The only thing scary about Nightmare Vermont was how scary it wasn’t.

Nightmare Vermont is an all-volunteer, charity Halloween event that’s been running since 2004. The event took place at the grandstand at the Champlain Valley Exposition.

This year, Nightmare Vermont attempted to take the audience into “the bowels of a notorious women’s prison, where evil forces brew and atrocities fester.” They did this by walking groups of roughly 20 people through the grandstand to watch a series of skits.

When we first entered, we were brought into a small room we could barely all fit into where a television turned on and gave us a setup for the storyline (if you can really call it that) about this all women’s prison where the guards are excessively abusive and living conditions for inmates are inhumane.

Halloween is as loved as it is because it provides a fantasy-based escape from reality. This storyline was initially way too realistic, as it was more upsetting and uncomfortable than scary or thrilling. At times it was also very political with a joke about Brett Kavanaugh in the very first skit.

This skit was about an undercover journalist in the prison being told she wasn’t getting out after her article had been published. This went nowhere. When the group went to the next room she was never seen again.

The next two skits also virtually did nothing to further the story or scare in the slightest. The skit was supposed to be a riot however it was just these two guards yelling nasty and triggering things at the prisoners and everyone beating on each other. The fighting was very poorly acted.

Then we were brought into another very small room where I guess we were supposed to be getting headshots for an excuse to use strobe lights. With so many of us in there, I couldn’t see this entire skit. Even if it was mildly scary, I wouldn’t have been able to notice. I could only hear it, and what I heard was a girl using a very disturbingly high-pitched voice talk about eye sight and blindness and a guard saying “Come to Daddy!” repeatedly.

The actors also kept breaking character to pick out someone from the group to be a part of the skit which was very awkward since no one wanted to participate.

I also found myself very annoyed by the actors because every time the group needed to move from one room to another they would scream at us to move. This was not scary for me. I just wanted to scream back at them to shut up.

The next room the group was brought into had blood all over the walls with one wall having what was supposed to be a witchcraft symbol on it. As the skit went on we came to find out the blood was period blood from an inmate. The skit ended with that inmate cursing a guard to bleed out of his ass for the rest of eternity.

Finally, the group was introduced to this “Feminazi” demon from the underworld who planned to eradicate all men. The storyline got messy from here.

Because the demon doesn’t belong in our world, she decided to transfer herself into one of the inmates at this prison. As she yelled about the inmate being reborn while she flailed around on the ground, the group exited and the bizarre experience was finally over.

I didn’t even care how confusing or abrupt the ending was, I was just happy to get out.

This haunted house was an hour long. Essentially it was an hour of watching guards yell bitch and whore repeatedly at the inmates making rape and selling body parts on the black-market jokes and the out of nowhere a demon comes up from the underworld like let’s kill all men.

Nothing about this event was thrilling or scary. It was either flat out uncomfortable or mildly humorous because of how bad it was. I sadly lost out on $15 for this.

I want to give some credit to those who worked on it because I see that a lot went into it and I appreciate the effort; however it was executed poorly and could have been about literally anything else and might have been better.