Howl O Scream Orlando — Local services in Dr. Phillips

So I dont usually post reviews about anything really. However I'm seeing to much BS in some reviews that are totally misleading and 💯 non factual that I had to. For starters If folks bother to read the website it LITERALLY says this event is intended for mature audiences. Minimum recommended age is 13 with parental supervision....Hey parents that means don't bring a 5 year old or an infant or your entire family of under 12 year old children and then complain on the internet like the typical keyboard warrior that it's a strip club. If you can't read or don't want to supervise your kids that's your failure as a parent. Be better.

2nd point. The dancers are professionals and are doing exactly what they're paid to do. Hence the proffesional part of professional dancer. If you equate dancing in a way that is mildly suggestive (stressing mildly here) and way less than what youd see in your avg nightclub with a strip club you're very out of touch with reality. These young men and women are working their butts off to provide you with additional entertainment. Show some appreciation.

3rd point. Seeing folks saying they didn't open on time. You're lying. I was there. Walked into the gate at 658 pm today Sat the 7th. Was not raining. Was sunny with some cloud cover and 93 degrees still. Scare actors walking around in hot cloaks for your entertainment. Also seeing folks saying lines are ridiculously long, no scare actors anywhere, houses are 2 minutes long. Again you're lying. Every ride was 10minute wait or less. Every house was 5 minutes wait or less. Scare actors all through houses and zones. They pulsed people through the houses so you could take the time to walk at a reasonable pace and enjoy the effort they put into it for ,you guessed it, your entertainment.

4th point. Sea world as a park was never designed for this type of event. However they've put a huge amount of effort into creating a more budget friendly Halloween event for those that don't want to deal with the massive crowds, huge costs, and total inability to get through aLL houses even with a quick que or express pass at HHN. Again I speak from experience. Been going to HHN like a lot of other people yearly for a very long time. I also go for Busch HOS and 3 years ago added SeaWorld HOS. I still thoroughly enjoy HHN. The creative team this year made that event something that I havent seen from them in years. But for 3 years now myself and my family which includes a teenage daughter have enjoyed HOS at Sea World. We've had the unlimited visit tickets for 3 years. For the cost of 1 visit to HHN without express passes we can go every night at HOS. We've gotten to know the entertainers. We've seen the event grow and change into something that we enjoy doing every weekend. The food is good. The drinks are good. The houses are a blast. The scare zones are fun as Hell. What they all have in common is the people and how they interact. They take the time to play with you if you interact. As a former entertainer I can say the more you give them the more they give you. 5th point. Quit complaining if they pull the actors and dancers Inside. Their safety is the top priority. If its raining or there's lightning close by (10 miles is typical), they get pulled Inside. Get over it. Again if you read they say no refunds or rainchecks right on site. Bottom line. This event is amazing and the people who put so much effort into it are also. They do a thankless job trying to entertain not just those of us who want to be but you Karen's out there who just want to be miserable and tear them down. They do it for a fraction of the cost and with a fraction of the budget in a park that was never designed to do it. A park that doesn't have massive Soundstages and huge Backlot areas to utilize. Yet still they manage to make it an amazing event with tons of scares and personal interactions that make it so worth it for both the guest and the actors, dancers, employees and the creative team that built this event to the top spot for theme park events in...

TL;DR It's lazy and amateur with scare-actors who can manage little more than to scream in your face; if you have any standards when it comes to haunted attractions, you'll be disappointed. You'd get a better experience for a comparable price at a Screampark.

I love Halloween and everything about it. I came to SeaWorld's Howl-O-Scream for the first time in 2024 because I saw the billboards that said it was voted best theme park haunt and I was curious. (I can tell now it's because it seems to be one of the only venues that encourage people who bought tickets to vote for them. Neither HHN nor Mickey's asked me to vote after I got tickets, and Busch Gardens was a lot more subtle.)

THE BAD

THE HAUNTS HAVE NO LOVE PUT INTO THEM. I don't like saying that the creators just "didn't care" but it was clear that was the case at SeaWorld. There was a hint of a story online, but when walking through the haunts, the theming was inconsistent and confusing. ------- In Atlantis, there was an evil sea witch who wanted ... something? She killed people but I've no idea why. ------- The Wellness Center was both a mental health facility and a plastic surgery clinic and there was maybe a siren somehow?

THE HAUNTS ARE HORRIBLY PACED; you'd walk for awhile and there'd be no scare-actors or any substantial decor, it's just a (very dark) hallway with nothing in it.

