BCR: A Place to Scare presents Cursed Creek: 2021 Review

BCR: A Place to Grow, Burbank, CA

One of the many things I love about the haunt community is that while the content of creations often focuses on the violent or gory or terrifying or morbid, the heart and the spirit of the vast majority of haunters out there is centered on a place of love and giving. For most, this takes the form of giving back to their local neighborhood in the form of Halloween displays or home haunts that their friends and acquaintances living nearby can enjoy. Sometimes, especially at home haunts that have grown more popular, the creators will partner with a local charity to raise funds for a great cause. And even on the commercial level, some pro haunts will allocate some or most of their profits towards community-oriented causes, as is the case with examples like Reign of Terror and Hauntington Beach Manor.

Our review today visits another such haunted attraction--one that we've not been able to make over the past two years that it's operated until last weekend. During the normal year, BCR: A Place to Grow is a Burbank-based community organization that supports children and adults with developmental or intellectual disabilities. Founded in 1963, Bridging Community Resources serves individuals with autism, cerebral palsy, down syndrome, epilepsy, brain disorders, cognitive disorders and other disabilities, and helps with training and care that can allow them to lead independent lives or gain skills to help with supporting a livelihood for themselves.

Two years ago, the organization started running a haunted attraction at their headquarter facility to help raise funds to support the program's services year-round. Cutely titled "A Place to Scare," their first production featured a vampire theme, with a blood bank, vampire ball, and then a set of eerie catacombs. Last year, with the Coronavirus pandemic, A Place to Scare switched to a drive-thru event called Cursed Creek, featuring a witches theme. And by all accounts, it was pretty great--a great execution of a challenging format to conduct a haunt.

This year, A Place to Scare returns its Cursed Creek production on a pedestrian mode of experience, bundling a collection of haunting and supernatural scenes related to witchcraft and covens and shamanism. Located at the BCR facilities in Downtown Burbank, the maze literally spans the parking lot area that surrounds the BCR building, building up a series of flats that flank a path and filling the resulting outdoor rooms with sumptuous decor and furnishings to bring the different stories of Cursed Creek to life.

Having not visited this attraction before, we first arrived expecting a routine haunted walkthrough with the typical assortment of monsters popping out for jump scares behind corners and ghoulishly wicked theming and all the makings of a standard maze. As it turns out, A Place to Scare is actually a hybrid haunted maze and haunted theater experience, blending the space to space nature of a traditional haunt with theatrical show scenes and actors bringing fabled stories to life. This meant that rather than being a compact experience lasting a few minutes, the journey into Cursed Creek was closer to 10-15 minutes, with each scene taking a few minutes to play out. This brand of haunted theater is not exactly interactive like Delusion or Creep, and it's not truly immersive because despite the opulence and detail of the sets, it's always obvious that one is walking through a parking lot environment. But it does provide a more investing and enveloping level of haunt entertainment that proved to be quite delightful.

Our first scene brought us into the world of voodoo as we encountered a voodoo priestess who set the spooky ambiance of the crisp evening in place and framed the eerie mood. Calling to an guest, she would ask for a wish and concoct a potion to bring it to fruition. Mixing in a bit of illusion-making and sleight of hand, the priestess seemed to weave actual magic before the audience's very eyes, but her extra-sensory perception also seemed to warn of an impending doom.

A cultish environment marks the second scene of Cursed Creek.

We moved into a cold, dark scene with what appeared to be cultish environment and twisted, blacklit scrawls and symbology across the walls. Here, a fiend greeted us with one of the few overt (and soft) scares of the event before eyeing us as we shuffled past. Moving quickly, we came upon a graveyard scene, complete with a gothic crypt. An unseen voice began a narration on a woman who was falsely accused of being a witch and executed by a paranoid community eager to embrace a supernatural fear-fueled brand of vigilante justice. Of course, in her death, she was brought back to wreck her vengeance. But the actual hag that appeared wasn't necessarily fearsome. Instead, she was almost playfully caricatured, leaning into her stereotype as a creaky old woman before unleashing dead spirits to wrought her sinister work.

