Ohio Fear Farm (Middletown, OH)
“An Explosive Haunt”
By Noah Wullkotte: jollypumpkin@aol.com
Ohio Fear Farm ( formerly After Hours Hayride) is Middletown, Ohio’s newest haunt. This haunted hayride takes place at Garver Family Farm Market and it’s frightfully fun. When you arrive, you’ll enter their concession building to purchase your ticket. They offer a variety of items. This includes maple syrup, apple butter, powered sugar waffles, donuts, T-Shirts and more. You can even pick your own pumpkin. After we were done, we got in line. You’ll eventually enter a tent where you’ll sit down on bales of hay while you wait for your turn. An evil clown with a bloody knife collects the tickets and torments the crowd. There are about 30 people per wagon.
From there, you’ll walk inside a building with a witch before it’s time to hop aboard the hay wagon. Ohio Fear Farm features a few horror movie characters like Annabelle, Michael Myers and Leatherface. The actor portraying Leatherface did an excellent job while he chased the wagon as he spun his chainsaw around and around. Michael Myers did a good job at getting up close and personal, but it would have been better if he had a scene just dedicated to him instead of sharing space with other actors.
An issue with Ohio Fear Field is that there’s too much dead space before entering various scenes. This is an old school haunt where you’re not going to see high tech props or tons of detail. This doesn’t really affect the overall experience since there are quite a few scenes that are pretty entertaining. Ohio Fear Field’s backwoods hillbillies are some of the best we’ve seen all season. The truck chase is wild and crazy, but the combine chase has room for improvement. Having the driver wear some sort of scary mask would be greatly appreciated.
Another scene that could have been better is the Annabelle scene. The actress portraying Annabelle seemed a little untrained and resorted to using the line “You want to come play with me”. It’s a violent scene, but could have been better. Even though Ohio Fear Farm uses a largely young cast, they’re decent for the most part. There are a plethora of scenes that will startle and make you laugh out loud. The outhouse scene was very explosive and this is all I’m going to say about that.
You never know what’s lurking in the cornfield at Ohio Fear Farm. You might meet a killer scarecrow or two and you will feel the heat from flames that shoot into the air. The clowns did a good job in the carnival scene and the slaughterhouse will get your heart beating. Including slabs of bloody meat would improve the slaughterhouse. Unfortunately, some of the scenes are hard to see depending on where you’re seated on the hay wagon. We had to constantly turn our heads around to see the action. Chainsaws are overused in this haunt as well.
Ohio Fear Farm features old school scares that will put a smile on your face. Tickets are $18 a piece for ages 12+, but $15 would be a more reasonable general admission. Total tour time was 18 minutes. It’s $12 for ages 3-11. This is a haunt with so much potential and we’re looking forward to seeing what their future is like.
Length-8 Design-7 Props/Animatronics-6 Acting-7 Scare Effect-7
Final Stab: 7.0
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