As long as I’m pontificating, I’ve been thinking about why this year feels odd. The music is part of it, but I’d question how large a part. There is also a sense of scattered identity in the merchandise that feels a bit reminiscent of 15, with the vague sense that departmental clash produced a lack of focus and diluted the traditional Halloween approach.
I think a much bigger part, however, is that the houses often failed to deliver on the specific expectations their description and theming produced. On paper, this year has one of the cleverest, most varied, and most enjoyable lineups in the events history. In practice, house designers often seemed to have approached their subject in an unexpected, often counterintuitive manner. In one case, this produced a truly great house - Pier, with its unique prioritization of mood over jump scares. Elsewhere, however, the almost elliptical approach was either not helpful or actively detrimental, producing a sense in guests that something is a bit off.
Monsters, for instance, promises a colossal three-way conflict but essentially offers a Mummy house with brief and vaguely disconnected appearances by the Wolfman and Drac. Bugs builds expectations for a humor house mocking 50s “houses of the future” via the giant bug films of the period like Them, but quickly loses any satirical edge to a succession of gross out rooms. Coven seems to promise locations and mood akin to the Kit Kat Club from last years Legendary or the club spaces in Dusk til Dawn or Demon Cantina, with copious mugs and molls scattered throughout, but delivers only narrow, dim, sparsely populated hallways that offer nothing like the promised good-time speakeasy. Even Halloween, presumably to avoid copying the stronger house at 24, offers an odd assortment of scenes often depicted in strange ways - for instance, Annie’s car scene, pivotal to both the film and prior house, is absent, Loomis is barely featured, and the closet scene is shown in a profoundly weird way.
I could go on (obviously), but I think this failure to meet expectations or attempts to meet them in odd ways contributes to an overall sense that something is off. I think something similar holds true with the music. The streets, on the other hand, are completely straightforward, exactly what one would expect from the description and very in line with the event’s back-to-basics theme - and they’ve earned almost universal praise.