying a different horror theme—ranging from clowns to murderers to psychotic farmers to depraved doctors and more.

Initially, the maze felt almost overwhelming. Most of the path was intentionally dark, and monsters hid in nooks or staging locations in small scene sets in order to spring out for a fright. Although this was somewhat disappointing visually, it was also an effective strategy. The more non-descript opening few minutes almost lulled guests into a false sense of security, persuading them that the rest of the maze might be similarly uneventful.

Don’t clown around in the maze. And take off or improperly wear your mask either. This guy will call you out for it.

However, once guests made it to the first actual set, with live actors related to the scene of the set, the action started to pick up. Out of the woodwork the monsters came, with great energy and aplomb, bouncing psychotically and yelling a variety of taunts, from traditional “I’m gonna get you” type villaneous threats to even one particular clown monster screaming at guests to wear their face mask.

The path pushing through the circuitous corn maze offered a sense of unease and anticipation. What lurked around the corner, and was it a live monster? And the cadence once guests started making their way from set to set provided a rhythm of short, intense scares, decompression and recovery, and then more scares at the next station. The talent throughout the maze did a great job of displaying a lot of energy and intensity, eliciting numerous frightened responses right back.

Stationing multiple actors together to allow for tandem scares is a smart strategy.

Scenically, if you’ve paid attention to our past Perdition Home haunt and Fleshyard updates, or if you’ve gone through one of their attractions before, then you probably have a good idea of what to expect at the Harvest of Horrors: blood, gore, and graphic scenes all over. And the creators didn’t disappoint. Veteran Perdition Home visitors will recognize plenty of bloody props and figures used throughout the maze, including mutilated bodies and body parts and bloodstained everything galore. On the other side, the layout retains the Fleshyard’s traditional diverse themes of rooms, giving it some variety. The Harvest of Horror does not tie into any previous Fleshyard lore. In fact, there’s not much of a real story through the maze at all, other than maybe a broad collection of nightmares. But it does have some pretty detailed theming and rich sets—a charnel house full of mutilated limbs and heads and organs, a lodge room with evidence of murder-a-plenty, a wrecked school bus showing signs of a clown invasion, and a bloody emergency medical lab gone terribly wrong, an unsettling campsite in the forest. And at each station, at least two or three scareactors lurking to hit guests with jump scares multiple times in a row.

If you enjoy the old school, gory classic Scary Farm-inspired aesthetic that shoots toward simply being graphically violent, then the Harvest of Horrors is a great maze for your to go through. If you’d rather see something more refined, more cinematically lit, and pull in more uses of interactive technology, then Harvest of Horrors might feel a little dated. But the talent and energy level are terrific and terrifying, and I definitely appreciated their efforts complementing the maze layout. A maze could be the most beautiful looking production ever, but it’s nothing without good monsters.

This is probably not the doctor from whom to seek treatment during this pandemic!

While we’re on the subject of the scareactor, I do have to mention an observation that did give me some amount of pause. Although all guests who enter Frosty’s Forest must wear a face cover in accordance to local public health guidelines, it did not seem that all the maze actors were doing the same. I noted several monsters who were make-up only and clearly did not have any face covering (though there were also a few who were indeed masked up as well). It was harder to tell for those wearing monster masks whether or not they were also sporting a surgical or cloth mask under the outer facade, but it didn’t seem like that was the case.

For some, this will be disconcerting, because it represents potential COVID exposure from monsters to guests. Remember that mask-wearing is designed to protect others more than oneself, and it hinges upon the vast majority cooperation so that everyone protects everyone else by wearing a mask, and thus everyone is also safer. Take the masks off an entire segment of people, and there becomes an area of increased risk. So if all guests are wearing masks but not the monsters, then they’re generally protecting the monsters from potentially getting sick, but not themselves—especially considering that a traditional walk-through maze is built upon yells and screams that expel a lot of air and particles. The outdoor setting certainly helps disperse air particles a lot better than inside, and wearing a mask does offer some protective properties to even the wearer by mitigating the viral load exposure, resulting often a less severe case. But all the same, it doesn’t hurt implement health safety best practices. I understand that wearing some sort of filtered mask may not fit within the theme of the maze or role of the character at all, but I still wished that all actors had been made to wear a mask while scaring, to limit their exhalation of body vapor.

The “camping in the woods” scenes had some pretty great looking faux trees, interestingly enough.

All that said, if you’re itching for a more traditional haunt experience and aren’t deterred by the actor mask situation, your destination should be the Harvest of Horrors at Frosty’s Forest. It’s a solid 10-15 minute experience, and the actors make all the difference in upping the intensity and making each group’s traverse through the maze a memorable one. The experience is what you’ve come to expect from these creators, and there’s definitely an audience for that brand of haunted terror!

Harvest of Horror runs Thursdays through Sundays for the rest of this month, operating from 7:00 - 10:00pm on Thursdays and Sundays and till 11:00pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Tickets are purchased on site. There do not appear to be any online ticket buying accommodations. The venue is located at 14861 Ramona Ave, Chino, CA, 91710. Parking is free. Please make sure to properly wear a face covering (including over the nose) if you decide to attend.