Right now, Drayton Manor is without a doubt one of the most exciting theme parks in the country. Having come back from the brink of closure just a few short years ago, we’ve seen the park install a fantastic new land – Vikings – this year as well as tease some more very big things coming in the future. As the park continues to improve their offering, it was a delight to see them announce – with some fantastic promotional materials – a brand new Halloween event Night at the Manor.
This event was (and still is) listed as including the following spooky attractions for guests aged 14 years and over (I would usually summarise these myself but I think it’s important in this case to see what is being advertised by the park):
As well as these attractions and The Haunting, Vikings is open all evening (with the exception of Sleipnir) complete with food stands and a live DJ.
With a 5pm start for Night at the Manor, I arrived at the park at 15:30 to catch the end of the park’s family event, Pumpkin Smash Bash, before the spooks truly began. Pumpkin Smash is included with regular park admission, so I was able to enter the park with my annual pass as usual and after a quick chat with a staff member, pick up my wristband for the evening at the same time – no re-entry required!
With a 4pm close for the season’s signature attraction – Castle of Spooks – I made a beeline for the castle. I wasn’t too sure what to expect from my first spooky experience at Drayton Manor, and honestly? I was taken aback by just how good it was. Castle of Spooks is a genuinely wonderful actor-led Halloween experience. This is a 20-minute experience with three different scenes designed for children, but certainly fun enough for anyone who remains a child at heart. The cast here were fantastic, with an actor in each scene delivering a different challenge. First, we stopped in with Witchy Woo Woo who needed our screams to help with her pumpkin carving spell. After that, we met a vampire who was determined to teach us some horrifying dance moves. Finally, we met with a mad professor who had a spooky quiz. Each time the kids in the group were rewarded with some sweets in their free bags. I was lucky to be in a group that were fully in the spirit of the thing and got completely invested in each challenge, but this was just such a delight. For an included-with-admission attraction, this is really quite wonderful and the team should be very, very proud.
I used the next hour to get a few walk-on rides on some favourites, and meet Spooky Rory(!!!), before settling down with some themed treats and waiting for the event to start. Fun Foods was certainly the place to be for themed goodies, with a ‘Spookalicious’ bubble waffle (£4.95) and reusable event cups available (£4.50 with a fountain drink, £2.50 refills). Passholder discount is available on both. Heads up for my fellow theme park herbivores, I’m pretty sure that pumpkin wasn’t vegetarian (it seemed to be a marshmallow).
As the time hit 5pm and the park was officially closed, the atmosphere in the park got a little bit strange. Families were still setting up picnics overlooking the lake. There was no announcement or indication that either the event had begun, or the regular day had ended. In fact, we sat on a bench until 17:30 waiting for any sort of sign of the event beginning, before making our way over to Castle of Screams.
Castle of Screams is a re-work of the daytime ‘Castle of Spooks’ into a scare maze attraction. During my daytime visit to the castle, I did wonder how this building filled with wide open spaces would translate into a scare maze. The answer? Not very well at all, sadly. All the set pieces from the family attraction were protected by metal fences, with the actors also positioned in these areas. With each fright being delivered by a fenced-in, fully visible actor, the scares just weren’t there. Both the first and final rooms were exceptions to this, with hands extending from dark windows in the first, and a character holding a plastic chainsaw whilst a chainsaw sound played over the speakers in the last. It should be said that whilst our first run of this maze was extremely disappointing, we returned later in the night and it truly felt like the actors had refined their techniques across the evening, with one kicking the fence to deliver a pretty good scare and another breaking out and chasing me down. Now we’re talking! But the issue remained that this space just didn’t work well as a scare maze. I’m not completely sure what the answer is here, as the daytime attraction is so wonderful that I’d hate to see it lost. Honestly, a new location would be best, but maybe there are some sort of dividers that could be brought in to make some more enclosed spaces? The other issue I had with the actual content – and others may disagree with me here – was the first smell used in the maze. It was straight-up revolting. Not spooky, or scary, or a little bit gross but fully I-feel-like-I-am-going-to-be-sick bad. There was at least a warning about this before entering!
This was the first, but not last, time in the evening when it felt like maybe this event had been targeted at the wrong audience. During our first experience of the maze, we did see people who were clearly very scared which made me think that perhaps this really would be a good first introduction to scares. The other, and maybe biggest issue, was that this entire experience took maybe three minutes? I’m not entirely sure how long we were in there, but it was nowhere close to the advertised 15-minute scare experience. I was sure I had misremembered the description of the attraction, but the lengthy runtime is still present on the website. The Castle of Spooks daytime attraction lasted 20 minutes and that was with full show scenes in each room, so I just don’t see how this would ever last that long. It’s just incorrect to advertise it as such.
With the sun still just about up, we waited for nightfall with a ride on The Haunting. As an indoor attraction, it wasn’t any different in the gloomy twilight, but the queue area looked fantastic with a gorgeous lighting package adding even more ambience to the vicarage.
