Tulley’s Shocktober Fest in Crawley offers Europe’s largest Halloween Scream Park experience, with scare mazes, live entertainment, and spooky attractions that draw visitors from across the globe, writes P.M. BUCHAN
Shocktober Fest at Tulley’s Farm, Crawley
Shocktober Fest at Tulley’s Farm in Crawley, just a short drive away from Gatwick airport, is an annual Halloween festival that bills itself as Europe’s largest Scream Park.
Running since 1996, the immersive event features 11 scare mazes (or Halloween haunts), live bands, roaming performers, and new for 2024, the Carneval Cabaret.
Renowned as the biggest Halloween attraction in the UK, Shocktober Fest is the holy grail for scare lovers in the Spooky Isles.
With witch trials, chainsaws, nuns, clowns and cannibals, Shocktober Fest ticks all the boxes that you would expect in a UK scare attraction, but with a budget and scale that far exceeds what you can expect at most regional (smaller) events.
As soon as you enter the site the carnival atmosphere begins, with a multitude of food vendors and bars, merchandise stalls and photo booths, plus plenty of fires to warm yourself around as the night sets in.
There’s so much happening at Shocktober Fest that you could feasibly enjoy a night without setting foot into any of the scare mazes.
As you’d expect from an annual event that has been running for nearly 30 years, the mazes are constantly changing and you can expect something new every October, whether that means the retirement and replacement of one of the older mazes, or a new gimmick to experience on the night.
The longest running maze, the Creepy Cottage, turned out to be one of our favourites when we visited. Possibly because it drew less visitors than other mazes, we found that the actors worked harder than anywhere else to frighten us.
This included several mannequins that came to life as we crept past them, and someone scrambling between the walls of a corridor in a hideous spider-walk that was reminiscent of The Exorcist and unlike anything I’ve seen at any other scare maze.
Two new mazes for 2024, Purgatory and The Carving, attracted long queues, but both felt too reminiscent of other attractions. Purgatory featured undead nuns and a route that visitors illuminated with the help of a lantern that flickered and failed at set points, but the actors felt like carbon copies of the nuns from FEAR at Avon Valley’s Malefica, and the lanterns would have been a great addition if groups of visitors hadn’t bunched together, spoiling the effect.
The Carving, similarly, felt like another Americana re-tread of redneck cannibals, like so many other attractions in the UK, redeemed only by some disgustingly convincing skin-masks worn by the actors.
Two standout mazes at Shocktober Fest that felt uniquely brilliant were Doom Town and the Wastelands Penitentiary. Doom Town features the best set build that I’ve seen at any UK horror attraction, including city streets, abandoned cars and looted shops that were occupied by shuffling zombies, giving the impression of experiencing Resident Evil 2 in real life.
Wastelands Penitentiary utilised a similarly brilliant prison construct, with a queuing system of bars and locked doors that was reminiscent of the labyrinthine queue for Smiler in Alton Towers. Once you’re inside the jail, the actors and scenery are all in place to evoke the feeling of trying to escape a prison riot.
Unfortunately, during our visit the biggest scare mazes suffered from overcrowding, with groups bunched together in a way that diminished the scares and gave a production line feel. Shocktober might have been a victim of its own success in that respect.
We had fast track tickets to skip most of the queues and only just managed to experience every maze before closing time. I can’t imagine feeling very happy if I had queued for an hour for a new maze and then queued through the maze itself, as we did on several runs.
The Carneval Cabaret, new for 2024, was one of the highlights of Shocktober Fest, with a brilliant vampire host, showstopping tricks that included sword swallowing, electric currents and a lot of fire, plus a charismatic cast that were keen for audience participation.
Couple the cabaret with some unexpected moments of brilliance, such as the Coven of 13 witch-trial maze that was wildly disorienting, eerie and atmospheric beyond belief, and there was enough magic to create a fantastic night and assuage our doubts.
Shocktober Fest at Tulley’s Farm is one of the UK’s greatest Halloween success stories and undoubtedly a must-visit for anybody who loves horror events. Anybody who enjoys the dark and macabre is sure to find something to love there, but the true measure of a Halloween haunt is how scary the experience is.
With over 100,000 guests flocking from around the world to visit Shocktober Fest each year, that’s a lot of people to get through the doors of each scare maze.
If you’re looking for true terror, the answer might be found in some of the up-and-coming scare mazes in more remote regions of the UK.
Have you experienced this famous Halloween event? Share your thoughts in the comments section!
P M BUCHAN is a writer whose stories have featured in Rue Morgue, Kerrang!, and Starburst. He writes about horror, dark art and the occult here. You can follow him on Twitter and Linkedin and visit his website.
