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3. Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye

Image: Disney

Location: Disneyland

Take a stroll through Disneyland’s Adventureland and you’re likely to see at least a few kids with their eyes closed tight. That’s because they’ve heard the legend of the lost god Mara, said to grant any who descended upon his temple one of three gifts: timeless youth, earthly riches, or visions of the future. The catch? If you so much as peek into the dark and corroded eyes of Mara, you’re done for.

It’s a surprisingly visceral, dark, and dramatic storyline for a park with a pink fairytale castle, but Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye is unequivocally the must-see 21st century E-Ticket of Walt’s original Magic Kingdom, envied by other Disney Parks across the globe.

Image: Disney

From its astounding queue – nearly a mile, wrapping through the exhaustingly detailed temple’s antechambers, caverns, and altars – to the mile-a-minute dark ride, every second spent on Indiana Jones Adventure is a spectacle and a living, breathing example of the feats Imagineering can accomplish when freed of budgetary limitations and given the chance to give it their all.

Most astoundingly, the ride vehicle – the enhanced motion vehicle or EMV – is the Temple’s star, as it simulates rough terrain, banks around corners, climbs over debris, and more. Each troop transport, in fact, is programmed with its own subtle “personality,” with each reacting to darkness, sounds, or surprises by bucking, sliding, or stalling altogether! Along the route through the temple, riders teeter over roiling lava pits, face scorpions, snakes, darts, rats, and spiders, float through collapsing chambers, and rumble over a wooden suspension bridge before Mara’s corroded 40-foot tall face. Indiana Jones Adventure turns one of Disney’s darkest legends into one of its most harrowing, intimidating, downright scary adventures yet.

2. DINOSAUR

Image: Disney

Location: Disney's Animal Kingdom

As the price tag of Disney’s Animal Kingdom ballooned, a team of Imagineers was hard at work on the concept of a land dedicated to dinosaurs – still at the height of their popularity in the years following Jurassic Park, and an obvious way to make Disney’s animal park feel like more than a zoo in the eyes of guests. When the land was almost cut to instead fund the never-built Possibilityland: Beastly Kingdom, the dino-focused designers made Michael Eisner a deal he couldn’t refuse: they promised that Animal Kingdom could cheaply double-dip from the technology developed for the brand new Indiana Jones Adventure, simply restaging the ride as a thrilling prehistoric adventure.

The result was Countdown to Extinction, a wild, off-roading adventure in the very last moments of the Cretaceous. Our goal? To locate and retrieve an Iguanodon from the brink of extinction. Our problem? One very mean, very terrifying Carnotaur (that’s Latin for “meat-eating bull,” mind you…) a day-glo predator with a mean roar, a pair of wild eyes, and a surprisingly fast sprint.

Image: Disney

While the ride is an almost-identical clone of Indy’s track layout (with just a few… eh hem… cut corners), Animal Kingdom’s ride places guests in perpetual darkness, bounding left and right among lightning flashes and too-close encounters with dinosaurs. The paper-thin, uneven plot (sometimes self-serious, sometimes corny to the point of frustration) is really just an excuse to race through the Cretaceous, ricocheting between encounters with dinosaurs (which themselves range from impressively engineered animatronics to literal static mannequins bolted to the ceiling… Look, no one’s saying it’s a masterpiece…).

In any case, in 2000, Countdown to Extinction was renamed DINOSAUR to promote the film of the same name released that year (which, oddly enough, also revolved around an Iguanodon and Carnotaur, though demonstrably not the same ones in the dark ride). Expecting that the new tie-in would draw younger guests, a few deliberate details were put in place to try to make the ride less intense… but c’mon… a rough, off-roading vehicle racing through prehistoric jungles where terrifying, screaming reptiles are leaping out of the darkness as a flaming meteor hurdles toward Earth? Loud, bold, and frightening, DINOSAUR remains one of the scariest attraction’s Disney has ever designed, even in its “relaxed” form.

1. The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

Image: Disney

Location: Disney's Hollywood Studios

There’s simply nothing that’s not scary about the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. People of all ages have been known to avert their eyes from the 200-foot-tall gothic citadel of sunset tiled roofs, twisted columns, and Neo-Mediterranean minarets looming ominously over Sunset Blvd. Even if its exterior weren’t lightning-scarred or its once-grand neon sign not sparking and dislodged, the lost Hollywood Tower Hotel would be a fortress for Tinseltown’s elite.

That’s to say nothing of the ride inside – a staggering thrill in its own right wrapped into an eerie, atmospheric, unsettling shell. From cracked, dry fountains and old time jazz standards echoing eerily through long-abandoned gardens to cobwebbed-covered libraries, steaming boiler rooms, and one particularly feared maintenance service elevator, the dark history of the Hollywood Tower Hotel is one of the most clever original stories ever devised for a Disney Park. And the thirteen story faster-than-gravity freefall doesn’t hurt either.

Image: Disney

The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is, in many ways, a pinnacle of Disney Imagineering. Those looking for the inside story on how and why Disney designed a drop tower at all will find it in the in-depth feature published here on the unexpected and almost-unbelievable closure of Disney California Adventure’s version of the ride, Lost Legends: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. From psychological chills to free-fall thrills, the ride lives up to its name... and then some.

Now, we want to hear from you. Did we miss any of Disney’s scariest attractions? What rides or shows left you shaking as a kid or even an adult? What phobias do Disney attractions play on? Do you agree with our top three picks? 

 
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