Fright Nights Haunted Houses

Looking for descriptions and reviews of the Halloween haunted houses at Fright Nights at the PNE’s Playland in Vancouver? Here’s where you’ll find them!

In 2024 Fright Nights happens on select dates between October 4th and 31st. For the attraction’s official website, visit frightnights.ca.

The following is one of Vancouver’s most in-depth and detailed reviews of the PNE’s haunted attractions: Haunted Mansion, The Bloodshed, Darkness, Fear, Materia Medica, Keepers Doll Factory, Carn-Evil, and the newest house, The Void.

Some are slightly better than others, but all are impressive and of a very high standard.

Warning: This article is not for the squeamish (and neither, obviously, is the actual Fright Nights’ attraction)!

Haunted Houses at Fright Nights in 2024

Vancouver’s PNE is famous for its haunted houses in October in the run up to Halloween. There are live shows, about 20 different amusement rides and dozens of characters in costume wandering around the venue. The highlight of the event, of course, is the PNE’s set of amazing haunted houses!

In 2024 Fright Nights runs on October 4th to 6th, 10th to 13th, 17th to 20th, and 24th to 31st. The attraction opens at 6:00 pm and runs until 11:00 pm or midnight depending on the day.

For general information about Playland at Halloween, including admission prices, click PNE Fright Nights. For a list of Fright Nights’ tips and to learn about the attraction’s history, click Fright Nights Tips & History. For a description and general review about each of the haunted houses, see below … if you dare!

Fright Nights Video

The following video shows scenes from Fright Nights in 2023. It includes scenes from inside VOID as well as the Keepers Doll Factory. It also shows the outside of a couple of other haunted houses, plus what some of the roaming characters looked like.

Fright Nights Overview

Which is the best haunted house at the PNE’s Fright Nights? We’ll give you our opinion, but in the end it’s up to you to decide!

Below is a detailed description of each of the PNE’s various haunted houses. Continue reading through the entire article, or click any of the following links to jump to a specific house.

The Haunted Houses

Haunted Mansion at Fright Nights — The Haunted Mansion

The Haunted Mansion

The Haunted Mansion is the same haunted attraction you’ll find at Playland in the summer, but with a few modifications and a small team of live actors.

If you’re looking for a traditional haunted house, this is it. Unlike the PNE’s other Halloween attractions, it’s actually a house. The Haunted Mansion has rooms just as you’d expect in a decrepit Victorian residence. There’s also a cabal of ghosts and psychotic characters!

Inside the home, there are hallways with pictures on the walls where creatures might pop out from behind, someone preparing a bloody and gruesome meal in the kitchen, hanging bodies you need to push your way through, loud bangs and blasts of air at your legs, a skeleton on a toilet in the bathroom and various other creepy scenes. The mansion also has a more-than-average-sized selection of older mechanized creatures.

Similar to the Darkness haunted attraction, the Haunted Mansion has a detailed backstory that provides context to the setting. The short narrative explains that the house was the home of Dr. Luther Van Horn and his wife Nora. The two were very much in love, but when Nora died the doctor went mad and devoted the rest of his years trying to bring her back to life, or at least communicate with her in the afterlife.

Although arguably the least original of Playland’s Halloween “houses,” the Haunted Mansion is definitely one of our favourites. One of the reasons is because it’s an actual house! There aren’t so many live actors inside – usually only four or so – but they are great. The attraction is good in the summer. At Halloween it’s a hit! The lineups can be long, but, in our opinion, it’s well worth at least a 30-minute wait.

The Haunted Mansion Tips

TIP #1: Similar to a couple of the other houses, the lineup for this attraction gets especially long as the evening progresses. It can be a good one to visit earlier in the evening.

TIP #2: While waiting in line, read the backstory. It’ll help kill time (yes, pun intended) and also add some context to the attraction and its theme.

Warning: Similar to the Darkness haunted attraction, the Haunted Mansion has strobe lights as well as a spinning tunnel at the end that you have to walk through. If you’re sensitive to flashing lights or don’t like spinning tunnels, then this house isn’t for you.

