Thorpe Park’s Fright Nights Scares Us Silly

We'll admit this up front. We're not particularly partial of screaming like a seven-year-old girl. Especially not in public.

It's a realisation we make pretty much as soon as we set foot inside the gates of Thorpe Park and are greeted by axe-wielding zombies and possessed demon girls with faces more disturbing than Jeremy Clarkson’s #WakeUpCall.

Welcome to the joy of Thorpe Park's Fright Nights, an interactive (read: terrifying) experience based on a host of iconic horror movies aimed at scaring you silly.

First stop: Studio 13, where we were promised to be made the stars of the Director’s own movie. Granted, we probably should have read between the lines and realised this wasn’t the big break we’d been holding out for. 

Waiting for what can only be described as ‘an ordeal’, our sceptical compatriots weren't convinced by the now unavoidable warnings we were entering a real life horror maze. "Really it's just people jumping out at you with silly face paint isn't it, I mean how scary can it be?," she said. 

At that exact moment an adult woman was escorted out the emergency exit.

In actual tears.

We soon found ourselves at the back of a terrified human chain, reluctantly shuffling into the studio reception as the relative safety of the park disappeared behind us.  Now, we don't want to give too much away about what happened next (SPOILERS, obvs), but let's just say we were shocked that doing what they did in that maze was legal.

From there, we stumbled our way over to The Blair Witch Project. Finding ourselves on a foggy, abandoned railway track at the edge of foreboding woodland, this was suddenly feeling all too real for our liking. As the darkness engulfed us, we attempted burying our face into the shoulder of the person next to us. The next few minutes are a pretty panic-filled haze. What we do remeber is running face first into a wall as we scrambled to find our way out of the infamous shack that features at the end of the movie.

As well as Studio 13 and The Blair Witch Project, visitors are invited to brave a host of other extreme "scare mazes", ingeniously adapted from films including Cabin In The Woods, My Bloody Valentine and Saw Alive. 

On top of all that they’re offering extra scares in the form of The Directors Cut experience (for over 18s only) which carries the disclaimer that "Guests may be kidnapped". What.

Fright Nights will be running at Thorpe Park on selected dates from now until 2nd November, and with online discounts on tickets there’s really no excuse not to get a group of mates together and take on the terror…