The Haunted Harvest: 2022 Review

Frosty’s Forest and Pumpkin Patch, Chino, CA

After a nice, warm, all-ages Halloween attraction interruption in our typical scary haunted attractions coverage yesterday, it's time to go back to the frights and the fear and the less family-friendly. Today, we make that transition jarringly with a trip out to Frosty's Forest out in Chino to visit The Haunted Harvest and their unique, twisted, gory haunted corn maze.

Now, if you're thinking to yourself, 'Wait a minute, wasn't the haunted corn maze at Frosty's last year called Dark Harvest,' you'd be correct. And it was also called Harvest of Horrors in 2020. This year marks the third name in three years for this attraction, and presumably the one that will stick. That's because there's a slight change in the design and operation team, as the Haunted Harvest is the sole creation of Brandon Spletter and Trevor Nielson, the folks behind Perdition Home Haunt. Former partner Adam LeBlanc, of The Fleshyard fame, has departed from the team and taken "Dark Harvest" to his old Fleshyard stomping grounds in Anaheim, partnering with the Pirates Cave creative team for this year's haunt (we'll have a review of that attraction next week).

As a result, The Haunted Harvest has shaped this year's haunted corn maze attraction into a sort of tribute to Perdition Home Haunt. This year's attraction features five total themes interspersed through the lengthy, fifteen minute-long corn maze layout. This is a reduction from last year's eight scenes, but each section is twice as large as any of last year's portions, meaning the themed walkthrough portions are still lengthier in sum this year. There are three haunted house segments that serve as current takes on past Perdition Home Haunt themes, and they're bookended by a Halloween section and a dark Christmas section that seem to reference Frosty's Forest and Pumpkin Patch. This creates a cleverly clean and logical structure for the corn maze, which is more frightening than ever!

There are plenty of monsters to greet guests, some rotting and some not rotting.

Guests enter the maze through a large-scale pumpkin head facade and head straight into the first room, House of Jack, which represents a vintage Halloween aesthetic gone gruesomely wrong. Four successive spaces featuring skeletons, sheet ghosts, devils, and pumpkins become progressively gorier, with the last bringing forth the trademark explicit and graphic simulated carnage that Perdition Home Haunt has long been known for. With both pumpkin and human guts everywhere, the scene is not for the squeamish. But it's a good barometer for the aesthetic and the scares to come.

House of Jack features gruesome takes on the vintage Halloween aesthetic.

After the initial winding themed course to set the mood, guests embark out into the first segment of corn field. Our trip coincided with a near full moon, which meant that the corn field was relatively well lit, comparatively speaking. But in a week and a half, when the moon is new, the trail will surely be creepy and ominous.

That would be enough just to have an eerie atmosphere, but this year, Haunted Harvest has stocked the corn maze sections in between the scenic rooms with more monsters than ever, allowing them multiple routes to intercept guests and spring jump scares and startles upon visitors who might already have trepidation pacing through the isolated and rural ambiance. It's a pattern that carries through each of the arcs linking the five themes.

But fiends don’t just lurk in the illuminated themed rooms. They lurk out in the fields too.

Eventually, guests reach the second room, Brujeria, which celebrates the theme that Perdition employed for its 2017 home haunt. The environment here is dark and dingy, but signs of witchcraft are clearly evident. Flayed fur coats and mutilated human corpses line the walls, while a horrid and haggard witch strikes a menacing presence. More bodies appear in the adjacent wing, including a body nearly torn open in half lengthwise and rotting human remains strung up on pikes as though to warn of the evil of this place. Brujeria is simple, sparse, and malevolent, needing little embellishment to demonstrate the depravity of its inhabitants' wickedness.

Brujeria features more death and damnation.

The halfway point, scene-wise, is marked by a large fiberglass figure of a serial killer--half a murderous Paul Bunyan, it seems--and signals the start of Maniacs, a condensation of Perdition's intense and notorious Death Cult production in 2018. This was our favorite part of the entire maze, and it showcases the Haunted Harvest's Perdition sensibilities at its bloodiest best. With segments featuring Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez the Nightstalker, Maniacs is full of slaughter and havoc. In addition, it features a coincidental dead ringer for Evan Peters' Dahmer in the new Netflix documentary series, unintentionally capitalizing on the popularity of the recent show. The scareactor portraying Jeffrey Dahmer captures his awkward exterior that hides his serial killer compulsion, and he succeeds in convincingly mimicking his creepy mannerisms. The John Wayne Gacy and Nightstalker characters use more traditional jump scare techniques rather than theatrical interaction, but they leave no doubt who they're portraying either.

Maniacs is a literal murderer’s row of content.

The Nightstalker is among three serial killers highlighted.