PNE Fright Nights Monster Actress — A Zombie Outside the Bloodshed Haunted House

The Bloodshed Haunted House

Open since 2017, Bloodshed is one of the newer haunted houses at Fright Nights. It’s thoroughly gross and lives up to its name – it’s a large dilapidated shed-like cabin full of bloody scenes! The building’s approximately 2,400 square feet of space is full of dead and mutilated bodies, torture devices and an overabundance of blood and gore.

Think of Bloodshed as a human butcher shop-themed wax-museum in a giant barn-like structure full of rooms and passageways. There are mutilated bodies, body parts oozing blood, ligaments sewn back together in different configurations and tortured human remains. There are also copious amounts of blood and guts, aliens and other non-human characters, and a surprisingly realistic-looking multi-eyed body of slime on a wall

When we walked through Bloodshed during our visit a couple years ago, it felt like the floors in some sections were slightly sloped, which added to the creepy and warped atmosphere of the attraction. At the exit there is fake smoke and live-actor creatures to welcome you back to reality.

Some of the scenes in Bloodshed, although shocking, overly gory and utterly repulsive, are also quite impressive. Most of the characters, and not just the live-actor ones, are highly realistic and of movie-set standards. A fair bit of creativity and money went into the creation of this haunted house!

In short, Bloodshed is both repulsive and impressive. It’s not a “haunted” place like some of the other houses – it’s more a series of gruesome horror scenes. Quality-wise, in our opinion, it’s probably the best haunted house at Fright Nights. It’s also one of the most disturbing. If you don’t like the sight of blood, then Bloodshed isn’t for you!

The Darkness Haunted House

Darkness is one of Fright Nights’ four older haunted houses. Inside are skeletons and dark passage ways, creatures popping out of places, wolves, cobwebs, skulls embedded in the walls and mummified creatures.

The Darkness attraction did appear to us to be slightly darker than other haunted houses, but not by a lot. Things to be aware of in this attraction are the spinning tunnel and the strobe lights. Both can be fun, unless you suffer from motion sickness or are prone to seizures.

The Darkness haunted house also has a detailed backstory, which describes a graveyard from centuries ago where an entire village of people sacrificed their blood to save a young girl from a demented man. In so doing the Angel of Death damned their souls to the world of Darkness (where you can now conveniently encounter them all at Fright Nights).

The Darkness Tips

TIP #1: While you’re waiting in line, to kill time (pun intended) and to provide context to what you’re about to see and enhance the experience, read the backstory.

TIP #2: If you don’t like the idea of walking along a pathway in a circular tube where the walls are spinning around and making you feel like you’re spinning too, you might want to skip this haunted house.

Just before we entered a couple of years ago a teenage boy went running out in a panic saying he couldn’t go in – he knew the tunnel would make him too dizzy, and possibly sick, and that there was no way he’d be able to make it to the other end.

Fortunately the spinning tunnel is at the very start of the attraction, so it’s easy to back out if you don’t like it. On the downside, however, it’s no fun waiting in line for up to an hour or more to then turn around and not go in.

The Fear Haunted House

Fear is a haunted house first introduced in 2012 that plays on common fears. It’s not a ghost house. It doesn’t have a haunted theme. There isn’t lots of blood and gore. Instead, there are spiders, snakes, simulations of high places, and various other things that many people are scared of.

In Fear there are a few scary monsters and gruesome scenes, but also germs, cockroaches, a psychotic dentist, ferocious animals and even a dirty toilet or two. Similar to many of the other haunted houses, there are also flashing and blinking lights, which people who suffer from photosensitive epilepsy might also be afraid of.

We’re told that in past years, Fear included a coffin that people had to climb inside. They did away with that in 2017, though, in part because it proved too traumatic for some fright seekers, and in part because the process took too long and slowed down the line.

Fear is a popular haunted house for a number of reasons, including because it’s so different. For some, it won’t be as scary as the other houses. For others, it’ll be truly terrifying. Unless you are deathly afraid of rats, snakes or spiders, we recommend checking it out.

FEAR VIDEO

For an idea of what to expect at the Fear attraction, watch the video below.

