It won’t be long before the fog rolls into Buena Park. At Midsummer Scream, Knott’s presented information about the upcoming attractions for Scary Farm this year.
The big focus was on the two retiring mazes, being The Grimoire and Mesmer. This keeps pace with two retirements each year, leaving room for two new ones to take their place, being announced at their event this coming Tuesday.
This led into a deep dive on the history of each maze. The Grimoire was revealed to be heavily inspired by The Goonies and the trouble and adventures kids would get into. It was also a chance for Knott’s to create their version of the Necronomicon, which has now permeated into every new maze at Knott’s Scary Farm.
The maze was originally intended to be on the back stage area, so it had to be extensively reworked to fit in the narrow footprint of Mystery Lodge.
They also revealed some of the easter eggs scattered throughout, that many sharp-eyed guests had already figured out, like the Campbell’s soup knock-off, or all the comic book covers named after other mazes.
Mesmer, the other retiring maze, was revealed to originally have been designed around guests wearing headsets to supply custom audio as you walked through, but COVID stopped that from going forward. They worked on physically separating the music from the audible speech in the maze, however, to give it the same eerie feeling of being hypnotized by Professor Mesmer himself.
They showed some of the character designs and inspirations, going into how every maze and scare zone focuses on a specific color theme, like Ghost Town Streets being faded browns, due to sun-bleaching.
They continued the deep dive by going into some of the decor around the park, specifically the ‘scare cloth’, making the larger-than-life cobwebs you have seen on all the buildings around the park every fall. And then wrapped up by discussing the main entrance centerpiece, which only began as a continuation of what the Boysenberry Festival started.
Unbeknownst to many, this area was also home to multiple lantern activations, including a creepy little ghoul that hid behind a gravestone.
Now, as to what is replacing the pair of mazes? Well, that’ll be all told at Nightmares Revealed, a sold-out event, on August 19th, hosted by The Boulet Brothers.
Knott’s Scary Farm runs select nights from Sept 18th through Nov 1st, and tickets are available now at Knotts.com.
