Thorpe Park's annual Halloween event featuring fear-inducing live action scare mazes and other terrifying attractions.
Thorpe Park's annual Halloween event featuring fear-inducing live action scare mazes and other terrifying attractions.
Thorpe Park Fright Nights
Thorpe Park's Fright Nights launched in 2002 (as "Fright Nites") and has taken place annually since then. It has grown into one of the largest Halloween events of its kind in the UK alongside Scarefest at sister park Alton Towers. Whilst Scarefest is aimed at the whole family, Thorpe's Fright Nights is solely targeted at thrillseekers who are up for an evening of terrifying scares, with the park staying open late into the night.
In the early days Fright Nights scare mazes had homegrown themes. Some of the classic mazes included Se7en, which contained seven rooms each themed around one of the seven deadly sins; The Asylum, the controversial theme of which eventually forced Thorpe to close the maze after concerns from mental health activists; and Experiment 10, the first Fright Nights maze to split up groups of visitors and force them to proceed into the maze alone.
In 2013, following a deal with Lionsgate, Fright Nights was relaunched with an overarching horror movie theme. New mazes were built, themed around various horror movie IPs including The Blair Witch Project and My Bloody Valentine. The best of these was Cabin in the Woods, a very well themed "free-flow" maze without a fixed route, which allowed guests to choose their own path.
Following Thorpe Park's deal with AMC, new mazes were introduced for Fright Nights 2017 themed around The Walking Dead TV series. The Walking Dead theme returned for Fright Nights 2018, which was the biggest event to date in terms of numbers, with seven scare mazes. However, the quality of the event suffered, with many of the new mazes lacking any real finese or, in some cases, even scares. Fright Nights 2019 saw the number of mazes and other special attractions for visitors to brave reduced and Creek Freak Massacre, a new scare maze billed as the "most intense Halloween maze in the history of Fright Nights" was introduced.
Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, major changes were made in 2020 and the event became "Fright Nights Fearstival" with mazes (apart from a considerably altered Platform 15) replaced with outdoor socially distanced scare zone experiences.
Fright Nights celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2021, with the new Trailers scare maze celebrating some of the best scare attractions from the previous two decades.
2022 saw the opening of Survival Games which Thorpe Park claimed was their largest Fright Nights investment to date. This was joined in 2023 by Stitches, a scare maze set inside a toy factory which also introduced a new Fright Nights character, The Toymaker.
Experience Jigsaw's twisted traps firsthand in this live action horror maze based on the Saw movies (2010-2018)
Walk down the abandoned railway track in search for the missing ghostly Sleeper Express (2016-2021)
Outdoor zombie filled scare maze based on The Walking Dead TV series (2017)
Survival has become a living nightmare as you try to escape the clutches of the Saviours... (2017-2019)
Venture through the formerly idyllic Dead Creek Woods and attempt to avoid the infected residents (2018)
The final step in your journey to safety is full of danger, with the potential to become food yourself before you can reach Sanctum... (2018-2019)
Explore the legend of the Blair Witch in a journey into the woods after dark (2018-2019)
Enter the Creek Woods Saw Mill if you dare come face to face with crazed chainsaw-weilding lumberjacks... (2019-2022)
Fright Nights 2014