EVERYTHING WAS SO DARK! I've never been to a haunt where I've been unable to see the decor like this, but there was just no lighting all over the park: in haunts, when walking around the park, in the scarezones, and the shops! One shop had green lighting that made it impossible to tell the color of products, in another the lighting was so dim it was hard to see. This lighting issue was completely unique to SeaWorld in my experience, and it really made me feel like they didn't know what they were doing.

LINE PACING! They were very slowly funneling people through the haunts - letting a group go, then waiting a minute before letting another group go, but he haunts didn't have unique scares or cool scenes to ensure people saw. All it did was clog up the line so you'd be waiting 1 - 2 hours for a subpar haunt experience. It was miserable.

THE SCARE-ACTORS HAVE NO TOOLS IN THEIR TOOLKIT beyond screaming very loudly and / or stomping the ground in front of you. I saw another review mention this as well and I'm glad it wasn't just me. This gets old VERY fast. At almost any other, mildly sophisticated haunt, you'll have actors who will have creepy lines they might whisper or they'll just lurk around you, but these actors had 1. stomp or 2. scream or 3. both. It felt aggressive, honestly, and it became annoying (not scary) very, very fast.

THE "DON'T SCARE ME" NECKLACE IS $15, NOT FREE. I know someone listed the existence of a "Don't Scare Me" necklace as a positive, but it is unforgivable to make someone drop $15 to mark a child (or adult) as someone who doesn't want to be screamed at. Absolutely ridiculous, it should be free. We didn't see these advertised either, they were just in one of the very poorly lit shops.

THEY DO REALLY PUSH THE ALCOHOL. At one point we were trapped in line and a scare-actor came up and hounded us to get jello shots or blood bags from these people pushing a cart around. He stood there for a while telling us we need to get them now before they leave, we should get their attention, etc. He didn't scream at us, though, so that was a different experience. There were more people selling alcohol than food.

THE GOOD

There were a couple nice photo opportunities.

It was under $50 / person.

I now know the experience sucks and won't be tempted to go ever again.

I wish I could have found something to enjoy but the whole experience was disappointing.

For what it's worth, you don't have to go to Universal to see a good haunt, nor do you have to pay $50+ for one. Screamparks have everything SeaWorld offers but they're more likely to do it well because it's the main...

My family and I visited SeaWorld Orlando on Saturday, Oct 14th with the Night and Day package. We had a great time during the day, until the park transitioned to the Howl-O-Scream event. At 6 o'clock, pure chaos ascended. Everyone was asked to move out of the side of the park where the event would occur. We asked one of the park staff where we needed to get in line for the Howl-O-Scream event. He showed us where and we got in line. After waiting for 45 minutes, someone asked us where our wristbands were. Wristbands? No one had mentioned a wristband before. It turns out that none of the people waiting in the line for Howl-O-Scream had their wristbands. They ushered us to another line where we had to show our paper tickets to get the wristbands. There were two people giving out the wristbands and a line of over 500 people. We joined that line at 6:45 and waited for an additional 2 hours. Just a few minutes before 9pm we were finally getting into the event. We got in line for the first haunted house and waited for approximately 30 minutes before they announced that they were having technical issues and the house was temporarily closed. Great. At this point we've waited in lines for 3.5 hours and still haven't done a single thing. Defeated, we had something to eat and decided to leave. However, we were told that we couldn't go back to the main entrance. We had to use another exit. We walked across the entire park to this secondary entrance, further and further from our car. When we finally got to that exit, we realized that our car was parked at the extreme side of the parking lot. Over a mile away. Main concerns:-Never received a confirmation code email, even though our email was clearly registered at the time of purchase-"Greeted" immediately by a rude ticket agent who seemed angry that we didn't have the confirmation code that we never received. Instead of simply looking up our names, he felt the need to accuse me of lying and asked to see my phone to prove his point.-Not given a wristband at check-in, which makes no sense if we clearly had the Night and Day Pass.-Spent hours waiting in line for a wristband, after waiting 45 minutes without even knowing we needed a wristband. This ruined the whole night. The wristband seems so unnecessary. If I have a ticket, why do I need a wristband? And if a wristband is absolutely necessary for some reason, why didn't we receive it when our tickets were printed? Why are only TWO people attending the thousands of people trying to get a wristband?-First haunted house was out of order-Had to walk almost 2 miles just to get out of the park from the secondary exit and walk across the entire parking lot to get to our car. Why weren't Day and Night ticket holders informed of this beforehand so we could have parked closer to the Howl-O-Scream entrance/exit? Overall, our night was nightmarish. Not because of the attractions that we never had the chance to experience, but because of the utter lack of organization and communication. I reached out to SeaWorld with these concerns and received...