Fright Nights is back for 2013 and has some major changes! Thorpe Park has teamed up with lions hate to bring some of there famous horror movies to life in a love action horror maze. This years line up is Cabin in the woods, Saw Alive, My bloody valentine, Blair Witch, You're next and The Asylum.
The park entrance and plaza area was given a fright nights makeover with stickers stuck over the pre booked booking office banners with a fright nights theme added to them and a fright nights banner added to the entrance to the park. Unlike previous Fright Nights the park didn't add a lot of park wide theming however when you got to the axes you would find theming related to that maze outside. For example for the maze my bloody valentine there was train track and a mine cart. The park lighting for the event was fantastic, previously Stealth has just been left with a few coloured flood lights however this year the park added a big colour changing light to the bottom of the ride for the event.
With rides and mazes open until 10pm there was plenty of time to get on everything you wanted to. We went on park multiple times and out of 4 visits to the park for the event 3 of them every roller coaster became walk on around 8pm making it very good if you just want to do Fright Nights for the night rides on the roller coasters. However the maze queues could get quite long with Cabin in the woods always having the longest queue of them all with The Asylum hardly ever getting a queue longer than 10-20 minutes.
The Asylum and Saw Alive were the only mazes to make a return this year from previous years events and we couldn't imagine a Fright Nights event without the Asylum. New for 2013 is brave it alone where you go alone in the maze and all of the actors concentrate on you. Our brave it alone review of the asylum can be found in the reviews section.
Your next is a set of actors that roam the park with cross bows, axes and there latest victim. As well as posing for photos and selfies they seem to just keep attacking there victim and chasing after people! We've seen one actor chase a girl all the way from Nemesis Inferno down to Slammer!
The Asylum hasn't changed much apart from maybe a few more actors in the maze this year. However it is still as good as ever! The maze is themed around a mental hospital with people jumping put at you and coming very close to your face. Making a return for 2013 is the chainsaw at the end of the maze which makes the group run out of the maze, very amusing to watch If your not brave enough to go in. Saw Alive horror maze was rumoured to be changed for fright nights however this didn't happen however the maze was full of actors like before and very funny if you got a group that have never been in the maze before.
Cabin in the woods was by far our favourite maze due to the fact that you can make a choice of what room to go into. Along with hidden rooms located thought the maze. It's very different to the other mazes on offer, in the film we see monsters such as the clowns and people with bags over there heads but in the film we only see these at the end where they purge the system and let everything out. This maze brings some of those characters to life and even has the merman on a screen in the maze!
My bloody valentine located in the arena has replaced experiment 10 with much the same layout but with a different story line. All of the rooms have been changed and we would say that they have made the maze less scary than experiment 10, the scariest past used to be that you were put in a room by your self for a few seconds but now you walk past that section not doing very much! Possibly one of the worst mazes for scares but then again all of our visits into the maze were different.
The Blair witch project was a walk through maze where you could walk through at your own pace and actors would try scare you. However since the theme was the Blair witch project it didn't really have many scares. On our first go of the maze at the start of the event we only saw two actors one at the start and one in the house at the end however at the end of the season we gave it one last chance and saw around 5 or 6 people. The maze consisted of walking down the old Canada creek railway path and ducking under netting and walking in and out of the way of tents and bushes. Not the best maze but could be very good!
Overall, Thorpe Park did an amazing job this year and was defiantly a set up from the usual Fright Nights line up. Hopefully the park will continue with the lion gates fright nights line up next year. However if they do we expect this is the last we have seen of the asylum.