After another stretch of corn field, guests arrive at the fourth room and final Perdition-specific theme, Pestilence, which serves as the spiritual successor to Perdition's 2015 haunt, Necro Space. That home haunt, their most popular year ever, engaged the "alien monster invading a spacecraft deep in the cosmos" theme, and a similar aesthetic is employed at the Haunted Harvest. This iteration, though, mixes in a bit of a quarantine vibe, referencing the pandemic that has dominated much of life the previous two years, and sheds some of the intergalactic setting. But it still retains a science fiction feel, which last year's similar room also shared. Here, a couple of scareactors provide some well timed jump scares through neighboring space and hidden nooks as guests make their way through this mini-haunt series. The final space also features a healthy display of hideously deformed and grotesque astronauts that have been mutated by whatever contagion ripped through this space.

Pestilence can refer to some sort of sickness in space or the pandemic of the past two years.

One more stretch of cornfield maze takes guests to XXXmas, the final theme of the Haunted Harvest this year and a wonderfully deviant take on a scary Christmas theme. A fearsome looking snowman's head draped with colorful Christmas lights hints at what's to be expected inside. Sure enough a series of frigid corpses strung up on the remains of evergreen tree trunks marks a most morbid Christmas tree lot. Heading "indoors," guests encounter a charming holiday scene--full of ghastly gifts like severed heads and bloody, charred bodies and crimson splattered walls and a very disconcerting bad elf not on a shelf who is possibly responsible for all of this butchery. Rounding the corner yields a sleigh and a Krampus and a Santa Claus who might as well be Santa Claws looking for his next slay.

Aw, look, a present! Never mind the carnage behind…

If guests can escape Santa's clutches, they can find themselves back out onto the end of the Frosty's carnival area again, where the Haunted Harvest is located for the third year in a row, and safe from the fiends inside the maze. They just might have to contend with the monsters who haunt the queue and terrorize guests waiting outside the maze, though!

The street monsters outside the maze are engaging and sinister too.

The Haunted Harvest and this year's haunted corn maze production represent the most polished and dressed iteration yet. Large and elaborate facades, focused and well placed lighting, a larger cast, and even small details like the use of transparent butcher's curtains between scenes demonstrate a growing sophistication and incorporation of thematically sensible theming elements to reinforce motifs and concepts tying the maze together.

The actors themselves are also energetic and excellent, having gotten a great sense of timing in their second weekend operation (when we visited) and grown comfortable with taking advantage of their surroundings. There was even one scareactor lurking in a segment of the cornfields that hid himself so well that we never saw him until he suddenly lurched out in front of us at the last minute. And then he did it again on a second run through, catching our friend Sara, from Golden State Ghouls, with a startle scare a second time. We also appreciated an adorably wicked elf looking for a new face who provided some entertaining startles before XXXmas.

The talent overall is invested and active, which is great!

Though the Haunted Harvest brings its finest edition yet this year, there are still places to improve, and Trevor and Brandon would be the first to acknowledge it, being the perfectionist haunters they are.

The stretches between scenes are lengthy, and though there are more monsters in between, there still can be long periods of inaction. This can help play into the psychology of the maze and build anticipation and suspense, but it may be disappointing to some looking for more frequent payoffs. A few more scenes next year would help mitigate this and build the content even further. More scenes would also increase capacity, as each section could function as a block similar to a roller coaster, allowing more guests through the course at the same time. That said, the Haunted Harvest's ability to send groups out and make them feel like they are absolutely alone in the maze is a huge strength and an attribute that many other haunts cannot claim to have. And these critiques relate more to how to make this attraction even better next year than to shortcomings this year.

Give the gift of scares this Halloween season and check out The Haunted Harvest.

Ultimately, the Haunted Harvest offers a unique and gripping Southern California haunt experience in a location that's not that far from metropolitan Los Angeles and Orange County. It's also relatively close to numerous other haunts as well this year, including this year's Delusion, Coffin Creek, Castle Dark at Castle Park, and the new Carnival of Darkness haunt at the Ontario Mills Mall, which can be partnered up in a visit. In addition, Frosty's Pumpkin Patch itself also features a variety of inflatable bounce houses and slides, carnival rides, a kid-friendly corn maze, photo ops, and of course the pumpkin patch itself. This site alone offers a fair amount of activities to do just in one location, in addition to the Haunted Harvest maze, and it is regularly very popular. The other attractions require separately purchased carnival tickets, though, and are not included with Haunted Harvest admission.

Frosty’s Forest also features a variety of other attractions open during day and nighttime!

The Haunted Harvest is located at 14861 Ramona Ave, Chino, CA, 91710 and runs Thursdays through Fridays and Halloween night for the rest of the month. Admission is $30 per person, and tickets are only available for purchase in person on site, not online. The attraction opens at 7:00pm and closes at 9:00pm Thursdays and Sundays and 11:00pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Admission to Frosty's Forest Pumpkin Patch is an additional $5 on Thursdays and $10 on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Parking is on site and free.