Sin City screams: A guide to Halloween thrills in Vegas
The red flag explains everything, even if its words are a little hard to make out as it whips in the wind high above the hearse parked out front, the wall of skulls inspired by the Parisian catacombs and the two cars in the driveway designed to look like Racoon City police units from the “Resident Evil” series. (“RUAZMB” — “Are you a zombie?” — one license plate asks; “URAZMB” — “You are a zombie” — the other answers).
“Living your dream by causing the nightmares,” the handcrafted banner reads on this breezy weekday morning.
For David Parry — an affable Halloween-aholic who goes by the name of Fido — the saying doubles as a motto for his life and that of the 24/7, 365-days-a-year haunted house that is the east valley home he shares with his partner and a roommate.
“Halloween was the one day a year that I could dress how I want, act how I want, and everybody just had a smile on their face,” Parry notes. “As I got older, I realized that people were losing that, and I’m like, ‘Screw it. I’m going to live Halloween every day.’ ”
Hence, the advent of Skull Manor, 5355 Camden Ave., the creepiest, skeleton-iest, most gargoyle-abundant house in Las Vegas.
Halloween may be a few weeks away, but here, October never ends — well, they do decorate some of the zombies with Santa hats come Christmastime.
Skull Manor is a must-visit for Halloween fanatics and a trick-or-treater’s delight: “We do full-size candy bars, hot dogs, chips, bottled water for the first 400 or so,” Parry says of visitors on Halloween night.
In the meantime, the house has become a year-round attraction, with people coming regularly every month to see this wicked wonderland and the three massive rescue dogs who keep watch over the place, including a pony-sized Great Dane named the Grim Leaper.
Skull Manor was born during the pandemic, when Parry and company began turning the home they bought in 2015 into a full-on Halloween house.
A disabled veteran, Parry has been a holiday die-hard since he was a boy — he created an impromptu haunted house in the garage of his family’s Utah home when he was 10 years old. Parry’s mother was a ceramics teacher and his father was an electrician, and it’s this blend of artistry and mechanical know-how that he’s used to bring Skull Manor to life — or death, as the case may be.
“It became more of an art project, with the house being the canvas,” he says.
Parry and his partner invited their friend Storm Schneider , a manager with Freakling Bros. haunted attractions, to move in with them a few years back, and he’s become part of the project as well.
“I grew up on ‘The Addams Family,’ ‘The Munsters,’” Schneider notes. “So when I came over and (Parry) was talking about doing this, I was like, ‘Oh, dude, I’m all-in.’ ”
The house wasn’t initially intended to be a public attraction, but that changed when people just kept stopping and checking the place out from the street.
Eventually, they got invited in.
“We would see them and go outside and talk with them,” Schneider says. “Sometimes the energy would just be really nice and everything, and it was like, ‘You want to see the inside?’ ”
Speaking of which, the interior of Skull Manor — past the front yard guarded by myriad flesh-eaters and an enclosed courtyard gothically appointed with caskets, thrones and dragon sculptures — is something to behold: The kitchen’s fashioned like the galley of a sunken pirate ship, complete with gold coins beneath your feet, while the living room boasts more undead than a cemetery — perhaps two — all illuminated by glowing red lights that cast an eerie pallor about the place.
And yes, of course, there’s a coffin phone booth by the front door. Dial up the coroner, stat.
“We believe in the spirit of Halloween, of being your true, authentic self, acting the way you want,” Parry says, reflecting on why everyone here goes to such great lengths to express their passion for the holiday. “I mean, you can put a mask on and stick your tongue out at the people that you’ve been wanting to stick your tongue out at all year,” he chuckles. “You can be yourself, and it’s empowering.”
Appointments can be made at skullmanor.rocks; admission is free, but donations are accepted.
A visit to Skull Manor is just one of many ways to get into the Halloween spirit. Here are a few more:
Old haunt, new concept
The lights are still on, yet the kids are ducking behind their parents regardless.
A young boy tucks his head into his mother’s forearm, hiding his eyes as if to ward off the 7-foot-tall zombie lumbering by, its mouth aglow with fluorescent green goo, as if it’s been gargling with toxic waste — and maybe it has, as we’ll find out soon enough.
A little girl abandons the claw machine she’s playing in fright as the scare actor stomps by, freaking out the staff, even — “You got me good!” a ride operator exclaims after the thing sneaks up on her.
On a recent weekday afternoon, though Fear Zone at the Adventuredome at Circus Circus has yet to officially open, one of its undead nasties is already giving passersby the creeps.
It’s taken eight long years for Halloween scares to return to the property, with popular former attraction Fright Dome, which ran from 2003 to 2017, giving way to this new, even bigger concept.
