I went to USS Halloween Horror Night 9 and it was amazing. To be fair, I went on a Thursday night, which explained why I could finish everything by 10pm. But nevertheless, the strategy is to plan your route, going for houses with the least queue first. So here's your cheat sheet for HHN9:
1. It only starts at 7:30pm
Sure, your ticket says 7pm. But everyone is required to gather Zone B for the opening act to start before the rides and houses are open. Therefore, there's really no need to run into the park exactly at 7pm.
2. Clear the first house as fast as possible
The first house with 5 minutes, go into it! This puts you on an advantage because you can clear the house quickly, which allow you to get to your second house as soon as possible. Since everyone was rushing into the House 2 - Hell Block 9 after the opening act, we decided to avoid the initial crowd and went further down to House 3 - Spirit Doll. We were probably the first 50 people and the wait was less than 5 minutes.
3. Clear the second house
Clearing the first house quickly means the other houses are probably still quite empty too. Our second house was House 4 - Chalet Haunting and the queue stated outside was only 10 minutes. But we got in almost as fast as the first house.
Not recommended but we took a ride in the mummy because it was 5 minutes queue, which turned out to be 5 minutes of walking to the ride. No queue at all! We had all the seats in the row to ourselves too. And I'm not exactly sure why but the ride was significantly scarier than what I remembered it to be. It could be because we were spooked out from the first two houses, which made this ride scary too.
4. Avoid long queues
We wanted to get into House 2 - Hell Block 9 but the queue was 40 minutes, which we found to be too long. So we wandered down and saw House 1 - Curse of Naga to be only 5 minutes wait. And this was the main house I wanted to go because it was a collaboration from the directors of Thai horror movies (SHUTTER, Phobi4, etc). The house did not disappoint!
House 2 - Hell Block 9 is still crowded so we went to my least anticipated haunted house, House 5 - Twisted Clown University. I'm not a huge fan of clowns, neither do I find them to be creepy. The queue was 20 minutes, the longest we queued so far. Unless you're afraid of clowns, otherwise this house is pretty mild.
After the clowns, we went over to the Scare zone A. It was too crowded to be honest, which killed the mood. The decorations were nice but you're walking back to back with people all around. At least in the houses, they would control the amount of people entering.
Since we covered everything else, we are left with our last house, House 2 - Hell Block 9. It said 40 minutes but the wait was only 30 minutes long so it was tolerable. Definitely recommend this house!
5. Catch the show
We finished our last house at 9:30pm, and we realised the show was just starting so we quickly went in to catch the show, and to enjoy the air-conditioning. The show was very entertaining and a good change from all the haunting and houses. Highly recommend the show! We didn't have any expectations for the show but we left feeling entertained.
After the show, we dropped by the carnival and played a couple of games and took a couple of photos.
We left HHN9 at 10:10pm, feeling very accomplished! The thing we learnt is that a weekday is always a good idea for HHN9.
We had very low expectations for Halloween Horror Nights because our past experience was really horrible with the long waits in queues and crowds. This year's exceeded our expectations.
The props and decorations were brilliantly done, very realistic. The houses were spooky and thrilling. Very well-designed houses! My favourite house would be House 2 - Block Hell 9, followed by House 1 - Curse of Naga. The Spirit Dolls and Chalet Haunting were great too! Have to give it to Chalet Haunting because of how relevant and relatable it was for Singaporeans. I didn't enjoy the Clown house so I would put that as the least priority if you are tight on time.
