I want to express a huge thank you to Tulleys for inviting us down for our first-ever Shocktober Fest experience. Rest assured, it certainly won’t be our last! Here’s our Tulleys Shocktober Fest 2022 maze review.
From the beautiful set detail to the sheer number of actors within the mazes putting on a stellar performance Tulleys Shocktober Fest 2022 really was a thing of horror beauty.
An American-type scream park right here in the UK with an unrivalled atmosphere and intensity. It truly is a park to be proud of and with two brand new mazes for the 2022 season, there’s even more for the die-hard scare lovers to check out during this 26 years of screams celebration.
Check out our maze review below along with Tulleys Shocktober Fest 2022 POV’s of each maze that we captured during the event.
We didn’t record with any additional lighting because we feel it spoils the authenticity of a natural walkthrough experience not to mention blinding the actors / ruining other people’s walkthroughs behind us.
Without further ado let’s dive in with the two newest mazes to arrive at Tulleys in 2022 as Elecktrick Circus and Doom Town introduce themselves to the world.
Elecktrick Circus
So say the new inhabitants of the Electrick Circus. This isn’t just a twisted re-wire of an abandoned Circus plot, this is a whole new SHOCK! A super-charged journey that will create sparks and cause jolts of excitement and terror. So if all the clowns are dead, then who runs the show? Meet Sparky… The new ‘clown’ in town.
Replacing the former Twister Clowns 3D maze which we obviously never did was Elecktrick Circus brand new for Tulleys Shocktober Fest 2022.
This UV-filled wonderland has you fully immersed in crazy clown world and we have a whole range of clowns on offer here.
From angry clowns to funny clowns, to animatronic clowns there really is something for everyone in this maze and it’s a joy to walk through.
My first maze of the event and my first jump scare came just mere seconds into the experience. With clowns popping out of every corner you can think of this high-intensity maze will certainly have you laughing one minute and jumping out of your skin the next.
What better way to end your experience than passing through a clown’s giant inflatable butt cheeks.
Elecktrick Circus isn’t as detailed as the other brand new for 2022 maze Doom Town (you can read that review shortly) but it doesn’t need to be. Some UV paint, wacky characters and animatronics do a wonderful job of immersing you in the experience.
Doom Town
Hell is bubbling over and the dead rise to walk in the realm of living. The molten evil rises and seeps out from every opening, every passageway into a purgatory of a time gone by. Doom Town is governed by evil and inhabited by the dead; walking corpses whose only need is to earn back their place back in Hell. Find sanctuary if you can. Find a Priest. Find salvation. Not even the church can stop the Hell Mouth from opening wide and spitting from them an army of the dead. Dare you enter Doom Town? Will you be the saviour of the past? Or will you be trapped forever in an 80’s Video-Nasty? Use your… BRAINS…
Doom Town may just be the most immersive scare maze in the entire country. This thing must have cost a fortune!
Up until now The Village at Xtreme Scream Park has been one of the most immersive mazes for me by a long country mile until I walked through this.
Doom Town takes us all back to the 1980s where a once quiet English town is now the home to a horde of zombies.
From back streets to cinemas, pubs, hairdressers and even a Chinese takeaway Doom Town has a mix of indoor and outdoor sets that are absolutely jaw-dropping.
Just wait until you’re outside and just stop and look around at the sheer beauty of this maze, it’s truly incredible.
Cars lined the streets, even a milk float, minibus, van and a hearse with real tarmacked roads, traffic lights, signs and more.
The maze is on a scale like never before and the attention to detail is magnificent. You’re absolutely catapulted back in time and there are so many actors in this particular experience that you feel absolutely overrun.
80’s music blares out around the experience not to mention light and smoke effects, full-blown immersion and I couldn’t get enough of it.
Doom Town is a maze that people will be doing a few times in one night. You need to do it more than once to take it all in.
It was Shaun of the Dead in the 80s and the actors looked as though they were having a great time fully interacting with the space they had been given and delivering plenty of scares along the way.
Doom Town needs to stay for many seasons to come and could even be expanded. I’m all for a Doom City scare maze, bring it on!
The Island
What horrors will men go to when shielded from the gaze of others? When isolated and detached from the rest of the world? The Island is inaccessible to all but he and those that he invites.
The genius scientist who planned to make the world better, more unified, cohesive; man and animals as one. An experiment outside the parameters of any inhabited land, The Island doesn’t even have a name. And the scientist in isolation brings the lost and naïve to this most secret place to make them stronger and braver, to challenge the very meaning of being human. The animal instinct is carved into his subjects. They are cut and spliced and merged with animal brains and bodies to create… something.
Something more than man. Something more than animal. They hunt. They kill. They reason. The scientist is no more, but his creations are loose on The Island and will protect what is theirs. RUN!
The Island at Tulleys Shocktober Fest was more of a mud treading exercise as most of this wonderful maze is outside.
