Knott’s Scary Farm: Nightmares Revealed announces new mazes, shows and more
- Share via
Many might think Knott’s Scary Farm activities only happen in October. But for Halloween and horror fans in the know, Knott’s Berry Farm starts turning scary much earlier in the year.
And even the late summer heat couldn’t stop the hordes of fans gathered at the annual Knott’s Scary Farm: Nightmares Revealed event on Aug. 18, when the Buena Park theme park announced all its new and returning shows, mazes, scare zones, food and more.
The sold-out event also included a creator’s panel with details about the new mazes from designers at the recently revamped Bird Cage Theatre, lights-on tours of some mazes, makeup and wardrobe demos, an appearance by drag artists the Boulet Brothers and plenty of scare actors ready to go for the Halloween season. Knott’s Scary Farm opens Sept. 17 and runs select nights through Oct. 31.
“Are you ready for some scare fog in the summer?” master of ceremonies Jeff Tucker said as he got the crowd going at the start of the presentation. “We’ve only been waiting almost a year for that Scary Farm goodness to come rolling in.”
This year’s lineup includes 10 mazes, five scare zones and three shows. Two new mazes were announced: “Inked” and “Unearthed.” The former features Mortimer Morbid, a washed-up 1930s cartoonist and former head of Morbid Studios, who brings his cartoon characters to life with blood and ends up unleashing a legion of murderous toons who want to pull viewers into their world.
“It has been two years in the making,” said Scary Farm art director Daniel Miller, who also created last year’s then-new, military-experiment-gone-wrong maze called “the Zoo.” “In fact, we pitched Inked before we pitched ‘Zoo.’ They realized that ‘Inked’ needed time because we had to do all original animation for it. So we took our time to do that.”
Meanwhile, the “Unearthed” maze features guests as part of a search-and-rescue team that arrives at a ravaged base at an excavation site days after receiving a distress signal — where the discovery of ancient tablets has awakened a malevolent force from a forgotten age.
“As they begin to read it, they notice that these ghastly creatures and something strange begins to happen in the caverns, which leads to what we call the smoking gun of the existence of the Anunnaki,” said art director Jon Asperin, who led the maze’s design. “Anunnaki is this ancient Mesopotamian deity that have roots all the way from the Syrian times, Mesopotamian times, Sumerian times. It’s crazy. It’s wild.”
This year’s Scary Farm also launches two new shows, “Voodoo: Bayou’s Edge” and “Occultum Curated by Magic Castle.”
“Voodoo: Bayou’s Edge,” showing at Calico Mine Stage, is a musical journey with Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, who heads into the court of Baron Samedi, Lwa of the dead, with dancers drifting through the mist as the New Orleans cemetery awakens.
“It’s actually inspired by the Fèt Gede, it’s a celebration of voodoo and heritage. It’s celebrated in Haiti, actually celebrated in New Orleans as well,” said art director Gus Krueger, who led the scenic design for the show. “It’s really just that New Orleans voodoo style. It’s a musical celebration … it’s percussive, it sort of gets in you, it’s very beat-driven. It’s more party than show, if you will. But it does have a great dance crew, it has aerialists, it has fire performers.”
“Occultum Curated by Magic Castle” takes place at the Bird Cage Theatre and will feature an array of magicians from the Los Angeles-based, private club Magic Castle.
“Thirty-five years ago, I actually worked at Knott’s Scary Farm. And then a couple years after that, I actually got TV specials from being here at Knott’s Scary Farm. So it really means a lot to me,” said comedic magician Rudy Coby, who describes himself as “the coolest magician on planet Earth.”
Long-running, Boardwalk-area scare zone CarnEVIL returns this year but has been reimagined from “Mesmer: Sideshow of the Mind,” a Scary Farm maze that ended its run last year. The backstory is that under the watchful eye of the hypnotist Mesmer, the circus has evolved into a more sinister spectacle with the sideshow as the main event, along with countless evil clowns and other curiosities.
“What I wanted to do was really put the evil back in CarnEVIL,” said Krueger, who led the reimagining of the scare zone. “With the retirement of Mesmer as a maze, it was a great opportunity for us to bring the sideshow back and actually incorporate Mesmer as a character into CarnEVIL.
“So that was a great kind of starting point to get this idea I have running again. And it was from there, I knew we wanted to have Mesmer sort of being this shadowy person behind the scenes running the show. It’s a continuation of the story from the maze, but it also gives us an opportunity to bring Mesmer’s sideshow back, also bring a new character, the Clown Maker, who is the queen of the clown … And it gives a chance to really create sort of a new palette using our old palette.”
