ScareLA 2017: Still Scary, Downtown Not Needed

It's warm and sunny. There's loud annoying music playing outside. And there's the constant noise of basketballs hitting the ground. A small dorky kid has goggles and a basketball uniform on. He runs past us as his father asks him does he know where to go. He takes one look at the ScareLA sign and runs away from it to have a fun day at the Staples Center. That's the entrance to ScareLA.

Eeeh, that's what our experience was as we started ScareLA 2017. ScareLA has moved past the Pasadena Convention Center, which we truly loved as the location. Instead, we could enjoy having to share the location to whatever Nike3On was and whatever basketball game was going on that day, which looked very engaging. Let's not forget $20 overpriced parking at the Convention Center itself. Because you always gotta give a hand to that greed.

Once inside, past the underutilized West Hall Lobby, where you could still see (laughing, writing about it) people playing basketball, you wonder if you're in the right location. There's so much wasted space until finally you're in ScareLA.

Finally, inside the main West Hall we were confronted with a much more terrifying atmosphere celebrating Halloween, haunts and how-to's. ScareLA is more of a how-to-make-horror convention. It has elements and promotions from horror movies, sure. But its real purpose is for you to start thinking about Halloween. What haunts you'll want to see around SoCal, with an entire mini haunts section. What props you'll want to get, to make your Halloween party or your own haunt scary. Some known horror icons to make it a bit special.

We know we drag it down and bury it for being downtown, but for those who love horror it's an early start for LA's already ludicrously busy Halloween season.

As we were getting zombie make-up done to us for free for playing a zombie sensor game called Z-Tag we heard the voice of the Crypt Keeper, John Kassir, summoning us to other events around the convention. We were too busy as we had to visit booth after booth of horrible goodies to get for the perfect Halloween party.

We couldn't choose between which products we liked more, Blood Rugs, Rip City's brand new blood Chum or The Webcaster Gun. We really wanted to purchase the pool toys from Blackcraft, they had a lovely Planchette and Pentagram pool float.

All the while we passed the oddly everywhere VR experience for the new "It" film and "Annabelle Creation." We would have rather liked to have played Wise Guys Events blindfolded Macbeth fight to the death. We couldn't stop, so we visited booth after booth of scary stuff instead.

We found an amazing sounding event, Sweet Sorrow A Zombie Ballet taking place Oct 8. We'll remind you with our annual Halloween Guides and list. A ballet filled with zombies taking place after Romeo and Juliet with the two becoming the undead! We can't wait to see it!

Some fans came in costume and even though downtown isn't the best place for it, there's nothing quite like seeing a costume skeleton man looking very tired looking for his car followed by other ghouls and monsters.