Halloween Season 2024 Retro-SPOOK-tive

As much as I hate to admit it, spooky season 2024 for me is now over, and suffice to say it has been an absolute blinder. I visited a total of 12 attractions that I would class as 'haunts' this season, with a mix of theme park and indie events, as well as  events I'm familiar with and events that were brand new to me. And as with every year, there have been things that have absolutely blown me away, things I've never experienced before in a scare attraction and an all round elevation of quality and innovation compared with previous years.

That's something I just love about this hobby - just when you think something cannot be topped, that you've seen everything you could possibly see out of a scare event, the creators squirrel away to come back with something that's a total game-changer and forces everybody else to take a look at their offering in response. It's so thrilling and exciting to travel across the country (and continent!) year after year to see what the incredibly creative minds behind the madness come up with. With that said, I'd like to start this blog off by  thanking every single one of you for doing this every season, with such passion and dedication, just to scare us in new and twisted ways. It really is the highlight of my year and I know it's the same for others too, and I'm so grateful we live in a world where Octobers and Halloween events exist. So thank you. 

I've never done one of these before, but every year I cram so much in (I know not half as many as some of you manage but still, it feels like a lot!) so I thought it would be nice to take a moment to take stock of the season's events: the best bits, the scariest bits, my favourite things, things that surprised me. a holistic retro-spook-tive of everything I endured if you will, so as to keep log of everything. Honestly I'm sad I haven't done before after a decade of doing this, it's but something I intend to do moving forwards. So what are we waiting for, let's get stuck in!

For the purpose of this one I'm not counting any event that is a series of 'scenes' in a single flow setup like Dr.Fright's and Scare City Experience. For this category, I am only considering new-for-me, stand-alone attractions. In 2024 I did no less than ten new-for-me mazes, and wow, there are some real contenders in here for my favourite. It's quite hard to compare as they're all so different, but in order for me to properly come to an answer I asked myself one question: if I could go through only one of these mazes one more time this season, which would it be? 

And the answer to this really surprised me, but it was indeed The Carving at Tulley's Shocktoberfest! Of all the mazes that have appeared in this location, this one spoke directly to my soul. I loved the retro, Americana 'Fall' vibes of the thing. I loved the glowing pumpkins, I loved the American flags, I am obsessed with the cage room with the all the moving saws, I loved the soundtrack. I absolutely adored all of it and I would love to wander through it one more time this season if I could!

Pretty self-explanatory - my favourite moment this year that made me exclaim 'oh my god!' Sometimes it's out of pure disgust and horror at what I'm looking at, sometimes it's out of fear and sometimes it's out of just being genuinely impressed and shocked with what I am experiencing. And there were a few throughout this season: the reveal of the main 'room' in Noxious Alley at The Howl, the entire Baby Stinkyface room at Horror at Hinchingbrooke House, but the number one stand out 'Oh My God!' moment for me was the exorcism scene in the Basilica of Galgani at Scare City Experience. The theatrics and choreography of the scene, the timing and talent of the actors, the lighting and special effects, it was all just so perfect and not something I was at all expecting. Bravo!

Ten years ago costumes were costumes were costumes at these events. Boiler suits, clown suits, maybe some generic tattered clothing smeared with fake blood or dirt that can read as everything from zombie to victim to psycho killer. What I'm saying is it was all very same-y, very generic. These days you can tell the creatives behind these events go out of their way to think through their costuming and masks to uncover new takes on existing horror tropes to ensure their character designs stand out from what we've seen before, and this year I feel like that's been levelled up tenfold. The punk-rave demons from Deadbeat at Fright Nights and the stunning masks in both Malkin Manor and Jinxed at Screams! were some outs for me, but by and away my favourite of the season has to be the creations of whatever disturbed mind is behind the creature design at Scare City Experience!

What I absolutely adored about these was the dedication to real body horror - actors sunken into sofas and walls to give the illusion of body parts missing or merged with another set piece to become a new creature entirely, some with moving parts to appear as though they're being dismembered. And it wasn't even just gore - I loved the weird...ghost phantom thing on stilts, the giant teddy bear and the spider mutants. It was all just so interesting and different and innovative and probably my favourite thing about the event, of which there was plenty to love and be impressed by. 

Of course, it's not all about the haunts themselves. Especially in scream parks where there's no rides to fill out the fun between mazes, a lot of heavy lifting is done by the talented roaming street teams, the theme of which is usually somewhere between making you jump whilst you're trying to sip a pint or dragging you into some sort of lewd and innuendo-laden conversation to get you all laughing between the screams. I may be wrong, but I feel like Tulleys Shocktoberfest started that trend, and these events do tend to have a habit of 'borrowing' from each other when a particular theme or activity is popular with the punters so it's something we've seen replicated here and there across the UK. I absolutely loved the Shocktoberfest team this year as per usual, particularly the twins who we had an extended and hilarious interaction with (I wonder how long they rehearse together to get all that dialogue exactly in tandem?) 

The Screamfest Burton team were great too - more focussed on jump scares with a lot of screaming and running away; we visited on a fairly quiet evening so we got quite a lot of attention there! But my favourite of the season has to be Screams! Probably the smallest street team I encountered this season but easily the most memorable and the most theatrical. I could have spent all night chatting and interacting with these depraved individuals and they're an absolute credit to the event.

