By Charly SHELTON

Halloween is nearly upon us and, to celebrate the spirit of the season, the local theme parks go all out to bring scary fun to boys and ghouls searching for a good fright. Last week, we saw all that Universal Studios Hollywood had to offer with its Halloween Horror Nights. This week, we travel a little bit farther out to Buena Park to the granddaddy of all haunt events. Now in its 45th year, Knott’s Berry Farm transforms, under cover of darkness, to host killer clowns, headless horsemen and ghastly ghouls at the longest running theme park haunt event in the world – Knott’s Scary Farm. This year, KSF has brought out some old mazes, some new mazes and some refreshment to mazes sorely in need.

The new mazes are pretty cool. “Pumpkin Eater” is based on the lines from classic children’s rhyme “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her; He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well.” It’s based on a maniac with a philandering wife who he killed for her transgressions and put in a pumpkin. Really great art direction with giant pumpkins as set pieces, faces oozing out of rotten jack-o-lanterns and dangling pumpkin innards complete with entangled pumpkin seeds and goopy special effects.

“Dark Ride” is another new maze. It takes guests into an old abandoned carnival dark ride that has been taken over by its decorations – clowns, skeletons, circus animals and the like. Huge elaborate sets within the Snoopy Theater make for a great maze.

The third and final new maze is an update on a well-loved maze that has been around for five years. But let me give some background first.

For the most part, when Knott’s does a maze, it’s around for a while. Maybe they make a few changes, add a room or whatnot, but the maze lives on for years. This is in contrast to Universal’s HHN which hosts almost entirely new mazes each year, with a very occasional repeat from one year to the next. Most other haunts are repeaters too – Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor and Six Flags Magic Mountain’s Fright Fest also keep a maze for as long as it’s good. But the difference with those other parks is the mazes still feel fresh. This year at KSF, it felt like it was time to let some of the mazes go. For example, “Voodoo” opened in 2014 and it was the best maze of the year. An open concept maze, guests picked their own way across buckling bridges over a bayou filled with gators and zombies, weaving through homes of local denizens like a voodoo priestess, crazy hillbillies and more. The following year, they took away the open concept and made it a straight walk-through, added a different entry room with a snake idol and the title got the runner “Order of the Serpent.” The year after that, they did essentially the same maze but fewer of the effects worked.

Now this year it’s the same thing again but backwards – guests enter through a nondescript side of a warehouse, previously the exit, and leave through the beautiful New Orleans two-story mansion, formerly the grand entrance façade. It feels like they’re grasping at straws with this one, as well as with a couple of other mazes, and I don’t know why they do it. The third new maze this year is a prime example of how old mazes should be treated, with new and surprising additions that add to the maze rather than stagnate it.

“Trick-or-Treat” has been around since 2012 and it’s a classic spook-house with all the Halloween greats – ghosts, werewolves, spooky attics, kids in bad plastic masks and a classic green witch using dark magic to bring them all to life. It has felt a little long in the tooth in recent years as visitors grew used to seeing it at each event. So this year, they took out all the lights.

“Trick-or-Treat: Lights Out” is a great maze. Wandering through complete darkness armed only with a faulty flashlight gives a scary new twist to a well-known maze. In this one, I was honestly scared the whole time. Many other mazes don’t scare so much as startle with jump scares. There’s no psychological factor. “ToT: Lights Out” was scary. I was on edge the whole time and, when that flashlight started blinking out, my pulse started racing. If the Haunt designers at Knott’s brought this kind of change to other established mazes, they would benefit greatly.

Overall, the event was pretty good. Not their best effort ever, but definitely not the worst. One word of advice –skip The Hanging. This wasn’t a good year, and it shows in the annual pop-culture roundup show. Instead, go see Elvira’s final year at the park. You won’t be disappointed.

Knott’s Scary Farm is open now and runs through Halloween.

  Charly Shelton