Author: Chris Glass

Midsummer Scream mixed up a few things in 2019, one of them having Halloween Horror Nights and Knott’s Scary Farm swapping days. I know that sounds trivial, but there’s a certain rhythm you get used to for events and our entire industry is about paying attention to little changes. (I mean, let’s be honest. We keep an eye on blackout dates on different annual pass levels and the paint scheme used on cinnamon bun stands.) Thankfully the most important beats are still there. Midsummer Scream getting a teaser presentation of Scary Farm, and the official announcement of the Knott’s Scary…

There’s a few constants when it comes to seasons at Knott’s. Well, there used to be… Autumn brings Knott’s Scary Farm. Winter brings the ice skating show with Knott’s Merry Farm. Spring is the Boysenberry Festival and Summer is a show in the Charles M Schulz Theater and some night time stunt show on the Calico Stage. That changed this year. While the theater still is playing the amazing Beach Blanket Beagle, now in its second year, the stage has been turned into a park. A park within a park, if you will. Dubbed “Knott’s Summer Nights”, it’s a collection…

If it’s Spring, it must mean it’s time for the Boysenberry Festival at Knott’s Berry Farm. What started out as a more open-ended “Berry Bloom” celebration, has quickly become an annual tradition that gets us all-too excited for what’s in store. The core part of the Boysenberry Festival is the focus on the eponymous fruit. While most theme parks try to theme their food events to a celebration of different cultures, Knott’s inverts that and challenges themselves to come up with as many different foods they can infuse with boysenberries as possible. Now in it’s 6th year, they’re still mixing…

If you can remember way back to July, there was a big reveal during Midsummer Scream’s presentation on Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor. A familiar face walked out, to the surprise of many. Jon Cooke, a maze designer formerly of Knott’s had a chance to work his magic on rejiggering the established mazes at Dark Harbor and we finally had a chance to see if the gamble paid off. Suffice to say, it did. Dark Harbor is one of the big four haunts of Southern California, alongside Universal, Six Flags and Knott’s, which is impressive considering how the others are theme…

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about Knott’s Scary Farm. Now in its 46th year, the team is better than ever at transforming the park into a living manifestation of Halloween. It’s more than mazes and scare zones. It’s more than the monsters. It’s the proof of the saying that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In terms of mazes, there are two new mazes and both feel like they’re going to stick around for a while if they can adapt a little bit. The first new maze is The Depths, from the…

It’s that time of year. Where the summer heat is starting to wane, pumpkins are being stocked at the supermarket, and every Michael’s, Big Lots and 99 Cent store has been stocking spooky merchandise for the last two weeks. Where Universal prefers to trickle out their Halloween Horror Nights information, Knott’s saves it all for a single night. Small amounts are confirmed at events like Midsummer Scream, or they tease the return of some mazes on social media, but the big announcements are saved for the final Thursday evening in August, as has become an annual tradition. Jeff Tucker, Knott’s…

Taking the reigns from Peaches the Clown, this year, Theme Park Adventure’s own Rick West got to host the Six Flags Magic Mountain Fright Fest panel this year at Midsummer Scream. The first new scare zone is Witches Lair. While witches have had a presence at the park for a number of years, this is a scare zone all for themselves and it’ll be right in the middle of Metropolis. And for the first time, there’ll be a scare zone at the back end of the park, near Roaring Rapids, called The Shadows and it’ll be a gory theme. They’re…

By now, there’s a familiar pattern to these panels at Halloween events. Each company has their own twist, but it’s generally started with introductions of the people, banter about the previous years and then a good amount of the remaining time spent on revealing new information. This year, the Halloween Horror Nights panel was anything but traditional. In a literal first, John Murdy, Chris Williams and Micahel Aiello all appeared together on a stage. Murdy, a frequent presence on Twitter, had been collecting questions, and saving up the responses for this panel. He made sure to pick questions that could…

For sheer entertainment factor alone, the Queen Mary Dark Harbor panel at Midsummer Scream has become a must-do, for the great banter between the Captain and the Ringmaster riffing on the seriousness of the rest of the panelists. That kind of aloofness is what has really elevated Dark Harbor in the last few years as their talent during the event is given far more freedom than other competitors, allowing for more intense and personal experiences. Right out of the gate, there was a new member of the Dark Harbor family introduced, but it wasn’t a monster, rather a bigger name,…

Taking a cue from their studio across town, the Warner Bros. Studio has been making strides lately in the theme park side of entertainment, heavily upgrading and promoting their studio tour and running a successful Halloween event for the last two years. From their panel, it was clear the Warner folks were proud of their event. They strongly stressed how they wanted to avoid the conga lines by keeping crowds small, bringing this point up many times throughout the panel. It also takes place entirely on the backlot, a transformed backlot, feeling like a party, or a festival of frights,…