• A benchmark for immersive and horrific shows, the Manoir de Paris is organizing its festival at the Grande Halle de la Villette for Halloween

  • The asylum, the slaughterhouse, the sanctuary and the supermarket ... So many haunted houses to cross quietly or ... there behind you, run!

  • Horror escape games are on the increase in Paris but also in several large cities in France

Halloween is always an opportunity to scare yourself with movies and series, with family or friends, but always in the safety of your sofa. Video games - and virtual reality - add interaction and therefore freak out. But, let's face it, it's for little players. The more intrepid, or less cowardly, need thrills and thrills guaranteed. In 10 years, Le Manoir de Paris has thus established itself as the benchmark of the “real” haunted house, an immersive and horrific show based on the legends of Paris during the year, and themed during festivals such as Halloween, Christmas or Valentine's day.

This year, the Manor takes over the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris from October 22 to 31 and offers its own 4,000 m² festival, with several spaces, events and above all four haunted houses.

An experience to be extended in the many escape games offered throughout France and increasingly dedicated to horror.

Passages straight out of "Conjuring"

"Do you want to do it again?" »At the entrance to the Asylum of the Manoir Halloween Festival, the« reception »agent assumes that visitors want to multiply the adrenaline shots. We are already going to do it for the first time. And wander the corridors of an abandoned asylum, between disfigured nurses, nutty doctors and crappy experiments. The scenography may be simple, the sets, the characters and a few ideas are enough to raise the fear meter, and for example a labyrinth of sheets stained with blood is enough to drive people crazy.

Some passages also seem straight out of a horror movie, a

Conjuring

, like when a demonic nun appears from a long foggy hallway and rushes at you screaming into The Sanctuary. Perfect jump scare. The influence of cinema is everywhere, and these haunted houses are based as much on immersion and immediacy as on an apprehension linked to our memories as spectators and to clichés of the genre. It is impossible not to think of the

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

among the pieces of bogus and rotten bodies in The Slaughterhouse. You won't escape the Chainsaw Madman, and impressionable or not, pick up the pace to get out of there.

Perhaps the highlight of the show is the Zombie Market Bio, which immerses you in the midst of the zombie apocalypse and revisits the eponymous and cult George A. Romero film in a mall.

To recover from your emotions, you can take a tour by the

American Horror Stories

tent

and its stories by the fireside, on the occasion of the broadcast of the series on Disney +, or ask yourself at the cinema with a selection of films by the Shadowz screaming platform.

Horror at the heart of escape games

Paris is of course not the only city to celebrate Halloween, and Nice, for example, will host Dementia Park from October 23 to 31, with an equivalent system on “the most dangerous criminals staged at the scene of their crimes”.

If the capital is perhaps the best endowed with horrific escape games (the found footage Panik Room, the palace of horrors of DeepInside, the Freak Show of Artimus, Le cannibale de Paris of You Have Sixty Minutes ...), the province is defends well with Dark Experience in Lyon, The Hostel in Bordeaux, The Dark Dreams and Fear in Marveille… Do not hesitate to check, it happened near you.

Series

“Escape” on W9: Escape games, a new playground for fiction?

Movie theater

"Bingo Hell", "The Manor", "Black as Night" ... Welcome to the Blumhouse, the house of horrors from Prime Video

  • Horror

  • Paris

  • Culture

  • Halloween