Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
As you make your way up the path through a pumpkin patch where there are many lovely dangling paper ghosts and things of the sort for you to be frightened of, you spy a sign written in marker that reads “Welcome to Pumpkinville.” You see the pumpkins are on sale for $2 to $4, depending on size.
Next you catch site of a wooden arch in the shape of a pumpkin with a mouth acting as a doorway. All around him are D.A.R.E. signs and police officers. Ironically enough, this pumpkin looks very much like he himself is on drugs. You expect it to go all downhill from there.
Within 20 minutes you are running through a cornfield maze dodging grim reapers, “Scream” stalkers and a crazed hockey-mask wearing chainsaw killer.
“Field of Screams,” is the latest of D.A.R.E.’s (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) “Fright Night,” which is held every year around Halloween. This year, it decided to hold its haunting at a corn field on Taft Highway, 1 mile west of Old River Road. It’s held Friday through Sunday until Halloween, and costs $6 to enter.
A maze in the cornfield serves as the “Field of Screams,” and the effect is good. With movies like “Children of the Corn,” “X-Files: Fight the Future,” and more recently, “Signs,” people have come to see cornfields as a place of true terror. And soon you realize firsthand just how frightening they can be.
The first stretch of the maze isn’t that scary. Mostly it features meandering children with faces barely painted. They “hide” behind cornstalks and wait for the few who didn’t see them to come close enough to startle. There’s also a few behind the scenes guys throwing sand at the corn for dramatic effect.
“I liked the guy with the sharp teeth. He threw dirt on us,” says Erin Sullivan, a student at Columbia Elementary School, who loves to be scared.
A bored individual might take this chance to sneak up on these made-up children and dirt throwers and do a little startling of their own.
Next you come to a patch out of the cornfield where there are many scarecrows on display. There’s a headless one, and one who bears a striking resemblance to Dickens’ Jacob Marley from “A Christmas Carol.” Shortly after jokingly saying to yourself? “God bless us, everyone,” you follow the path back into the cornstalk. From there, all hell breaks loose.
As you walk through the maze, which you now discover is a lot larger than you had anticipated, music plays from unseen speakers as you run into all manners of monsters.
“The scariest part was the boogley eyed monster,” says Sohna Burce-Oliver, a student at Fruitvale Elementary School.
A Jason from the “Friday the 13th” movie series makes an appearance with a realistic sounding chain saw. Is it real? You want to see, but you are too startled to go find out. Suddenly the Grim Reaper shows up out of nowhere. But don’t fear the reaper, there’s aliens ahead.
You visit an alien crash site, with many miscellaneous sound bites ranging from old ’50s sci-fi movies to the cinematic masterpiece “Masters of the Universe.” Lights from the spaceship glow, as the radioactive smog covers your path. Things yell at you from below, but you have no idea what they are. You find the way leading from the crash site, but the worst scare lies just ahead. But that’s something you must experience for yourselves. In fact there may be even more surprises if you visit.
“We’ll be adding some new exciting thrills new for this weekend, even if they’ve been there before, they can expect something new,” says Karen Bennett, one of the planners and organizers of “Field of Screams.”
You leave the cornfield, realizing how scary a group of kids, city volunteers and police officers working to raise money for education against drugs are capable of being.