Around the first of October, temporary businesses start to crop up around the nation. The costume shops and haunted houses stay in town for about a month out of the year. Some offer all the thrills they promise, but others leave you cold — for the wrong reasons. You might feel like you’ve just wasted your cash on a fly-by-night operation that didn’t live up to your expectations. This year, with our handy guide, you won’t have to waste your time on haunted houses that don’t deliver.

On the other hand, if you’re a parent with a child or just a scaredy cat looking for a mildly frightening time, you can find the perfect haunted house here, too.

By Shannon Sturgis Red-painted skeletons at the Haunted Hospital in North Little Rock.

The Torture Chamber

3805 Benton Parkway, Benton

torturechamber.samsbiz.com

Dates: Nightly through Nov. 1, 6:30 p.m.

Admission: $12

Good: Some truly disturbing animatronics combined with live actors who have an excellent sense of just when to show up — particularly right behind you — make this blind stumble through the dark excellently terrifying. From a corpse roasting on a spit to a mad butcher offering a taste of a human leg, the scenes in this haunt are chilling and winding through them, including ending up in a few devilishly placed dead ends, will get the heart going.

Bad: The only critique worth making is that the madman wielding the obviously fake chainsaw would do well with a trip to Lowe’s. The fumes and sounds of the real thing just can’t be replaced, especially by something that sounds like a toy.

Scary: As good as it was front to back, it’s hard to pick any standout moments, but having to look down while being forced to crawl through one short section resulted in an epic scare (I won’t say why; it would ruin the surprise). And in the realm of the unique, the forced squeeze between two inflatibles — with something pushing from each side — was far more fun and frightening than simple straw brushing against the face, though I think there may have been some of that, too.

Rating: 9



READ Haunted House

123 Locust St., Malvern

(501) 332-4039

Dates: Oct. 30 and 31. Opens at 7 p.m. and closes "when the last victim leaves."

Admission: $6 for adults, $3 for kids under 12

Good: The team of people who assembled this haunted house clearly put in days and days of work — and made the very most out of the space they were given. The attention to detail and the ratio of store-bought Halloween props to homemade props and scares was incredible. The volunteers clearly have the routine down but manage to consistently work up the nerve for a great performance.

Bad: I'm short on complaints for this one. I did get my shoes wet while walking in the basement, which is a sort of swamp, complete with water and "bridges" which sometimes serve their purpose, but sometimes don't.

Scary: Most of the tour is guided, however, at one point the guide ditches the victims and leaves them to navigate a very dark cardboard maze on their own. Also, victims are nearly hit by a well-crafted replica of a truck's front bumper, complete with headlights and an airhorn.

Rating: 8.5



Night Terrors 13 Haunted House

15310 MacArthur Drive, North Little Rock

(501) 612-3327

Dates: Open every night through Nov. 7 from around 7:30 p.m. to midnight. But if you’re still standing in line come midnight, you’ll be allowed to enter.

Admission: $13

Good: You get more scare for your buck because it’s a 20-minute journey through a 16,000-square-foot abandoned grocery store alternating between completely dark, claustrophobic spaces where animatronics supply the scares, and rooms where live actors and discombobulating strobe lights combine to create hysterics and frightening encounters. And it’s more live actors — more than two dozen — than animatronics supplying the scares. People in line are treated to free movies on a projection screen while they wait.

Bad: Parts of the Night Terrors Haunted House are a tight fit for taller people. And we did lose our way one time and walk into a behind-the-scenes area (which at first appeared to be an abandoned mental hospital).

Scary: Connecting the rooms are darkened mazes, so as you blindly plod along, sticking your hands out in front to avoid running into walls, you’re always fearful of someone or something grabbing your hand. And spots in the Night Terrors Haunted House are completely dark, with only the free glow-in-the-dark beads illuminating the pitch black. So perhaps the scariest part is realizing the glow-in-the-dark beads only make you an easier target for the live actors roaming the house’s interior. And be prepared for the surprise ending that sent members of my group running into the parking lot straight to their vehicles.

Rating: 8



Haunted Hospital

No. 1 Pershing Circle, North Little Rock

(501) 744-5404

Dates: 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., Monday to Thursday, 7 p.m. to midnight Friday, 7 p.m. to “until everyone is dead” Saturday.

Admission: $10

Good: They have the perfect venue for a haunted house and they use it very well - the building does half the work, being musty and eerie and up on a hill. They carry the hospital theme very well, using operating rooms and operating tables. 

Bad: For such a perfect, creepy venue, they also tone the scariness down by using a great deal of store-bought Halloween props and strobe lights (lots and lots of strobe lights). They also use lots of percussive noise — clanging that is scary at first, but ends up in sensory overload when combined with the aforementioned strobe lights.

