Drive-in theaters are, by their nature, places of light in the dark: a glowing screen, a field of cars, and beyond that, nothing but black. Someone at the Ozoner 29 Twin Drive-In in Broadalbin, New York looked at all that blackness behind the upper screen and decided it needed monsters.
That decision became Terror Behind the Screen, an immersive Halloween attraction that runs this October at the drive-in on State Route 29 in Fulton County. It is not a haunted house in the usual sense. Guests arrive at the drive-in grounds any time after 6 p.m., then set off on a guided tour that begins as a scenic walk through the Adirondack wilderness and does not stay scenic for long. Scare actors dressed as creatures wait in the fields and forest. There is fog, strobe light, gore, and the deliberate disorientation of darkness. The story, as organizers describe it, eventually puts guests inside their own horror movie: a ritual in the forest awakens a great evil, and the tour walks straight into it.
The event's own materials call it "Twelve Nights of Terror," and the schedule bears that out. Tours run every Friday and Saturday through Halloween, with guided walks beginning at 6:30 p.m. and continuing until the last tour at 10:30 p.m. Organizers recommend arriving about 15 minutes before your chosen time slot, and note that tours may run later depending on crowd size. Tickets are sold online; the event's ticketing page shows a $33 base admission. The event listing spans September 18 through October 31, 2026, with the October run as the heart of it.
What makes the night unusual is what happens after the screaming stops. Guests who survive the forest can stay at the drive-in for a horror movie on the big screen, buy concessions, and browse a craft-fair bazaar stocked with artisan souvenirs and Halloween-themed goods. It is a hybrid that few venues could pull off: part haunt, part movie night, part market, all on the same patch of ground.
The man coordinating the haunt is Devin Wemple. He told WTEN that the goal was to build something that could genuinely scare horror fans while still being something families could enjoy. That tension is written into the event's rules. Terror Behind the Screen is billed as an R-rated experience, complete with disturbing imagery, practical gore effects, and startling moments, but children are not prohibited. Parents and guardians are warned to expect the R rating and to keep their kids beside them at all times. For families who want a gentler walk, the attraction offers glow sticks: a guest carrying one signals the actors to tone things down. It is a small, clever piece of design, and it solves a real problem — the moment a parent realizes, thirty seconds into a haunted trail, that a terrible decision has been made.
The safety disclosure is unusually thorough for a seasonal haunt, and it reads like a document written by people who know their land. Guests are warned about uneven terrain, mud and wet earth, rain, roots, ruts, branches, fog machines, strobing lights, confined spaces, and darkness. Actors will never intentionally touch guests, and guests are not permitted to touch actors. Tour groups must stay together from the walk into the field to the moment they reach the bazaar. Boundary ropes are not to be crossed. It is the kind of fine print that comes from running an attraction on real forest floor rather than a built set.
That forest sits behind the Ozoner's upper screen, one of two 70-foot-wide pole screens at the drive-in. The Ozoner is a relative newcomer as drive-ins go, and its origin story is part of why the haunt feels like a natural extension rather than a gimmick. The theater was built from the ground up by the Wemple family and opened in August 2003. Before the Ozoner opened, it had been 15 years since Fulton County had a single operating drive-in. The family already ran the El Rancho Drive-In in Palatine Bridge, a classic single-screen theater built in 1951 in the farmlands off the Mohawk River, so the Ozoner was not a first venture but an expansion of a family business that had already survived decades of an industry in retreat.
Survival has been the theme ever since. Drive-ins across America struggled as technology and viewing habits changed, and the Ozoner nearly became one of the casualties. By 2014 the theater had not converted to digital projection and was at risk of not reopening the following year. Darci Wemple led the conversion in early 2015, telling The Leader-Herald that the family searched out the best-priced new equipment and pulled together money from family, banks, and remortgages to make the switch — because the alternative was closing entirely. The Ozoner converted and kept going.
That history gives the Halloween attraction a certain logic. A drive-in that fought to stay open by adapting is now adapting again, using the land it already owns — the woods and fields that were simply dark space behind a screen — as the raw material for an entirely different kind of entertainment. The Ozoner holds up to 500 cars across its two fields, is dog-friendly, and is cash-only, with movie audio broadcast over local FM frequencies (90.5 for the lower field, 89.7 for the upper). It is seasonal, open from late April through September in a normal year, which makes an October event a genuine extension of its calendar rather than business as usual.
For all the gore and jump scares, the event's ambitions are local and family-shaped. The bazaar of handmade goods, the concessions, the horror screening, and the glow-stick system all point the same direction: an evening that a horror fan and a nervous twelve-year-old could theoretically spend in the same place. Devin Wemple's stated aim — scary enough for fans, manageable for families — is the whole design in miniature.
And there is something fitting about the setting. The drive-in has always been a place where the audience watches terror from the safety of a car, at a comfortable distance from the screen. Terror Behind the Screen closes that distance. It takes the darkness that used to be the boundary of the experience and makes it the experience itself, then returns guests to their cars to watch a movie about people who should have known better. The walk through the Adirondack woods is real, the terrain is real, and the thing waiting behind the next tree is, at least for the length of a 15-minute tour, meant to feel real too.