It’s with very heavy hearts that we announce that Vancouver Horror Nights has closed.

Vancouver Horror Nights (“VHN”) was born out of necessity. In 2020, the Provincial Health Officer ordered the Giggle Dam Dinner Theatre, and other theatres, to close because singing and concerts were a high-risk activity during COVID-19. Our theatre was long rumoured to be haunted, and so with the blessing of the Province, the Giggle Dam opened it’s very first haunted house, which ran in both 2020 and 2021 at the Giggle Dam theatre. The event was a massive success with sold out nights and amazing reviews.

In 2022, we expanded to a new location that was bigger and better than ever at Coquitlam Centre. Unfortunately, the City of Coquitlam’s building department did everything they could to continuously come up with new ways to delay our opening, including things like considering our temporary structure the same as any permanently constructed building with all the same rules and regulations — and then some new rules, like taping out a fire lane around the entire floor area, something we had never seen before or since. Each time we would finish complying with their requests, they would issue another full page of changes they wanted to see. The result was the attraction was not permitted to open until 3 weeks into October, which essentially financially decimated the company. Without the revenues from guests, VHN was left with a huge shortfall. As a Halloween only event, we had just a few days to thrill ‘n chill all of our fans, but we did our best to put on a good final show, closing on November 5, 2022. Though we had plans to continue the attraction and makeup the shortfall through private investment, it wasn’t meant to be. VHN was never truly financially stable and the delay from the City was the last straw.

In February 2023, the Giggle Dam’s landlord terminated the lease of the theatre after 21 years, along with it the offices of VHN to make way for a new development. The building sold to the City of Port Coquitlam 3 months later. Creditors from the Giggle Dam came calling and since the assets from the first 2 years of VHN operations were still owned by the Giggle Dam, most of the assets that we used to operate VHN were seized by creditors of the Giggle Dam. All of the mazes and attractions were built using Giggle Dam money, and thus we lost substantially all of our assets to the Giggle Dam’s creditors.

The management and staff of VHN worked incredibly hard to bring an amazing attraction to Vancouver and we’re so proud to have operated for the past 3 years as a truly unique event. We created over 300 seasonal jobs, added new and exciting attractions every year, and had great and wonderful plans for the future. We are heartbroken that the journey must end here.

We would like to thank everyone who worked so hard to the build the attractions from scratch, our amazing actors, attraction staff, makeup teams, and our one of a kind management team, without whom VHN would not have been possible. Lastly, we’d like to thank our fans who came back year after year to support us. We had a blast creating the attraction for all of you and hope we brought some fun to the community during the spooky season.

We are hopeful that someday there may be a resurrection of Vancouver Horror Nights, but until then, we wish you all a scary and safe Halloween.

The VHN Management Team