It’s definitely a maze to do at night but due to the downpour the night before we were more focused on trying to stand up than being immersed in the maze.
We did our run-through in the day and there are so many wonderful things to see including the ship-yard which would look superb all lit up at night but the actors were at their crazy best and whilst there are a few indoor scenes the weather put a dampener on this particular experience for us.
It’s a shame they didn’t lay down a mat or similar in certain places as even some of the actors were having trouble standing up in certain places with the mud slipping their boots all over the place.
Definitely one to do at nighttime but a day run-through certainly allowed us to appreciate all the details of this rather lengthy maze.
Wastelands Penitentiary
The Penitentiary is damaged, locks and bars are broken and those once incarcerated are now free. The guards are no longer a match for them.The prisoners have taken over. If you want to survive your visit to the Wastelands district then you must visit the Penitentiary and beg the prisoners to spare you. Perhaps they’ll take pity on you, or perhaps they’ll taunt you and torture you and lock you away, just like they have with the guards. Are you ready to visit Wastelands?
Wastelands Penitentiary is certainly strobe light central as you navigate your way around this wonderfully detailed cell-block. The actors are absolutely nuts and that’s with them not acting as to be in those conditions for any length of time is absolutely insane.
My eyes were going absolutely bonkers just walking through the maze let alone being the ones who are in there for the evening trying to scare people.
The narrow corridors of the cell block meant you were always spotting actors and they’d absolutely crammed as many as they could into this maze to give it more of an intimidation factor. This really was a cell block, full of inmates who were all out to get you.
I thoroughly enjoyed the build-up to the cell block scene as you passed numerous parts of the jail including the mug-shot photo sequence, the medical room and more, then before you know it, chaos begins.
Wasteland Penitentiary is one hell of an intense maze and I was jumping like a fish out of water around every corner. Very intense, very immersive and just incredible.
The Village Coven of 13
Alice Hemlock was accused of being a witch. Confirmed, tried and convicted, death upon her was afflicted. The Women gather in their Coven, together strong vengeance for their cousin wronged, but vengeance never stops at one, all to blame are cursed bar none. Their thirst for blood and pain and death is uttered in every cursing breath.
The Village Coven of 13 was a maze we did both in the day and at night and this one certainly requires some walking boots as it’s a very lengthy maze indeed.
Walking into some beautiful sets and then outdoors into the open is such an immersive experience and whilst I felt the atmosphere was much better at night during the outdoor segments even in the day it had a creepy and unsettling vibe as you walked through this wooden structure.
Into cottages and through fireplaces and even an impressive wicker man style scene at the end, all weaved a story as you were walking through it.
What made me laugh more than made me jump was how the witches were shouting absolute waffle at you, it wasn’t even English, like some possessed language that made no sense that had me giggling rather than cowering in fear.
As the maze comes to its final conclusion we’re all sacrificed in the fire as we enter a smoke-filled room with the heaters cranked up. It was absolutely boiling in there and once again I felt sorry for the actors who had to stay in there and move around in that uncomfortable heat.
An incredible maze, of which there are many at Tulleys and one of (if not the) longest maze in the park.
The Chop Shop Garage
Billy-Bob, Billy-Joe and Billy-Ray are the owners of the Chop Shop Garage, they may seem like three innocent brothers trying to run a family business, but they have a disturbing dark secret. Don’t let them fool you, those chainsaws aren’t just for chopping car parts. Once you go scrap, you never go back.
This maze should really be known as the hillbilly chainsaw massacre as after a rather impressive opening inside a garage complete with car parts and an actual car you’re thrown outside into a chainsaw-filled wonderland.
Chainsaws around every corner, chainsaw jump scares of which I got many but after a good 30-40 seconds of this your body becomes used to the sound and by the end of the maze it does get a little same old, same old.
Blood splattered corridors, minimal theming after the introduction but incredible actors who are absolutely pumped at the thought of trying to scare us with heavy machinery.
The Chop Shop Garage had so much potential in the beginning as the theming and acting drew you in then turned into a copy-and-paste scare zone.
Let’s face it, chainsaws just aren’t scary in a scaze maze as there’s very little they can do with them to genuinely scare you. Once you’ve jumped once I’d be very surprised if you jump again in this particular maze.
My first run-through filled me with the anxiety of not knowing what was around the corner but my second run-through was an absolute walk in the park.
The Creepy Cottage
Throughout the years, the cottage has seen a lot of comings and goings and some say many of its previous inhabitants have stuck around, unable to pass over. That doesn’t mean to say the long standing tenants aren’t friendly. They’d like you to stay. Stay for a very long time! The ghosts in here believe in a traditional welcome and will show you all around the house – even the winding corridors where the lights don’t work and the rooms where the floor boards have been eaten away by creepy crawlies. There’s a lot of long since passed family members hanging around in there too. Shocks and scares to bemuse and bewilder you. Once you get in, will they let you back out?