So when I previously mentioned operators borrowing ideas from one another previously, that usually refers to themes or effects etc, but something else I've noticed that has become a bit of a trend has been the themed plastic cups! It's a recycling incentive: essentially when you buy a beer there's an extra pound or two added onto the price as a 'deposit' for a plastic cup, usually with a spooky design themed around the event. Once you finish your drink, instead of throwing the cup away you hand it back and either get a token which you can exchange for another cup when you're ready for another drink, get your money back if you don't want the cup or simply do nothing, and keep the cup as a souvenir.

When you go to a lot of these things as we do the cups very quickly stack up, and have become something of an in-joke for Sam and I, so I'd be remiss to not dedicate a category to my favourite themed plastic cup of the season, which is this little beauty from The Howl, featuring creatures from some of their iconic werewolf themed maze line-up!

If you've been following me since I started documenting all of this stuff over ten years ago, you'll probably be sick of me saying that clowns just don't really do it for me in horror mazes. I have whatever the opposite of coulrophobia is - just completely unphased in every way by clowns. BUT, as the years have passed by I've come to appreciate a good clown maze for what it is, even if they don't get my heebies jeebie-ing. We've seen a huge effort from creators in recent times to add some new flavour to their clowns, to differentiate them from what is expected, and the result of that has been quite brilliant. 

We've had Killer Klowns on spaceships, toxic clowns, electric clowns, dead clowns, zombie clowns - you name it, someone somewhere has clownified it. But the standout clowns for me this year have to be the kings of clowny chaos over at Horror at Hinchingbrooke House this year. If clowns do one thing for me, they have to be unpredictable and erratic and the Hinchingbrooke team had that in shedloads. Horrible, twisted masks, clowns with chainsaws, clowns with horns honking in your face, clowns TICKLING us - all whilst trying to navigate our way through circus tents and soft play theming including an actual ball pit. Horrendous, hilarious stuff.

There's been some glorious set design this year, from the creepy gaslamp lit rooms and hallways of Purgatory at Tulleys Shocktoberfest and the long, winding industrial corridors and creepy creaking sheds of Stourbridge Scare Maze to the wrecked American High School hallways of Howl Valley High at The Howl  and the giant unexploded atom bomb at the centre of Grindhouse for this year's Dr.Fright's Halloween Nights. It's a hard one because every horror maze and scream park creative pours their heart and soul into creating beautiful sets upon which the depravity plays out - it's an art I feel is very much taken for granted by those who don't see or understand the effort that is put into creating these terrifying environments.

The stand-out for me and by far my favourite this season is the beautifully decaying and crumbling interior of the gorgeous Malkin Manor at Screams! I gushed about this set design in my review of the place, but it really is glorious. Something about a classic, gothic haunted house just speaks to my soul and when I'm walking through a horror maze making mental notes for my own interior design inspo you know you're onto a winner. Just gorgeous, authentic feeling stuff, incredible attention to detail with an elevated feel all round.

I've mentioned this a few times throughout the season, but I feel like we're getting back to basics this year in terms of delivering extreme, intense scares. In a post-COVID world it felt like designers were forced to hold back slightly from the place we'd gotten to by 2019, and the years from 2020-2023 were about edging our way back there, with creatives dipping their toes back in and easing us back towards that taste for something more extreme. We've seen themes of separation with the isolation chambers in COMPOUND at Alton Towers and the iconic Blackmarket at Screams! Extreme themes of gore and body horror with the likes of Scare City Experience and Horror at Hinchingbrooke House - fitting considering the likes of The Substance and The Terrifier 3 doing so well in cinemas across the season too. The appetite has well and truly returned for something bone-shakingly, heart-racingly offensive and terrifying, and mazes across the country have answered that call and then some. 

For me, after much deliberation and back and forth, this has to go to Hellcatraz at Screamfest Burton. The Hellraiser, industrial demonic horror theme, the isolation chambers, heading into the complete unknown alone in a brand-new maze and having absolutely no idea where I was going or what would happen to me to then be descended upon in such a way was so intense. It was vibrant, it was extreme, it was over the top, it was unexpected, and I loved all of it. 

You'd think after years of doing this I'd be completley numb to any sort of scare tactics, but truthfully if you nail me with an excellently timed jumpscare I'll still scream my head off or run away as fast as I can in the other direction from a chainsaw wielding maniac. Regardless, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't harder to coax that reaction out of me these days, which is why it is so memorable and special when it does happen. And I'm pleased to say there's been LOADS of them this year - 'electrified' cattle prods shoved in my face in COMPOUND at Alton Towers, zombies running at me out of nowhere and ghouls grabbing at my ankles from the fog below at Stourbridge Scare Maze, the AWESOME stilt ghost spirit creature thing at Scare City Experience moving in such a horrendous and unnerving way. It's been a fright-heavy scare season for sure, and I'm so grateful I haven't become entirely numb to it. 

But there's just something that really gets me about a scare that comes from a direction I wasn't at all anticipating, which is why my favourite scare moment of the season goes to the demon flying overhead in Deadbeat at FRIGHT NIGHTS. It caught me completely off guard, made me jump out of my skin and was just a fantastic and unique use of space and levels.

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All in all it's been a bloody excellent Halloween and scare season. Writing this has been bittersweet, especially as I'm typing this on Halloween itself - the date we spend months celebrating and anticipating but that we also never want to actually come! As always, we've seen loads of development and innovation in 2024 and I cannot wait to see what 2025 brings. 

Did you visit any haunts in 2024? What were your stand outs? Let me know in the comments, I'd love to have a chat!

Scream later xoxo,