Hong Kong Halloween

MANILA, Philippines - At Ocean Park Hong Kong, Halloween is a very big deal. A week before our trip to see their Halloween Fest attractions ourselves, I found myself sitting next to an undead Elvis Presley at the launch they held in Makati Shangri-la.

“See you next week!” Ocean Park chief executive Tom Mehrmann said when he learned I’d be checking out their horror houses. “I won’t be in costume then.”

I looked at his fully-painted skeletal face, his big teased wig, and the bush of fake chest hair popping out of his bedazzled plunging neckline. “You might have to reintroduce yourself,” I laughed.

But that’s how they are at the theme park. From the executives, down to the employees who guide and entertain you on the ground, everybody enjoys dressing up and participating in the festivities. We were also told that many of the people who provide the scares are actually professionals during the daytime, such as doctors and lawyers, who enjoy embodying different characters and freaking people out as a form of de-stressing. And they all remain in character the whole time — from eerily friendly clowns to grotesque lab experiments. Some will even growl and suddenly jerk at you when you approach them for a picture. And for a split second you genuinely wonder if it’s okay.

Halloween attractions

Our first stop upon arriving at Ocean Park was the Doraemon House of Gadgets, which was a welcome treat, especially to the avid cartoon fans in our group. Growing up, who didn’t develop a fondness for Doraemon and all the ways he helped his friends with the fantastical toys he pulled from his giant front pocket? Going through the house was a fun and slightly nostalgic experience. We got to pop out of Doraemon’s magic desk drawer, walk through the Mirror Maze, try the Time Machine, and many other magical experiences that were part of our afternoon TV-watching as kids.

We then proceeded to Phantom Studios, where a director guided us through the process of making our own movie. We had a self-deprecating time shooting five-second expressions and movements with our faces, pretending to run away (and stumble) from a dinosaur, and many more antics that resulted in a short clip that we could watch and download at the end of the activity.

We wrapped up the morning with a quick lunch at Tuxedo Restaurant, which had a full view of Ocean Park’s plump penguins, wobbling clumsily and zipping around swiftly underwater. We gathered our strength for the scarier houses ahead on our itinerary.

Facing your biggest fears

Since being briefed on the various experiences that Ocean Park’s Halloween Fest had to offer, we all particularly looked forward to the H14 Ultimate Insanity Test, which we were told would play on our innermost phobias. Prior to entering, we were asked to fill out a questionnaire, indicating the things that scared us the most, for a customized experience. We also received instructions as to what the safe word was, should we not be able to handle the fear.

Upon entering, a mad doctor greeted us, telling him that we were his patients, and to do everything he told us to do. This was our “treatment.” I won’t spoil the experience for you, but it can be likened to the Saw movie series, with each bloody and filthy room requiring us to solve puzzles and find the key to the next room. You accomplish all this through pushing the limits of your fears. Guests had also better watch their backs and that of their friends, as the inhabitants of the house sometimes kidnap those who fall behind the group.

The next attraction, while still Halloween-inspired, was a much lighter one. The Eerie Nippon Journey brought us through a garden of Edo-period design, populated with the nightmares of Japanese folklore. There was a funny kappa (river child) to welcome guests by the pond, a karakasa-kozo (umbrella spirit), a hitotsume-kozo (one-eyed kid), and many other supernatural Japanese creatures, including the enma-daio (King of Hell).

Asian folklore

In previous years, Ocean Park Hong Kong used to fill its Halloween houses with Western-inspired supernatural creatures, such as vampires and werewolves. Today they mine their own folklore and that of their close Asian neighbors for ideas. So walking through the horror houses that they construct can simultaneously serve as scary, screaming entertainment, as well as an opportunity to see how other cultures have been scaring themselves to death at night. I suddenly feel bad about not pitching ideas from Filipino folklore — from our manananggals, tiyanaks, aswangs, kapres, and maybe even the white lady said to roam Balete Drive. 

Other attractions that featured the Asian supernatural world were the Forest of Doom, filled with Chinese legends, and the Chinese Mad-icine Hall. The latter was themed around a terrible doctor gone mad in his obsession with finding an elixir of eternal youth, using his patients in his evil experiments. We entered rooms with human organs and dismembered body parts hanging from the ceiling, acupuncture tables covered with corpses, and cadavers which we originally expected to be mannequins, but turned out to be real people waiting to pounce on us. The idea was to escape the mortuary maze before falling prey to the evil doctor’s diabolical treatments.

The unanimous favorite horror experience in our group was “Yahoo! Hong Kong’s Rigor Mortis LIVE.” We entered the eerie dilapidated public estate that was the setting for the award-winning movie, encountered the ghostly twins in room 2442, and were chased throughout the apartment maze by the masked vampire nurtured back from the dead.

We were told later on that Rigor Mortis LIVE used the old style of horror houses, banking on sudden surprises to elicit scares. Creatures from the movie had a way of flinging themselves at us from dark corners when we least expected it — at times all at once, so that in running away from the masked vampire, we ran into something else and basically walked out with scratchy throats from all our screaming. But we liked it a lot. I think in theme park horror houses where guests already know that all blood is paint and all ghouls are mere actors, playing on human fears of not knowing what lies ahead and rushing at them when they least expect it still does the trick.

The best way to unwind

Finally, after a full and hot day of walking all over the park, it was time to settle into Neptune’s Restaurant for dinner. The carpeted dining place was built around a giant aquarium, where guests can watch a huge variety of fish, sharks and giant stingrays swimming around silently. I didn’t think that I’d care much to see something like that, in the same way that a trip to the zoo is no longer something I’d necessarily go out of my way for. But it was strangely relaxing, seeing sea creatures gracefully move around and around the tank at their own languid pace. It seemed to release every tense and exhausted nerve in our body, more than our cushioned seats could. And when, despite our tired and aching feet, we found ourselves lingering and talking right beside the giant aquarium instead of sitting at our tables, we realized that this was probably something we could do all day.

* * *

Ocean Park’s Halloween Fest continues until Oct. 31. Visit http://halloween.oceanpark.com.hk or call (852) 3923 2323 for information and tickets.

Tweet the author @catedeleon