It’s October so it’s that time of year again where Halloween events start popping up at your local amusement park or random spot in the woods. Knott’s Scary Farm has always been one of the most famous ones in Southern California. This year it features 11 mazes, 1,000 monsters, 3 scare zones, 2 shows, and a lucky 13 thrill rides.
I attended last year and my favorite maze put you straight into one of my favorite video games: Call of Duty Black Ops Zombies. The maze you can tell is inspired by it with its name Special Ops. They give you a gun that keeps score, the people dressed up as zombies have sensors on them, you shoot zombies and work together as a team to get out of there. This year they are bringing Special Ops back with a much bigger maze in Special Ops: Patient Zero. Even your gun has been given an upgrade with kill streak rewards and a health meter. If you run out of health, you have to go to a respawn area. Sounds awesome, huh? I was so pumped to do this at this year’s Knott’s. Check out my interview with design specialist for the maze, Jon Cooke, which also shows video from last year’s Special Ops.
While last year was the first time they did it and my gun broke down a minute into the maze, I still had a ton of fun yelling bang bang at the zombies running towards me. But again, this year they have new guns. And the guns broke down early on in the night. Everyone who does it has to pay extra and has a set time to do the maze. When they finally got all the guns up and running, the time slots were back up for a couple of hours. Even with your fast pass or fright pass as they call it, you still had to get to the back of the line. I was pretty bummed about this. I could wait in line all day to do the one maze or do the other mazes. I got bummed again when 2nd Hanging show was canceled due to humidity in the air. Damn you El Nino! But I got over both these things with the amazing Elvira Asylum stage show. The show featured nonstop entertainment, and non stop boob jokes. Which also had one of the longest and funniest hash tags #MyGodElviraLooksAmazingAndSoYoungAndSuperSexy!
The 11 mazes were all great. Returning were some classics like the Edgar Allen Poe inspired maze Nevermore which puts you inside his most famous poems like The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart. You will never think the same of Disney’s classic tale in the Pinocchio maze where Pleasure Island is more like horror island. Speaking of Disney. Are you a fan of Frozen? Do you hate Frozen? If you answered yes to either question then Dead of Winter is the maze for you. It basically takes the story and turns it into a horror movie, with the snow queen coming after you. You thought going to the dentist was scary, wait until you go through The Tooth Fairy maze at Knott’s Scary Farm. By far it is the the scariest maze, with gruesome images of teeth being pulled that you won’t get out of your head for weeks. Of course they have that non stop dentist drill noise going throughout the maze. Knott’s added live people scaring you on the mine train ride which is now called My Bloody Clementine. It was awesome! I’m hoping they will bring back live people on the log flume ride at Knott’s Scary Farm. I grew up on the east coast and everyone calls it the log flume ride there, but in California everyone calls it the log ride. Why is that? Anyway….
Buy your tickets or season pass now at https://www.knotts.com/scaryfarm/