Scott Kearnan

Scary movies usually play on fears of isolation. Think: a babysitter alone in a big house, camp counselors lost in the dark woods, road trippers taking a wrong turn toward bloody chainsaws in the middle of Nowhere, USA.  Is it even possible, then, to get spooked by a self-described “Hollywood-caliber haunted house” at an upscale real estate development in a bustling city?  It was a dark and stormy night when I arrived at the looming gates of Boston’s Wicked Haunt Fest to find out.  [Dramatic chord, rumble of thunder.]   Photograph: Courtesy Wicked Haunt Fest The two-acre scare park has erected three themed haunted houses and a carnival-like midway—complete with a live music stage, pop-up shops, bars and a beer garden—in Charlestown’s Hood Park, an “urban campus” that boasts luxury apartments and ground-floor retail tenants. Halloween-season haunts are typically associated with sleepy suburbs and country towns where nobody can hear you scream, not with paved city lots in earshot of an indoor cycling studio and an Aveda Concept Salon. And yet there was Wicked Haunt Fest, “Boston’s first-ever large-scale Halloween festival,” a hulking setup aglow with theatrical orange, red and purple lights, barking eerie plumes of fog into the black sky.  My Time Out editor tapped me for this experiential assignment because I’m an avowed enthusiast of scary movies, ghostly tales, haunted houses and all things Halloween. Surely my in-depth knowledge of every slasher film franchise of the last