Knott’s Scary Farm, Howl-O-Scream, and Haunted Delusion deliver the true meaning of spooky season.
The West Coast continues to be the prime destination for Halloween haunts and events that horror hounds from all over the country flock to for a reason. From original immersive theater such as Haunted Delusion to regional theme park haunts such as Howl-O-Scream and Six Flags Fright Fest, plus local LA destinations including Dark Harbor and LA Haunted Hayride, Halloween is alive and well.
It’s thanks in part to Knott’s Scary Farm, which has served as the blueprint impacting the theme park world with over 50 years of operation, predating Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights (which started in 1991). It has really shaped Halloween culture across the country and the kinds of events you can visit now.
While yes, spooky season has become its own fandom for those who embrace it all year long as a lifestyle, it’s not entirely reliant on modern horror franchising. Halloween has always been about ghost stories and putting on masks. So while there is a huge movie and television presence within the subgenre of haunts, it’s one that would still thrive without it. And that proof is in the original work haunters put into their experiences.
Knott’s Scary Farm nears 55 years at this point of largely sticking to traditional storytelling based on cultural horror folklore. It has its own Green Witch, an icon of sorts, alongside all sorts of goblins, ghouls, ghosts, zombies, vampires, and even aliens. Hey, they’ve covered a lot in half a century.
Recently io9 was invited to attend this year’s festivities and got to experience three new mazes with fun mythologies that really represent how Halloween is often bigger than Hollywood. There was Zoo, a maze that took guests through a demented labyrinth of humanoid animal experiments. It was very Island of Dr. Moreau. Then, Cinema Slasher rips both as a maze and literally (as in, the screens you walk through). It’s a parody of a campy horror cinematic universe that comes to life in a theater, complete with a popcorn bucket mascot who chases you with a knife. But our favorite of all was Mary.
If you grew up going to sleepovers that would go from yapping about crushes to descending into the chaos of “Hey, let’s summon Bloody Mary” in the bathroom mirror, Mary really captures the horrors of what saying her name three times in the mirror can set off. In keeping with the park being ahead of the curve in immersive aspects within the mazes, this one had a fun level of interaction where if you said her name in any of the rooms with mirrors while going through this maze, it would activate her horrific presence.
