Video Interview: Knott’s Scary Farm 2019

This season, the Knott’s Berry Farm Halloween Haunt continues its successful strategy of emphasizing quality over quantity. Though it still features more walk-through mazes than other Los Angeles Halloween theme parks, the number is small than it used to be: nine instead of a dozen.

Also, like last year, Knott’s Scary Farm is debuting only two new mazes for Halloween 2019, which allows the creative team to focus their resources on making those as memorable as possible. Both Waxworks and Origins: The Curse of Calico are marvelously immersive, creating environments that are sinister, scary, and convincing. Origins has the added benefit of portraying the back story of a wrongful execution for witchcraft that left a curse upon the ghost town; in effect, the maze provides an explanation for why Knott’s Berry Farm (which is based on the actual Calico mining town) is haunted every Halloween.

In this video, Creative Designer Timothy “Gus” Krueger discusses Knott’s Berry Farm’s strategy for their annual Halloween Haunt: allocating resources on two new mazes while beefing up or altering returning attractions (such as Krueger’s creepy outer-space effort, Dark Entities, which returns for its sophomore appearance this Halloween).

Note: This video embedded at top originally contained a subtitle error misidentifying Paranormal Inc. as making its final appearance this Halloween. The video has been corrected to show that that Special Ops: Infected and Shadowlands are making their final farewells in 2019.