Slasher Things

OVERVIEW

This year’s haunt is what happens when you take your favorite 80s slasher movies and sprinkle in the 80s vibe from the more recent Stranger Things. Expect throwbacks to thrillers such as Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, IT, and Chuckie.

WELCOME TO SLASHER THINGS

It was Halloween night, and you were just a kid with a pillowcase and a costume, going door to door like every other kid in Hawkins. The neighborhood looked the way it always did this time of year: jack-o-lanterns grinning from porches, porch lights throwing pools of orange, the distant laughter of children carrying through the cold. It was ordinary and safe. Until you found the candy shop.

It was warm inside. The old radio on the shelf played something soft from earlier in the decade, and the shelves were lined with everything a kid could want. On the counter, next to a box of Eggo waffles, there was a note — handwritten, pressed hard into the paper, like whoever wrote it was in a hurry: Don’t fall asleep. Don’t open any doors.

You pocketed the note. You probably shouldn’t have.

The warmth was heavy. The sugar, maybe, or the radio, or the particular quality of the quiet. By the time you noticed your eyes getting heavy, it was already too late.

You woke up somewhere wrong.

The hallway stretched longer than hallways should. The wallpaper peeled at the corners. Steam hissed through pipes you couldn’t locate. And from somewhere below (or maybe above, direction had stopped making sense) something was dragging a blade very slowly across metal. The sound filled the corridor like a song you’d heard before and couldn’t shake loose. One, two…

This was not Hawkins. Or it was, but the version of Hawkins that lives behind your eyelids when the night gets long enough. Here, the rules are his rules. Nothing ends unless he lets it. You ran. Of course you ran. And at the end of the hall there was a door.

The note said not to open it.

You opened it.

The room beyond smelled of rust and ozone. Fluorescent lights stuttered overhead, and warning signs lined the walls in official yellow and black: Hawkins National Laboratory | Authorized Personnel Only. A chalkboard in the corner was covered in equations, and someone had circled three words in red chalk at the center: dream state displacement. Someone had known. Someone had been studying this for years.

Whatever they were trying to contain, they had failed. The vines had already come through — thick as rope, dark and pulsing, growing through cracks in the concrete walls like the building itself was being consumed from the inside. There was only one way forward. Through the Gate.

You didn’t choose to step through. The Upside Down chose you.

Here, the world is Hawkins, but wrong, and old, and cold. Ash drifts through air that carries no smell of autumn, only rot and copper. Somewhere in the distance, a string of Christmas lights blinks its slow alphabet against a wall that no longer belongs to anyone: H… E… L… P…

Music is playing somewhere far away, thin and distorted, as if the signal is traveling from another dimension entirely. A pair of children’s sneakers sits beside an untouched Eggo waffle on an overturned crate. And there on the vine-covered wall, pinned with what looks like a piece of claw, is a note. The handwriting you recognize.

You made it this far. We didn’t. Don’t look behind you. — Will. Mike. Dustin. Lucas. Max.

You were warned at the very beginning. The note on the counter. The two rules. You broke both of them: you fell asleep, and you opened the door. And now here you are, at the end of the Upside Down, with something behind you that you haven’t looked at yet.

The question isn’t whether you survive. The question is whether you were paying attention.

Welcome to Slasher Things. You’re already inside.

TEAM: Matt, Evan, Aaron, & James
PLANNING TIME: 2 Weeks
BUILD TIME: 2 Months
ATTENDANCE: 400+ Trick or Treaters
CANDY: Free Selection of 2 Pieces

Media will be posted after the 2026 season.