A creepy graveyard is home to a hag persecuted by her community.

Our escort to the next scene brought us to my personal favorite part of Cursed Creek, the encounter with the Slavic mythological legend, the Baba Yaga. Known in Slavic folklore as a wretch hag who lives in the mysterious woods in a house distinctly standing on giant chicken legs, the Baba Yaga was a scene featured in last year's drive-thru Cursed Creek, but was kept low to the ground at the time. This year, determined to bring the stories to justice, the creators actually elevated the house, supporting it on a pair of distinctly fowlish legs. A young girl girl suddenly appeared out of the woods, looking for her mother, only to be encountered by the Baba Yaga and taken to be held for a cruel fate. Her echoing screams disappearing into the curious abode, the girl's fate was illustrated through a silhouette of the Baba Yaga chopping up dinner at the kitchen window. Suddenly, a run-in with the Big Bad Wolf doesn't sound half as bad!

The famous Baba Yaga house is done to full justice this year.

Cursed Creek concluded with a spiritual walk influenced by Native American shamanism. Dark, moody, and ethereal, The Familiars brought more of an introspective activity, meandering through a foggy plane of supernatural consciousness. A meeting with the raven helped inform one's nature, and this finale capped off a thespian-filled haunt with a deep and thoughtful fade rather than a climactic bang.

The deviation from the overt sensory clashes that most mazes feature was intentional at A Place to Scare. The team was mindful to craft an experience that their clientele could safely and comfortably enjoy. As many of these individuals are on the spectrum (a facet of their service acknowledged in the blue pumpkins cast into a pair of marker towers at the entrance into the haunt), this mean avoiding common haunted house effects such as strobes, loud banging noises, and even providing glow sticks to allow actors to tone down or smooth out their scares for audience members who might not be able to react well to it.

The Familiars takes on a more understated, spiritual vibe.

The various scenes within Cursed Creek were also mostly played by the writers who developed said scenes. Joseline Lovett shined brightly as the voodoo priestess. Denys Flores, Victor Lalo Barrios, and Dulce Moreno brought a quiet creepiness to the cult scene. Joshua Cristobal Lumicao crafted a fantasically entertaining graveyard scene. Rome Fiore's Baba Yaga was fanciful, original (in terms of themes seen at the haunts we've attended), and creatively executed. And The Familiars was developed by BCR Community Integrated Specialist and A Place to Scare producer and creative director Michael Escamilla.

For Michael, this fall event has been the culmination of a lifetime of Halloween love that began when he and his mom watched horror movies during his childhood and grew through high school trips to Knott's Scary Farm with his brother. Having worked at BCR for eight years and being distinctly aware of the Halloween hotbed that is Burbank, Escamilla sought for years to combine his two passions of community service and spooky fall activities into an event that could bring greater recognition for BCR as an organization. Thankfully, he was able to render those aspirations into reality in 2019, and A Place to Scream has been able to grow since.

The Baba Yaga beckons, but don’t follow her!

We came into A Place to Scare's Cursed Creek with no expectations and intentional ignorance of what the event was really like in order to experience it as objectively as possible. We left delighted to have discovered a unique and wonderfully fun and considerate haunted attraction that helps a fantastic cause and supports a disadvantaged populace to gain better footholds to help them with success in life. This really does strike at the heart of Halloween--to enjoy the season in a communal setting and to bring joy through a controlled experience of frights.

Cursed Creek may be produced by A Place to Scare, but it really demonstrates that it's A Place to Care. And we are grateful to have been able to visit and support such a worthwhile endeavor.

A Place to Scare is located at 230 E. Amherst Drive, Burbank, CA 91504 and runs three more nights, this Saturday and Sunday, October 23rd and 24th, and next Saturday, October 30th, from 6:00 - 10:00 p each night. Tickets start at $10 plus online fees (or can be purchased on site), and all proceeds go directly to Bridging Community Resources. Please be aware that the line will be cut short early to ensure that operations does not extend too far past 10pm. Parking is on the street and free. And given the wonderful work that BCR is doing for intellectually and developmentally disabled people, additional donations are, of course, highly welcome!