Louisville Halloween gets an EXCLUSIVE preview of Fear Fair’s largest renovation ever for Halloween 2015!
Voodoo, gators and above ground cemeteries await you within the Freeman Municipal Airport at 800 Ave in Seymour, IN this Halloween. Owner/operator, Brett Hays, wants to take you to Bourbon Street and beyond to check out his biggest haunt renovation in 15 years at Fear Fair: Indiana’s Scariest Haunted House. Find Marie Laveau’s grave, meet Baron Samedi and escape the jaws of a legendary man-eating alligator in this season’s massive rebuild of this classic attraction.
Currently ranked Number 11 on USA Today’s Top 20 List of Extreme Haunted Houses in the United States, Fear Fair built its reputation on its realistic, film set worthy movie scenes featuring Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Leatherface. The movie scenes and familiar cinematic slashers were so well done, in fact, that they ultimately attracted the attention of Trancas International Films, copyright holders of the “Halloween” movie franchise.
“We got a cease and desist letter from the copyright holders of Michael Myers,” admits Brett Hays who is actually a lawyer when he’s not serving as Head Frightmaster at Fear Fair. Since the birth of such huge budget Halloween events like Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights, the copyrights to licensed silver screen boogiemen have begun to be much more closely guarded than in previous years where almost every haunted house had “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” scenes.
“Universal is paying over six figures to exclusively use Michael Myers for its Halloween Horror Nights,” says Hays, “and they’ve started cracking down on the higher profile haunts that use these characters without paying for them.”
“We got noticed when people started writing really good reviews of our scenes on Universal’s Facebook page,” relates Hays, “and from that point on I figured all our slasher movie characters were living on borrowed time. It was time for a change.”
“It was time to stop being the world’s best AC/DC cover band and start playing our own music.”
After Fear Fair closed for the 2014 Halloween season, Hays spent several weeks in New Orleans taking in the history and atmosphere of the place, joining expeditions into the swamps and touring the Gothic beauty of its above ground cemeteries.
“I visited Marie Laveau’s grave and took a lot of photos,” says Hays. Marie Laveau (1774-1881) was known as the Queen of Voodoo in New Orleans, and was equally respected and feared for her legendary magical powers. “We rebuilt Marie Laveau’s grave in exacting detail in our new above ground cemetery scenes.”
The new cemetery scenes are the centerpiece of Fear Fair’s original rebuild which includes a trip to Bourbon Street into some of the more infamous Voodoo shops and across rickety bridges in a gator filled swamp. These new scenes replace scenes depicting Rob Zombie’s “Halloween,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Scream,” “Friday the 13th” and even the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” scenes which were just installed last season. This year you can still experience Fear Fair’s infamous “Saw,” “Silent Hill” and “The Walking Dead” scenes, but Hayes intends to replace those as well with original haunt scenes by Halloween 2016.
We did manage to get Brett to give us a hint at what to expect next year. Think “The Haunted Mansion.”
The above ground cemetery is huge and includes both an interior and an outdoors area filled with Gothic architecture all built to scale using real brick, stone and mortar. Its construction alone took six months and untold hundreds of man hours to complete.
It’s filled with both animatronic zombies and dozens of shambling undead actors as well as one gigantic cemetery demon summoned by the ghost of Marie Leveau to protect the graves from interlopers. The zombies you’ll find here aren’t the bloody, gory kind you’ll find in “The Walking Dead” scenes. They appear to be more influenced by George Romero’s original, black-and-white “Night of the Living Dead.”
“These zombies are older, dustier and more dried out,” says Hays. “It’s a different kind of zombie than you’ll see in the other scenes. These are real Voodoo zombies.”
Fear Fair will be open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through November 1st. They will be open on Fridays and Saturdays from 8 PM until 1 AM and on Sundays from 8 PM until 10 PM. General Admission tickets are $20 and Fast Pass tickets are $25. The drive from Louisville to Seymour takes approximately an hour.