Talking about beautiful lighting, the next part of our evening was undoubtedly my favourite: Vikings at night!
Trust me, pictures just do not do it justice. The red lights around the arch were flickering with orange to make it seem fire-lit, with the rest of the land basking in a similar warm glow. Here we had a brilliant walk-on, front-row ride on Jormungandr – passing across that glowing arch was delightful – and soaked up some of the atmosphere from the live DJ. The smell across the land was incredible too with both Walhalla and a hog roast stand open, as well as plenty of drinks options.
Next on the to-do list was The Haunted Express, an attraction I’d heard lots of positivity about and was very excited to try for myself. This had a long line – we waited just over 50 minutes – which was absolutely fine (it was the opening night of a new event after all), but would have benefitted from a little bit of ambience. With no other attractions open in this area of the park, everything was dark and silent. We could just about hear the music coming from the main hub of the park, but this wasn’t a huge help as the playlist seemed quite short (we heard Rihanna’s Disturbia four times during our wait). Finally scoring a spot on a train, we hopped on and immediately put our headphones on. They were those light-up ones that you get at silent discos but provided a reasonably solid quality of sound. I loved the initial premise of the audio: we were heading on a history tour of Adventure Cove and off to uncover some of its darker secrets, until, of course, it all went a bit wrong! As we chugged along on the train, it felt genuinely eerie at times with the usual set pieces on the train line lit in red and given a spooky makeover, and there were long sections of the attraction that I thoroughly enjoyed. The actors along the course mostly walked along the side of the train holding prop weapons. Admittedly, this did seem to provide quite a scare to the teenage girls sitting behind us but personally, I would have liked to see a little more dramatic interaction with the passengers. They were also slightly ruined by the headphone lights shining through the black hoods. This would be a super easy fix with either some thicker material or even just stickers over the lights and would go a long way to improving the scare factor from the actors! After some interesting show stops – I loved how the train movement was modified to match the audio, similarly to The Walking Dead: The Ride – the audio did take a turn for the odd when it started blasting out upbeat dance music to get us back to the station. This just felt at odds with the tone the ride had been trying to create elsewhere and a waste of the spooky ambience delivered by a dark, wooded train route. The Haunted Express was an attraction that showed a lot of promise. There were elements of the experience that I truly loved, as well as some that left me wanting. At the moment, this too felt like an experience geared toward the younger guest which is of course no bad thing, but not quite the scare expected from a 14+ event.
We did plan to experience Hunt for Zebadiah next, waiting about 15 minutes in the queue outside of the Zoo before whispers began that the attraction had been closed. Suddenly, a flood of guests appeared exiting the attraction who confirmed that an incident had occurred – many were saying a guest had punched an actor – resulting in the attraction’s closure for the rest of the evening. I’d be lying if I said we weren’t a bit gutted, but honestly, I just hope the actor is okay! I do question the positioning of a scare attraction inside a zoo, but without having experienced it I don’t know whether it actually entails anything that could cause distress to the inhabitants.
Our final attraction of the evening was a final ride – and first night ride – on Apocalypse, in the form of Zombie Apocalypse. Except, there weren’t any zombies. In fact, there wasn’t anything different – not even music – except some smoke (I don’t think they usually have that, do they?) which to be fair I really liked. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to get a night ride on this beast though, and I don’t know if I just forgot how intense it is, but phew that might have been the most intense ride I’ve had! The fact that the operating car faces Vikings made the experience even more special, seeing those gorgeous lights from above. Having seen some friends get some ride photos in special themed frames at the media event, I’d hoped to pick up mine to mark my final ride but sadly these weren’t available with all photos on display in the booth showing as empty cars. (The ride was constantly operating, so it just couldn’t been working).
So, that was our experience at Night (and some of the day) at the Manor. I have to emphasise the fact that we visited on the first public night of the first year of this event but personally – and I really hate to write this – I didn’t really have the best evening. I adore Drayton Manor, and I’m so happy they’re expanding their repertoire, but as it currently stands, this just wasn’t a great event for me. I’m interested to see how this event develops in the future, as the park has made clear that they are keen to listen to feedback and improve. However, I feel like with some tweaks – centred mostly around generating some atmosphere in the park outside of Vikings – they could make this into a great event for the younger guest (around age 10, perhaps?) because whilst these attractions weren’t scary for us older guests, we did witness some younger attendees having a lot of fun. Alongside the truly fantastic Vikings set-up, this could really work. (Honestly, had this just been a Vikings After Dark event I would have come away very happy) I think it’s also important to adjust the information available to reflect the offering. It’s fine to just offer a zombie-less Apocalypse, and a short scare maze but that needs to be clear from the website.
As things currently stand, I can’t recommend bringing kids along to Pumpkin Smash Bash enough. Whilst I may only have caught an hour of the daytime event, I had an absolute blast! Sadly, I can’t really say the same for the evening. But if night rides are your thing, it may be worth it just for Vikings and Apocalypse alone.
Speak again soon,
Claire
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coasterclaire.co.uk 