“You’re going to have four haunted houses, six scare zones and a complete fogged-up atmosphere throughout here,” Circus Circus general manager Shana Gerety notes as she leads a tour of Fear Zone. “When the park is dark at night and no lights are turned on, it’s all haze, so it gives you that real kind of feel of a nightmare. You’re not sure what’s going to pop out at you.”
Nothing pops out at us at Hillbilly Hollow, the first haunted house we enter, as the Fear Zone cast of 200 employees isn’t on the job just yet.
Still, the maze of bloody hay bales, dead chickens, dismembered limbs and bug-covered grotesqueries remains sufficiently disturbing even without the abundance of scare actors lunging forth from parts unknown.
Next up: Deep Containment, which is themed like an abandoned military bunker with nuclear testing and a zombie outbreak — hence, the towering, aforementioned cast member, who unleashes some truly unsettling bellows.
This haunted house is even gorier than the first, with plenty of splayed corpses and exploded craniums to test gag reflexes.
Gerety notes how guests will enter Fear Zone from a tent in front from the Adventuredome parking lot, immersing them in the action from their first step inside the bulbous, rose-colored building.
“As soon as they come in, there’s scare zones on both sides and they’ve got haunted houses on both sides of them, too,” she says. “They’re all pretty good-sized houses. We wanted to make sure that with there only being four of them, the experience was a real crowd-pleaser,” she explains, her words occasionally muffled by the roar of roller coasters overhead.
Speaking of which, unlike the Fright Dome years, all the rides will be operational during Fear Zone.
“People can still come ride rides, do the houses, do all of that,” she says. “You’re just going to be doing it in the dark.”
More seasonal scares
As if Vegas resort fees weren’t frightening enough, experience an even scarier lodging scenario at Hotel Fear, one of two haunted attractions at the Meadows Mall, 4300 Meadows Lane. There’s also the crazy-fun Asylum to the get the goosebumps bumpin.’ lasvegashaunts.com
From the fiends behind local favorite Bonnie Screams comes Desert Screams, a new Halloween attraction with a pair of haunted houses (“Clowns of Carnage;” “Crimson Manor”) at Combat Zone Paintball, 13011 Las Vegas Blvd. South. Get creeped out beneath the stars at two outdoor mazes and remember, in the desert, everyone can hear you scream. desertofscreams.com
Time to get growled at by a demonically possessed teenager at the maze of torments that is Universal Horror Unleashed at Area15 (3051 S. Rancho Drive). Experience four epic haunted houses themed after horror favorites such as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Exorcist: Beginning” and a whole lot more, from evil clown cabaret shows to killer cuisine at the Blumhouse Productions-themed restaurant Premiere House. universalhorrorunleashed.com
Cars and corpses
Rub elbows with former Misfits and Ramones drummer Dr. Chud and the creepy scalpel-wielding kid from the original film adaption of “Pet Cemetery” (aka actor Miko Hughes, all grown up now) at the debut of Nightmare in Vegas at the Silverton on Saturday and Sunday. The city’s first outdoor horror convention promises a “twisted playground” of live bands, DJs, interactive displays, a sprawling macabre marketplace, celebrity signings and a hearse and classic car show. nightmareinvegas.com
Silver screen screams
Fifty horror flicks in 31 days? You won’t have time to sleep — not that you could anyway, what with all the big-screen frights unleashed upon the return of “The Wake” film series at the Beverly Theater (515 S. Sixth St.). Highlights range from a 100th anniversary screening of Lon Chaney’s “The Phantom of the Opera” to a showing of “The ’Burbs” followed by a talk with director Joe Dante. Go big with the $99 Slash Pass, where you’ll get unlimited entry and priority seating to every film. thebeverlytheater.com
Stage frights
Die laughing when the Las Vegas Horror Show production company stages “Zombie Joe’s Underground’s Urban Death Vegas” at the Vegas Theatre Company (1025 S. First St.). An inventive blend of terror, coal-black humor and flesh-crawling visual effects, the show debuts Saturday with performances running through Nov. 2. theatre.vegas
A scary-good read
Any book that shares its title with a relentlessly savage album by death metal greats Morbid Angel had better be relentlessly savage itself, and Vegas author and UNLV professor Jarret Keene’s timely, terrifying new horror anthology “Gateways to Annihilation” lives up to that lofty billing. From black metal-infused ragers about demonic invocation to tales of not-so-nice androids, the only thing that’ll outpace your fast-beating heart while reading this one will be the speed with which you turn its pages. darkwolfbooks.com
Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.
