One of my favorite pastimes while living here in Los Angeles has become the Haunted Hayride attraction, which takes over Griffith Park every October, bringing a taste of Midwestern tradition into the City of Angels. This year, the LA Haunted Hayride is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and because the event has become part of my own Halloween traditions every year, I jumped at the chance to speak with Melissa Carbone, CEO and President of Ten Thirty One Productions, who talked about hitting the monumental milestone with the LAHH. Carbone also chatted about the thrill of getting to incorporate her love of Halloween and horror into her ever-expanding empire of eeriness, creating an event for fans of all ages, and much more.
And for those you who either live in the Southern California area or might be visiting sometime this month, you can find more information on the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride HERE.
Congrats on another great year at the Haunted Hayride. I’ve been going for years now because it is so perfectly in my wheelhouse, and it really celebrates everything I love about the Halloween season. With coming back for the 10th year, what was the big thing for you this year, in terms of hitting that milestone and celebrating it properly?
Melissa Carbone: It was really important for us in our 10th year to bring back a bunch of the iconic fan favorites of the past decade. And that's really what I wanted to do. I've known that I wanted to do that for years. I knew that once we hit our 10th year, that was going to be the moment that we brought back the showstoppers of the last decade. And so for me, it was about that. It was about looking back at all the different content of 10 years—and there was a ton of it—and choosing the things that had the best receptions, the things that people have asked us to bring back, and the things that to me, epitomize the aesthetic and the demeanor of the hayrides. We've also added some new pieces as well that we think just jump on that old magical Halloween world nerve even more.
I think what's really great about what you do with the Haunted Hayride, and I don't mean this disrespectfully to any of the other haunted attractions because I love them all, but LA is a very crowded marketplace when it comes to this stuff. And I love the fact that this really, for me, celebrates the reason why I love October, whereas a lot of the other events and attractions are more about celebrating the scares. Hopefully that makes sense.
Melissa Carbone: It makes a ton of sense. That is philosophically the spine of the attraction. We're unique in that we're all original content. I'm actually a massive Halloween Horror Nights fan, but it’s a different offering for sure. In a market like this, there has just been room for all of us and I love that. The hayride definitely is about bringing this October, Halloween, fall festive feel into a city that I don't think has much of it. The other piece of it is, we don't ever play in the woods in the city, so the most important part for me was to create an experience in an environment that hasn't been used in that way before. I don't just want to do another haunted house or something that is already here. So, finding woods and putting city-dwelling Los Angelenos in them at night to annihilate them, how could anyone not love that? How could that not last 10 years?
Something else that’s really cool about the LA Haunted Hayride is that families can come out and enjoy it. And, for me, Halloween is all about traditions, and while I love going to these events that are geared towards us grown-ups, I love being able to see little kids getting to immerse themselves in something at the Hayride that they don't really get a chance to do with other attractions in the area.
Melissa Carbone: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that. I think most parents know their kids’ threshold for pain, so we don't have a restriction on age, and we have seen a lot of parents actually over the years that have raised their kids on the Hayride, if you can believe it. I met a girl who was like 17 years old that came up to me and she was like, "Oh my God. I'm so excited for the hayride. I grew up on this." It was like, “Oh God, how old do I feel right now?” But it was great to have that realization that we've become a staple in Hollywood. It's very cool.
Plus, something else that’s really cool is that Ten Thirty One Productions, which was the company I started that owns the Hayride, Great Horror Campouts, Great Horror Movie Nights, and Ghost Trip, we sold the company in January to Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group, so now we have attractions in 15 markets across the country. And as I'm talking to you, we're operating 15 Halloween attractions simultaneously across the country. It's incredible. We sold the company, and it was an awesome move for us in having more attractions across the country, and being with a team that had a big infrastructure already in place to do that with.
Obviously, nobody starts anything to just meander their way through it, and so I'm guessing you always had huge aspirations for the Hayride and everything else. But could you have imagined 10 years ago when you were first starting this company, where you guys would be with everything today?
Melissa Carbone: I've gotta be honest and say "yes," but it's only because I have this freight train personality, and I don't do anything unless I feel like I'm gonna shoot a cannon off a bow with it. When I started this, I only jumped into it because I was so incredibly enthusiastic and optimistic and passionate about what I was doing that I couldn't not do it, and I know when I get like that, I become laser beam focused on building something giant and amazing. My philosophy in life is to always bust out onto the scene like you're Disney, so we were never gonna be dipping our toe, we were never gonna start small, and my hopes were that, yes, we would get to this point someday.
I wanted to ask about the Great Horror Campouts, just because I’ve never had a chance to do one myself, but everyone always raves about their experiences. Can you talk about coming up with that concept, and then being able to execute it in a way that's enjoyable for everybody, but still feels like an organic experience for attendees?
Melissa Carbone: In order for us to create something, we want to do something that has not been done before, at least in the market where we're doing it. Like a [Haunted] Hayride had never been done before here in Los Angeles, and an overnight camp had never been done here or anywhere else in the country before us. The second piece to the puzzle is that we will only do it in an environment that is already disturbing, haunting, and creepy in its demeanor before we even go in and put our footprints in it, AKA the woods. The woods lends itself a lot to obviously that philosophy. And then, it has to become incredibly immersive in that, from the moment you get there until the moment you leave, you're never plucked out of the environment in a cerebral way.
Campout was all of those things, and it was exciting, because I felt like this was a much more extreme way where we could play with people for longer than a couple of hours a night. If we could have them for 12 hours, just imagine what we can do if we have a group of campers for 12 hours, so that prospect was incredibly exciting. So, we built it, and yes, it's a very challenging model to build, but all of these are. Just rolling into the woods and campgrounds and giant spaces and trying to create an infrastructure for thousands of people, it's not an easy thing to do, and because we're 10 years old now, we've gotten a lot better at it, so, luckily, now I think it all is a pretty well-oiled machine.
But initially, these were all hard things. There were no models in place because nobody had done them before, so it was trial and error, a bunch of upper cuts to the jaw sometimes, and then we would just come back with a new message, with new data, and fix and crush it. So, that was always the hope and that was always the philosophy, and Great Horror Campout is one of those events that people really adore.
With all these different events that you've been involved with, is there something about the horror genre that you find motivates you in a way creatively than, maybe, say, if you were just working with a traditional theme park type of idea, or in other avenues of creativity?
Melissa Carbone: A hundred percent. That's what pushed me, my organic love for Halloween, long, long, long before the Haunted Hayride was even a fetus in my brain. The Halloween time of year has always felt magical to me, and as far as the horror genre and horror movies go, I've never been able to consume enough of them. So the notion of being able to make a living at playing in blood and guts and creating my own kind of Halloween magic was too much to pass up. It felt like the opportunity of a lifetime.
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In case you missed it, check here to read Heather Wixson's impressions of this year's Los Angeles Haunted Hayride!
Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.
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