While visiting Dallas recently, I attended The Fatal End. The weather was just beginning to turn wet after a long draught, but it hadn’t yet begun to storm. It ...

While visiting Dallas recently, I attended The Fatal End. The weather was just beginning to turn wet after a long draught, but it hadn’t yet begun to storm. It was a Sunday evening in early October. After snacking on alligator tail at Gators, we walked over to The Fatal End in Dallas’ West End tourist mall. Talking with the manager, I learned that The Fatal End is a year-round haunt. I wish I hadn’t known that before attended because it prepared me for what I expected to be an attraction that had twelve months of care and upkeep as well as a full staff. That was not to be.

After leaving the ticket booth, we were pointed toward the entrance of the haunt where a fun, friendly man ran through a well-rehearsed precautionary list of things we weren’t to do. There was no line whatsoever, so we were ushered down a flight of stairs and started the tour right away.

The Fatal End is a standard walk-through attraction with one small maze area. Right away, I was worried that it wouldn’t be a high quality adventure. The walls of the haunt were generally plain, straight, and featured an exposed ceiling. This didn’t do much to transport me to a horrifying place though it wasn’t at all as uninspired as some haunts I’ve been in that have nothing more than warped walls of plywood painted black.

I was also saddened to see several objects I shouldn’t have seen, such as an air compressor in the middle of a scene. Some camouflage netting has been carelessly strewn on top of it in an attempt to hide it, but half of it was exposed. This simple thing that would be so easy to conceal really killed the mood.

Before entering, I has asked the usher if the haunt was fully staffed on our Sunday night. He replied with a pithy remark about having enough folks to handle us and promised we’d be “scared”. Not the case. We had followed the twisting plain walls for a couple of scenes before someone finally showed. When they did, I wished they hadn’t. It was the typical young actor with a yell or a roar or a boo that was completely juxtaposed from their character or costume, then they followed us around a bit, and eventually tucked tail into a dark corner.

One of the only creepy moments, and thereby the creepiest, was turning a 180 corner to see a television set on a TV cart at the end of a short hallway. Howdy Doody crackling in eerie black and white was the only light flickering in a small bedroom. As we were walking towards the TV, I had crossed my fingers hoping that there’d be a motion sensor that would cause the show to sputter into a very creepy black and white demonic child trying to grab us through the set or something, but no… Howdy Doody continued playing and there was only a small pneumatic prop of some small gory scene in the bed that had nothing to do with the TV set or the show.


One of the things I was excited about was that The Fatal End is advertised as two-stories of terror! Sounds great!! I didn’t want to let myself believe that a haunt would take the insurance risk of stairs or a real elevator, but when I let my mind wander, I envisioned a creepy elevator or themed staircase that appeared rickety but was really extremely safe and sturdy. So another disappointment occurred when we rounded a corner and came to a wide bare staircase. It had no theme to it. We climbed the stairs and continued the haunt. It didn’t feel as though it was a continuation since there was a separation of the two floors connected by a span of 30 boring seconds, and even worse, it didn’t feel like a two-for-the-price-of-one either. It just felt like an unfortunate situation to have two uninspired floors of attraction divided by an even less exciting interruption.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that the relative quiet and lack of actors did cause me to actually jump a bit when a lone actor (one of ten maybe?) lurched from a hidey near the floor. Otherwise, there were a few interesting animated props that were interesting, but far from engaging or scary.

Overall, I was disappointed with this attraction. Like so many today, the website promises a strong and psychologically terrifying theme, but the house just doesn’t deliver. Even if it weren’t all it promised on the terrifying side, at least it could have been thematically strong. As is, it’s a hodgepodge of thinly connected scenes that take about 15 minutes to walk through.