HorrorWorld TCM: 2021 Review
Haven City Market, Rancho Cucamonga, CA
Ask any haunter, and they’ll tell you that the business of scaring is pretty challenging stuff. This is not an endeavor one starts for the purpose of making money. It’s a project of passion, and if it happens to be profitable, all the better.
For those who make the transition from home or amateur haunting to commercial operations, the challenges are even greater. Aside from an actual dependence for at least some amount of financial livelihood, there are numerous standards and regulations to deal with, not to mention location scouting, marketing, and staffing, and customer service.
Larry and Cheryl Bones and the folks at Boneyard FX know the pain of these tribulations all too well. Long renown in the haunt world for their incredible masks, prosthetics, and make-up, supplying the likes of major names like Halloween Horror Nights, the Bones’es took their first foray into their own haunt endeavors back in 2017, with Into the Black. And they very quickly discovered how tenuous commercial haunt operations can be when an unexpected inspections issue cost them their opening weekend. The following year brought the creation of HorrorWorld and a partnership with Adam LeBlanc and The Fleshyard. There were less jurisdictional issues there, but the Puente Hills Mall location brought its own foot traffic struggles. 2019 saw the project go dark, but Larry and his team had a big 2020 planned when the Coronavirus hit. Undeterred, they pivoted by working with their new space at the Haven City Market to ensure an efficient, well-filtered conditioned space with social distancing and masking protocols, sanitizing stations, and an online reservation system. Nevertheless, shortly before they were scheduled to open last year, their opening was postponed by city officials… a postponement that became indefinite and eventually wiped out their entire season.
So suffice to say, it’s been a pretty challenging past few years for Boneyard FX, which is what makes the debut of their latest haunt such a satisfying triumph for the team. With seemingly the bureaucratic universe and some poor fortune against them. Larry and Cheryl and their team have managed to persevere to finally open their haunt at the Haven City Market in Rancho Cucamonga, premiering HorrorWorld TCM last night!
Haven City Market offers a great selection of gourmet quick serve restaurants in an expansive indoor setting.
The Haven City Market offers several great advantages as a location for this latest iteration of HorrorWorld. In addition to be pretty close to the Boneyard FX studios in nearby Glendora, the venue itself is a fantastic modern food court with a variety of gourmet quick serve dining options that appeal to today’s Instagram-centric foodie generation. The place has a feel of an Anaheim Packing House, but set over one, more sprawling floor instead of two. It’s the type of place that sees regular foot traffic and passers-by, giving HorrorWorld a pretty optimal anchor spot to attract those who might be interested in dinner and a scare.
The haunt itself can best be described as a variation of the Into the Black maze that is most certainly not claiming to represent the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any associated intellectual property (their words, not mine). They are definitely not featuring any Leatherface monsters in their maze either. Instead, HorrorWorld TCM (initially 137% coincidental) features a boy named Bubba who develops a taste for human flesh—both for consumption and for wardrobe. In addition, Bubba is joined by Grandpa, looking like Mr. Six enjoying his retirement years by plumping up on account of his cannibalism. Together, they weave a trail of carnage, mutilation, and suffering throughout a sprawling property, taking guests along for an intense, visceral ride.
Bubba loves faces. He’s got a whole selection of them!
Lets be clear, HorrorWorld TCM is a single, extensive sojourn of a haunted house that takes a solid ten minutes to go through. The maze ebbs and flows, alternating quiet, dark, drab hallways with sudden moments of jump scares and cacophony and torment and evisceration. In the tradition of the Into the Black haunts, the hiding places are varied and often creatively placed to catch guests off guard and looking at a completely different direction. These ambush scares create a building sense of pursuit and dread that mimicks what Bubba and Grandpa’s victims must feel.
And there are a fair amount of victims here. The maze takes on a Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights quality by creating cinematographic scenes with doomed souls being picked off or captured or tortured (there’s even at least one water effect in one of the rooms, though it’s not too egregious), plunging guests into their very own horror story. Sometimes, the victims serve as distractions, while other times, they are the subject of a scene that plays out in front of guests’ eyes. But it all serves to bring this totally-not-a-Texas Chainsaw Massacre to life.
One of the doomed victims in HorrorWorld TCM, destined for a horrific fate.
As with any opening night experience, HorrorWorld TCM was not without a few issues. The sound seemed to be inconsistent (not sure if intentionally so), being silent for the first part of the maze before suddenly manifesting in parts of the second half. Some of the scareactors’ chainsaws didn’t seem to quite work, leaving them to literally call a audible and sort of a cappella the slashing. There was one room that looked like it could have benefited from a heavy, dense layer of fog, but temperature settings seemed to preclude this from working to its full impact. But these are largely resolvable details that can be smoothed out as the run goes.
This is not the most appealing bed and breakfast, but sometimes, beggars can’t be choosers.
Ultimately, HorrorWorld TCM is a gritty, jarring, old-school style haunt that will have guests literally seeing red (a lot) and enjoying a frighteningly fun time. Congratulations to Larry and Cheryl and the crew for finally getting their haunt open. Hopefully, this leads to more scares come actual Halloween time!
There was something about the moodiness of this room that worked very well with the relatively uncluttered furnishings.
HorrorWorld TCM is located at Haven City Market (8443 Haven Ave, Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91730) and operates 5:00 - 9:00pm. Tickets need to be purchased online and are sold for $80 for groups of up to 4 people. The catch is that the price is the same whether the group is 4, 3, 2, or 1 persons, and a group of 5 will need to purchase a second group block. At its greatest value, $20 is not bad at all, though that number is understandably less palatable for smaller groups. Keep in mind that similar to how Into the Black ran, groups are sent in with an extensive amount of spacing between them to ensure that they never run into the next group. This offers a much more intimate experience than most haunts, especially over the distance that the maze continues.
If you’re interested, you can visit HorrorWorld TCM tonight as well as the next two Friday and Saturday evenings through September 4th.
Architect. Photographer. Disney nerd. Haunt enthusiast. Travel bugged. Concert fiend. Asian.