Scary: There are quite a few scary images that stuck with me from this haunted house  - one of them, for example, is a room with a strobe light (of course) with two children limping across the floor while dragging a machete and what appeared to be a lead pipe, respectively.

Rating: 7.5





The Haunted Hotel

12505 Arch Street, Little Rock

(501) 804-8883

Dates: Through Oct. 31, 7-10 p.m. weeknights, 7 p.m. until guests stop arriving weekends

Admission: $10

Good: What seemed like a huge cast of live actors constantly kept us jumping as we never knew what was suddenly going to start moving next. Revving chainsaws, banging sheet metal and air horns were the constant audio backdrop to a guide-led journey of ducking and crouching through darkness only occasionally illuminated by strobes or black lights, but more often by nothing at all.

Bad: The bad here isn’t that it’s not scary, it’s that the guide moved us through things so quickly — about 15 minutes start to end — it was hard to be deeply frightened. Not that you want to stick around when there’s a guy with a chainsaw behind you, but after a while it feels like just walking through the dark from one loud noise to another. There was no chance for the subtlety of some of the more detailed rooms to sink in, and I think that could have been done without ruining the illusion.

Scary: Probably the creepiest thing here is that one point the guide leading us through (a strangely comforting constant rather than a distraction) intentionally abandoned us — just disappeared and was suddenly not there anymore. You know that sense of dread you can see on the face of a soon-to-be-dead extra who wanders off by himself in a horror movie and suddenly realizes he’s doomed? My face probably looked something like that.

Rating: 7





Field of Screams

23738 Hwy I-30, Bryant

Take the Alexander exit, follow the service road to the Field of Screams. If you hit Bryant city limits, you’ve gone too far.

(501) 517- 9773

Dates: Oct. 28- Nov. 1 and Nov. 6 and 7

Hours: 8 p.m. to when people stop showing up.

Admission $10.

Good: Breathing cold outside air while in a corn field too thick with darkness to see through creates a pleasantly eerie ambiance. Also, the workers’ horrific masks are unique. And gross.

Bad: The premise of the field’s disturbing goings-on is rather disjointed with a video mentioning a pyramid, the Civil War and a lost investigation group. There are few links to this story expressed in the haunted house. Most of the imagery can best be described as “freaky” but not necessarily on topic.

Scary: As you wander along a path flanked by corn stalks, you turn a corner to see a scarecrow with a maimed face propped up on a post. Walking toward the thing is scary enough but the best part is when he suddenly comes to life, chops himself down from his post and comes after you. Despite a scream and a quickened pace he continues to creep behind you until your next frightful encounter.

Rating: 7



EMOBA Haunted Cathedral

1208 Louisiana St., Little Rock

(501) 372-0018, emoba_museum@hotmail.com or www.emoba.org.

Dates: Through Oct. 31 from 7:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. on the weekdays, 7:30 p.m. to midnight on the weekends.

Admission: $10 weekdays and $15 weekends

Good: The haunted cathedral annually held the last two weeks of October is a fundraiser for Ernie's Museum on Black Arkansans so your money is being put to good use. It’s also got the right combination of live actors and animatronics with surprises around every corner to keep you on your toes. And while it’s hard to recommend any haunted house as child friendly, the EMOBA Haunted Cathedral is suitable for older children.

Bad: If you are searching for hardcore scares, this is not the haunted house for you.

Scary: What’s scarier than an abandoned 88-year-old former church? An abandoned mental hospital or an abandoned funeral home, but good luck finding a local haunted house in one of those two locations. (That’s a free tip for next year’s crop of haunted houses.) So the built-in spooky setting is excellent even though the scares are more of the family-friendly variety.

Rating: 6.5



Scimitar Shriner Haunted House

No. 1 Scimitar Circle, (South University at Forbing Road) Little Rock

(501) 565-5992

Dates: 6-10 p.m., Oct. 28 to Oct. 31

Admission: $10

Good: It's a very clean, well-constructed haunted house run by very nice people. It's their first year to do a haunted house, and I'd call it a success. It's very tame — only a few bits were genuinely scary, but I'd count this as a plus for anyone wanting to take kids — I'd bring a brave 7- or 8-year-old. Not to say that the rest of it is necessarily cheesy, since I still enjoyed myself. There's also a carnival going on in the back lot with rides and a mechanical bull.

Bad: The only negatives would be if you were to show up expecting to be scared witless.

Scary: None of it was scary in any sort of lasting way.

Rating: 5.5