Dark, unsuspecting and terrifying The Creepy Cottage was one of the more intense mazes as you are completely dragged into the world that Tulleys have created.
The narrow claustrophobic corridors, the costumes, the set decor and the intensity of the jump scares made this one a firm favourite of the evening.
Very impressive!
The Cellar Imprisoned
The Cellar has long been a place where things are kept and forgotten. Lost things in the darkness scavenging to survive. But, those that dwell in the Cellar have not been forgotten, they have been purposefully locked in. Imprisoned. Incarcerated. An experiment. What once was human is now a feral and malnourished murder of scavengers. These ‘Creatures’ have ransacked their ‘comfortable’ surroundings and turned it into a deadly game of cat and mouse. So when their captor releases the ‘live food’ into The Cellar they are the cat and YOU are the mouse. The Cellar door is open, come on in, they’re waiting!
Perhaps the darkest maze we walked through during the event and the one that made the least sense.
We start by entering a cellar and halfway round we suddenly find ourselves in a cellblock replica of Wasteland Penitentiary. It’s dark and immersive and then it becomes a strobe light city.
I thought The Cellar Imprisoned was one of the weaker mazes of the event as it didn’t really follow the story that it was supposed to and it felt very samey samey compared to other mazes.
How can you be imprisoned in a cellar that suddenly turns into a jail cell? I’m lost already.
Certainly one of the weaker mazes but certainly not in terms of detail or acting or anything of the sort, it just felt like other mazes we’d done previously with nothing really new of note, it didn’t stand out on its own and blended with some of the others.
Hell-Ements
Earth, Wind, Fire, Water … Shades of Dark and Yourself!
What happens when you die? Is it dark? Is it painful? Is it frightening? Yes. Particularly if your soul is less than spotless.
The journey to hell is long and difficult and you can’t see your way there, you can only sense it… Like all lost causes, you will be shrouded in a cloth hood and guided by the rope of your execution, taunted by the ‘Shades of Hell’ as you journey through the punishing elements of earth, air, fire and water. You are condemned and your soul is forever marked.
There aren’t many weak mazes at Tulleys Shocktober Fest but if there’s one that we didn’t enjoy as much as the others it was certainly Hell-Ements.
Hooded mazes really are boring. You put a hood on (that you can see vaguely see out of) and people whisper in your ear as you follow a rope.
Hell-Ements threw in some fire and water effects whilst blindfolded which certainly added to the experience but it was just dull from start to finish where finding the rope became more important than anything else around you.
If you’re scared of the dark this isn’t the maze for you but it was just so weak and this conga line of poor scares really does need a replacement.
When the hood is removed you’re in somewhat of a themed experience for a little bit but if you’re going to make a themed experience after a hooded maze at least make it good.
Hoodoo Voodoo at Xtreme Scream puts its guests through the boring hooded experience but when that hood is removed you’re fully immersed in a Voodoo village and it works perfectly.
Hell-Ements was just poor all round. The worst that Tulleys Shocktober Fest 2022 had to offer but that’s just my opinion. Some people may absolutely love this one.
Horrorwood Hayride
Jump on a trailer, take your seat and explore the abandoned Horrorwood Film Studios. Back in the Golden Age of cinema, the Horrorwood film studios were booming, full of glamour and intrigue and bursting with life. Now all old Horrorwood is bursting with is DEATH. After the terrible incident with the actor who played ‘The Woodsman’ the old studio was forced to close and all the movie sets and props remained abandoned. Lots of actors lost their jobs, and were never on screen again, but worst of all, they lost their fame and MINDS. Some believe that the old actors from all of those years ago still act out the scenes of their glory days on the old set, unable to move on in this life, or the next. Are you ready for your studio tour?
Tulleys Shocktober Fest 2022 or any Tulleys Halloween event for that matter wouldn’t be the same without this particular experience. The Horrorwood Hayride is great fun for all the family, not too scary and a lovely 13 minute+ trip around a forest including sets and actors who are more than happy to jump on the back of the truck and interact with guests.
Meet numerous characters from Horrorwood and enjoy the ride.
It’s immersive with wonderful lighting and actor stops along the way and having the actors board the vehicle with you is a nice touch. There are some genuinely creepy moments (a girl on a swing in particular) and the audio, lighting and fire effects are wonderful.
Tulleys Shocktober Fest 2022 certainly brought a whole range of interesting mazes but if we had to put them into our favourite to least favourites they would go as follows:
- Doom Town
- Wastelands Penitentiary
- The Creepy Cottage
- Elecktrick Circus
- Horrorwood Hayride
- The Chop Shop Garage
- The Village Coven of 13
- The Island
- The Cellar Imprisoned
- Hell-Ements
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