Screams! Takes place at Thornton Hall Country Park just outside Skipton on the border of Lancashire and Yorkshire. As well as three scare mazes they offer a central hub with live music and a bar with some food options. It’s worth noting that the mazes are a short walk from here so there was a slight disconnect between the two areas. We observed a potential opportunity to use a few more scare actors here to create a scare zone between the two.
Malkin Manor
This maze has a fun concept where you are joining an online ghost hunting team called Haunt Hackers. The immersion starts from the beginning with the queue line attendant being in character and setting the scene well (this is actually true of all three mazes and a nice touch). The concept of the maze was really strong and could definitely be explored even further. We had a couple of scares in this maze early on but felt the disorientating nature distracted from a few of them hitting hard. One suggestion of our group was that the ghost hunter could join the group along the way to add an additional bit of immersion and guidance throughout. The scares could probably be better timed later in the maze as they missed us quite a few times.
Black Market
Absolutely love the concept of a rave in an abattoir. This maze is billed as being more intense but sadly that intensity didn’t develop for us. The actors struggled to handle the throughput leaving us wandering around with nothing happening for long periods of time. This is a real shame as the story, the theming and the overall maze, including a nice restrained section were great. The whole thing sadly didn’t integrate particularly well. Feeling disjointed and not overly coordinated. Having a free roam section is great but it needs scares one after another to work well. We found the actors we did encounter didn’t always acknowledge us and we simply walked past. The raver was a nice touch but some of the masked characters didn’t feel particularly sinister. Once we had found our way through the maze we came to a nice finale scene that did work well, leaving us running for the exit. A really strong concept where further guidance of the actors could make the concept land in a more cohesive way.
Jinxed
Again a solid concept going backstage with the misfits of Carnival Jinx. Usually we are great fans of this style of maze but after an opening scene with an impactful scare the run through the actual maze didn’t have any scares that landed for our group. There were times the actors just stood there seemingly not knowing what to do. Again it feels like a coaching issue and one that could be quite easily resolved.
Summary
We appreciate that this review may come across particularly negative but we have to base our review on the experience we had and sadly things could have been better. It’s clear that we are in the minority with many other reviews exclaiming how good this event is so I would recommend checking those out too. Screams! Is an event with wonderful concepts that were let down on our runs by the execution. It may have been because we were in the later slot and everyone was tired but the scares just didn’t hit particularly hard if at all for us.
If you want to check out Screams! for yourself you can get tickets on their website. The event runs on select dates through until the 31st October.
