Review: Reinvigorated Knott’s Halloween Haunt returns with a vengeance

The once bloated, middle-aged beast known as Knott’s Scary Farm has trimmed down and shaped up into a lean, mean terrorizing machine with the 42nd annual Halloween Haunt.

The increased competition from Universal Studios Hollywood has forced Knott’s Berry Farm to reassess its strengths, reconsider its identity and reconfirm its commitment to Halloween supremacy in Southern California. The result is the best Halloween Haunt in years.

Gone are the 13 cookie-cutter mazes the Buena Park theme park boasted in recent years largely as a marketing gimmick that emphasized quantity over quality and stretched the Haunt creative team too thin.

This year’s Haunt presents a more manageable nine mazes with compelling themes, beautiful sets and well-paced crowds, making for a more enjoyable overall experience.

What Knott’s needs to do next is add two missing ingredients.

The first is simple and visual storytelling. Now that Knott’s has replaced all the woeful paint-and-plywood mazes that came to define the low-water mark of the past with fully realized three-dimensional sets, Haunt’s masters of mischievous mayhem need to tell an easily repeatable story in each of those scenes.

Far too often, Knott’s mazes are populated with aimlessly wandering purposeless monsters. Put them to work as “scareactors” assigned to a single scene in a maze with 10 to 15 seconds of action and dialogue that can be repeated throughout the night with slight variations. That will turn the endless slog of room after room and monster after monster into more memorable moments that visitors will remember for many Haunts to come.

The second is recognizable and repeatable characters. Knott’s is never likely to add a slew of marquee villains like Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. But Knott’s Halloween Haunt can continue to cull distinctive characters from literature, mythology, folklore and fairy tales. That core villain then needs to hunt us relentlessly through virtually every scene in the maze -- not just at the beginning or the end.

Knott’s knows how to do all this already. They’ve created easily repeatable scenes and instantly recognizable characters for the upcharge Trapped maze and pre-show Skeleton Key rooms. Now they need to bring that level of visual storytelling and character development to every scene of every maze in the park.

This year Knott’s raised interactive storytelling to a new level with the Special Ops: Infected zombie apocalypse attraction that took over six acres of Camp Snoopy.

Armed with an infrared laser simulated assault rifle, I joined a team of 12 Haunt visitors as we set off into an infected zone swarming with zombies.

It didn’t take long to forget I was in Camp Snoopy as I blasted dozens of zombies lumbering from hiding places throughout the darkened kiddie land.

As Haunt continues, I suspect Knott’s will likely tweak the survivor-saving missions each squadron is assigned to streamline the storytelling in Special Ops: Infected.

You’ll want to head over to Camp Snoopy as soon as you arrive at Haunt to make a reservation for Special Ops: Infected.

Let’s take a look from best to worst at each of the mazes at Halloween Haunt 2014:

Back for a third year, the completely revamped reservation-only Trapped maze offers a whole new set of doorless rooms you have to puzzle your way out of.

This year’s version of Trapped was the best one yet. After a letdown last year, Knott’s saw the error of its ways and returned to form with an entirely new version of the upcharge maze that even bested the hard-to-top inaugural edition.

While I don’t want to spoil the experience, I will say the puzzles have become more challenging and the rooms more difficult to escape. Every room was better than the last and there wasn’t a dud scene in the entire maze.

For me, the most memorable moment of the night came when our small group was split into two and we had to work together to free each other and reunite.

You’ll want to make reservations early for Trapped, which sold out every night last year.

Voodoo was easily the best new traditional maze of the night, taking visitors into the swampy backwoods of a Louisiana bayou brimming with witch doctors and zombies.

The choose-your-own-path aspect of the maze made the experience highly repeatable and the amazing scenery set a new standard for Haunt quality. I only wish the relatively short maze could have been longer, allowing for more space to expand the incredibly evocative swamp shanties in the bayou village.

Voodoo’s highly interactive Skeleton Key room was the best Knott’s has ever created and should be a blueprint for future offerings of the upcharge pre-show experiences.

The new Tooth Fairy maze mashed up two rites of passage: the legendary creature that sneaks into children’s bedrooms in the middle of the night and an agonizing trip to the dentist’s office.

The bizarre and twisted story got a little muddled in the middle, but that didn’t take away from a wonderfully detailed maze that delivered plenty of scares.

The best scene in the Tooth Fairy maze -- a demented dentist furiously working on a terrified patient -- is a perfect example of the easily repeatable scenes we need more of at Haunt.

The highlight of the maze was an animatronic version of the wicked tooth fairy herself in the final room.

The beautifully rendered Forevermore maze follows the bloody trail of a modern-day serial killer who re-creates murders from the terror-filled tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

Among my favorite Forevermore scenes: The pulsing red lights and thumping heartbeat under the floorboards in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the corrugated steel walls squeezing in on both sides of a shrinking room in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

The Black Magic maze recounts a number of Harry Houdini’s most amazing feats -- including a water tank escape and knife-throwing illusion -- with some supernatural twists.

While Black Magic offered wonderfully rendered sets and a compelling story, the maze lacked a main character and featured far too many generic monsters with ill-defined roles. Why not turn the famed magician into a vengeful villain out to ensnare us in his most death-defying escapes?

With a well-conceived back story and impressive sets, the Wild West-themed Gunslinger’s Grave maze suffers from one major problem: Masked cowboys wielding revolvers just aren’t that scary.

The much-improved Skeleton Key pre-show for Gunslinger’s Grave offered a path for improvement. Knott’s turned a back story that was largely told through video screens last year into a classic Hollywood fight scene. The slight tweak made all the difference. The actors put on a great show. Guns were drawn, a fight ensued, a woman was kidnapped.

The only problem: The pre-show set up a story that was never told in the maze. Why not pay off that setup with of a lawless cowboy gang out to get us because we tried to help the kidnapped woman and her family? That way the cowboys would be after us rather than somebody else. And bring the level of showmanship seen in the Skeleton Key room into the maze with bar fights, shootouts and an old-fashioned hanging at the end.

Theoretically owned by Haunt’s iconic Green Witch, the beautifully rendered Trick or Treat haunted house is unfortunately populated with a bunch of random tricksters aimlessly milling around.

The Green Witch is a classic Haunt character and the closest thing Knott’s has to a brand-name villain. She would make a perfect repeatable character who could stalk us through every scene of the maze.

My favorite scene in the Trick or Treat maze: A staircase filled with glowing jack-o’-lanterns.

The Pinocchio Unstrung maze offers a twisted take on the classic tale, with the puppet who longs to become a boy embarking on a wild killing spree after the Blue Fairy denies him his final wish.

This well done but long-running maze has gotten a little tired and will likely be a candidate for replacement next year. I hit the Pinocchio maze late in the evening when it seemed like all the monsters were on a break -- even the bungee jumping puppet.

I loved the little person scareactor near the end of the maze who said, “I was a real boy.”

I’ve never really understood the Dominion of the Damned maze that ostensibly tells the story of Gothic vampires obsessed with fine art and classical music.

This creepy but sleepy maze seems to have endless story line possibilities that could borrow from any number of vampire tales dating all the way back to Dracula. Certainly there must be a scarier story to tell.

The room full of rattling coffins remains a highlight in this aging maze that hopefully won’t be returning in 2015.

The 42nd annual Halloween Haunt at Knott’s Berry Farm runs on select nights from Sept. 25 through Nov. 1.

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