Scare City 2024 offers a spine-chilling Halloween adventure set in the eerie ruins of the Camelot Theme Park in Chorley, with unique scare zones and unforgettable characters, P M BUCHAN writes
Scare City, Chorley Review
Scare City Experience is an annual horror attraction set in the ruins of the derelict Camelot Theme Park in Chorley, North-West England. This immersive, interactive experience utilises the surviving architecture of an abandoned theme park, which closed in 2012, to terrify participants over a sequential trail of scare mazes that was described in previous iterations as the world’s longest outdoor horror attraction.
Scare City began in February 2022 as Camelot Rises, a zombie-themed drive-through where visitors travelled through a zombie trail, populated by live scare actors, culminating in a drive-in cinema against the backdrop of the remnants of Camelot Theme Park.
The event proved to be so popular that Camelot Rises led to the first Scare City dedicated Halloween event, using sections of fairground and castle from the family theme park to create a walking trail of horror dioramas and mazes to explore.
The launch of Scare City made news around the world and the event proved so popular that it was sponsored by Swizzels, one of the UK’s best-recognised confectionary manufacturers (a brand that incidentally names Halloween as its biggest sales period).
Year-on-year, Scare City grows in ambition, expanding on the most successful elements and adding new mazes, new stories, and new scares. Scare City 2024 boasts ten scare zones, intricate set designs, and live actors wearing some of the most horrific costumes and makeup of any attraction in the UK.
Based on promotional footage from the early events, it seems that some of the most frightening and disgusting masks and creature designs from the inception of Scare City are revived each year, giving the actors an opportunity to retain the most gruesome designs and build on them each season of events.
Scare zones for 2024 include Slaughter House, Carni Valley, Arakhne, Basilica of Galgani, Infirmary, Reaper’s Ranch, Junkyard, Vallis Mortis, and Contained. In practice, this means passing through carnivals (made more interesting by the site’s family fun history), abandoned churches, zombie containment facilities and more.
There’s a tendency for most Halloween scare mazes in the UK to draw from the same limited pool of themes and tropes, including clowns, nuns, hillbillies, and zombies, but the variety of mazes at Scare City and the ingenuity of the costumes and set designs means that some areas stand out for their originality.
Arakhne is a claustrophobic (if very linear) maze tangled with webs and inhabited by a gymnastic group of scare actors covered in eyes and prone to dropping out at visitors unexpectedly.
Basilica of Galgani takes the familiar theme of corrupt nuns but includes an exorcism, similar to the standalone Exorcism of Evelyn Grace performance seen in FEAR Scream Park at Avon Valley.
Reaper’s Ranch features a standout section of red light/green light, where visitors can pass along the path when the light turns green, but will be mobbed by scarecrows if they move at the wrong time.
Together, there are enough novel elements for Scare City to compare favourably to any of the big annual Halloween events in the UK.
New for 2024, FrightVision cameras in the final scare zone of Scare City capture your experience escaping from the zombie containment area, offering a souvenir of your time in the scare maze. The footage comes with an additional cost, and has an entertainment value that grows exponentially depending on how unnerving you found your time among the zombies.
Scare City offers a unique Halloween experience, taking advantage of a setting that few other scare activities can rival. The grotesque characters inhabiting the scare mazes include some incredible actors and some seriously ghoulish costumes, leaving an impression that lingers long after you’ve departed the site.
Scare City has returned to the North West every Halloween since the event launched, but who can say how long a site like Camelot Theme Park will be left to ruin? With such an unrivalled atmospheric setting, it might be best to wisest to treat each year of Scare City as if it could be the last.
You can visit Scare City website for more information.
Have you experienced the Scare City? Tell us about your spookiest moments 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.