The Materia Medica Haunted House

Introduced to Fright Nights in 2009, Asylum was one of the PNE’s four original haunted houses. It used to be located not far from the Corkscrew Roller Coaster and Revelation ride, and was one of Playland’s most popular October attractions. It featured scenes of tortured and demented individuals, psychotic doctors and various ghastly scenes.

Unfortunately, Asylum is no longer a featured attraction. However, the Materia Medica haunt seems similar. For an idea of what to expect, continue reading for details about Asylum from previous years.

Asylum was a mental institution right out of a twisted horror movie. It had people screaming, medical staff torturing their patients, characters in restraints and all kinds of tormented souls. In one room there were bodies hanging like carcasses from the ceiling which you had to push your way through.

While it wasn’t our personal favourite, Asylum was the #1 most popular attraction at Fright Nights in 2016, with more than 45,000 guests over the course of the season! One of the scariest parts of the Asylum was a balloon-bladder-kind-of-thing that you had to squeeze yourself through. If you were in any way claustrophobic, you probably hated the Asylum’s squishy balloon-bladder passageway.

In short, Asylum was a bit of a twisted haunted house that most people loved but for us was about average, or slightly less than average, compared to the other PNE options. That being said, next time we go to Fright Nights we’ll still do the Materia Medica, which appears to be similar to Asylum but with a different name!

TIP: Given that Asylum has been the PNE’s most popular haunted house in past years, Materia Medica is probably a good one to visit early in the evening, before the lineups get overly scary!

The Keepers Doll Factory

The Keepers Doll Factory was introduced in 2014 and has been a Fright Nights hit ever since. At 3,600 square feet in size, it’s the largest haunted house at the PNE and involves numerous mannequins, dolls and hanging bodies.

In the Keepers Doll Factory there are strobe lights, smoke machines, screaming sounds and other loud noises. There are also porcelain faces, a theatre of zombies and characters with masks, scars and missing limbs. The theme is occultist.

The special effects in the Keepers Doll Factory, in our opinion, aren’t the best relative to some of the other haunted houses, but it’s also not fair to compare rooms full of creepy department store mannequins with wax-museum and movie-production-quality creatures elsewhere. Both are effective in their own ways.

At the start of the Keepers Doll Factory you go into a simulated elevator where on a screen you watch the elevator go up, in a jerky-kind-of-way, and then go crashing down. It’s well done and pretty effective. The floor bounces around a lot too, which adds to the experience, although it can make it hard to stand and not so good for people with balance issues or foot or leg injuries.

Similar to Darkness and the Haunted Mansion, the Fright Nights’ website has a backstory about the Keepers Doll Factory that’s worth reading before you go in. In it, the narrative mentions the existence of a group of cloaked men with a mysterious stone tablet called “Diabolus Corporibus.” It goes on to tell about a sinister group’s practice of cutting off people’s body parts, like arms and legs, and sewing them back onto other people.

KEEPERS DOLL FACTORY VIDEO

The video below shows scenes from the Keepers Doll Factory in 2024.

The Carn-Evil Haunted House

The Carn-Evil haunted house has been re-imagined slightly in the last couple years. Before, it was a 3D experience featuring dozens of scary face-painted psychopaths with wigs, clown scenes, a maze of mirrors and a carnival-themed horror movie atmosphere. There were evil-looking clown characters throughout, flashing lights, decapitated clown heads, honking sounds and live actors who blended into the decor and seemingly came out from nowhere.

Carn-Evil wasn’t featured as a haunted house in 2022, but it’s returned since that one-year hiatus. Now, the new version includes humanoid creatures in sewers. These beings encountered radioactive waste and grew and multiplied.

Fright Nights Car-N-Evil Clown — A Live Actor Outside Carn-Evil

The Void Haunted House

The newest attraction, The Void made its debut in 2023. It’s a set that resembles caves and forests in the Pacific Northwest, but with creepy beasts lurking in the dark. The attraction’s story involves a forest ranger and hikers who all go missing. It’s up to you to find them all in this outdoor-themed haunted house.