Insane Haunt Productions presents Haunted Tiki Island / Fright on Lewis Way: 2022 Reviews

Santa Clarita, CA

We resume our Halloween season recap posts again with a double feature: two mini-haunts from the Santa Clarita Valley that we hit as part of an epic, 15-stop haunting spree the Saturday of Halloween weekend in the SCV! We’ve long talked about how the Santa Clarita Valley has been such a huge hotbed of Halloween celebration. With legendary haunts like Beware the Dark Realm and Coffinwood Cemetery and well-known favorites like The Farm Haunt and Club Fear, among others, the spirit of October has long been alive and thriving in this north-of-Los Angeles suburbia. But there are also treasures in smaller scale haunts that still feature charm or creativity in them.

Today, we’ve got two such examples, both locations that we’ve visited in the past in one form or another!

Fright on Lewis Way

Our first stop takes us to a location that we visited as a yard display the year that almost everything was a yard haunt—2020. At the time, it was one of the comparatively less elaborate haunts in the Santa Clarita Valley line-up, but it did have a mix of themes and some attempt at putting a collection of Halloween-related vignettes together.

This year, we found a driveway maze at the same location when we arrived, buzzing with activity from a Halloween party that the family appeared to be having. Similar to what we saw a couple of years ago, this haunted maze was not the most sophisticated. There weren’t framed walls or flats. Instead, the maze was basically a plastic black sheet maze, minimally themed, with emergency tape and alarming words scrawled in blood red paint across the “walls.”

Fright on Lewis Way is more of what most people who imagine a home Halloween haunted house would think of.

Inside, we made our way through several fog-filled spaces with rudimentary lighting, occupied by child scareactors dressed as psychotic clowns. In one room, a menacing limb lurked beneath a table. In another, a little clown wielding a toy chainsaw threatened us in a strobe-filled environment. We found child held hostage, confined in large kennel cage with only a glowing skeleton as a roommate, yelling for rescue. In the final chamber, a hood skeletal figure fired a laser gun while a demonic animatronic clutched a victim just to the side.

Fright on Lewis Way may not have been the most spectacular haunt, but it's a reminder of the joy and simplicity of crafting a wickedly fun haunted house for the family and the neighborhood. With a collection of mostly store-bought props and decor, it doesn’t go for anything splashy. It’s just a canvas for a group of children who really enjoy Halloween to exercise their passion, which over time, may very well go the route of more polished home haunts that we’ve seen elsewhere. Every home haunter, including the Rotten Apples and Pirates Caves and Corona Haunts and Beware the Dark Realms of the world, started with something like this, and Fright on Lewis Way was a charming reminder of those roots of Halloween passion.

But what it lacks in the sort of near-professional sophistication we see in many of the home haunts we cover it makes up for in fun, childhood-love-of-Halloween spirit!

Also, across the street, there was a house that I remembered having a cool Little Shop of Horrors yard haunt in front a few years ago. This time they had a whole bunch of miniature horror villains and icons all over their front lawn! It's actually quite adorable! I don’t have photos in this article, but check out the back half of this Instagram post for pictures.

Fright at Lewis Way was located at 25739 Lewis Way, Stevenson Ranch, CA 91381. It operated the last weekend of Halloween, probably from 7-10pm, though we didn’t have confirmed times for this haunt.

Haunted Tiki Island

The last time (and first time) we visited Cameron McGuinness’ home haunted house, it was three years ago, and he was an 18 year old young haunter producing his own, cozy Halloween production in this little nook of Santa Clarita. His creation that year was an intimate pirate-themed haunted attraction that showcased some of the creative innovation and mix of haunt and theater that reminded us of other new-generation young haunters like Sam Kellman of Opechee Haunt and Zion Fenwick of Twisted Minds and Ben Conway of Rosehill Haunt and others.

Unfortunately, we were unable to visit Insane Haunt Productions the following two years, as his haunt didn’t run until the final weekend, and we had taken to making our Santa Clarita Valley run the weekend or two before Halloween weekend. As such, we missed a clever and creepy Candy Shop haunt in 2020 as well as last year’s The Cabin—though we did get a see an alternate version of it at Seasons Screamings’ Hall of Yuletide Spirits last December! This year, though, our Santa Clarita jaunt coincided with Halloween weekend the the operation of Insane Haunt Production’s latest creation, so we made sure to stop by Cameron’s old stomping grounds to see what he had in store this year.

Insane Haunt Production’s Haunted Tiki Island actually had a tiki bar as part of the maze! Well, outside the maze. And only on its Saturday run for creator Cameron McGuinness’ birthday celebration.

Haunted Tiki Island was not the longest or most extravagant haunted house of the season, but it was definitely some spooky, tropical fun! Inside the walkthrough, which wound along the sides and back of the McGuinness residence driveway, we found an eerily-lit cave with trapped and dearly departed tropical tourists, followed by a laser vortex tunnel with a tiki statue at the end and poison darts and an unwelcoming jungle gremlin coming our way. A corridor lined with colorful, blacklit skulls completed the brief sojourn.

The short maze has its share of pop-out scares.

After surviving our trek through the maze, we encountered a welcome first—a home haunt bar! Although hidden bars inside of mazes has become a thing at several professional haunts (especially those in Long Beach) we had never gone to a home haunt that incorporated a bar until this Halloween weekend trip! This was because Insane Haunt Productions' Haunted Tiki Island served as the site of Cameron’s 21st birthday party. In celebration, Cameron included an actual Tiki bar wrapped by the u-shaped maze! The bar was simply decor non-operational on the haunt’s other nights of operations, but on Saturday, October 29th, it served as the first-ever not-so-hidden maze bar that we’ve ever enjoyed at a home haunt! Thanks, Cameron, for the delicious Pagan Colada, and for the little haunt!

Naturally, in an tropical, lush, and exotic haunted maze environment, a laser vortex tunnel is almost compulsory!

Insane Haunt Productions’ Haunted Tiki Island was located at 20205 Soladera Way, Santa Clarita, CA 91351 and ran the last weekend of Halloween, from 7-10pm.

That wraps up this Santa Clarita Valley mini home haunt double feature! We’ve got one more residential haunted house stop in the SCV, coming up in our next haunt season catch-up post!