Overview
We hate to be overly negative about events, but it is important to be honest about our experiences and where possible we always try to be as constructive as possible in our criticism.
Halloween Haunt Fest, a new event for 2025 based at the Hertfordshire County Showground near St. Albans, has generated a lot of buzz in its inaugural year for a brand new event, not least for its use of licensed IP in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey mazes as well as two original mazes of Eden and The Trails (sic) of Jane Wenham. We were kindly invited along to their Press / Friends and Family Preview night.
Atmosphere and Setting
Initial impressions were promising. On entrance you pass through an overhead banner, security and ticket office and onto the entrances to the two original mazes, Eden and The Trials of Jane Wenham. Passing through you have a large open area where you can find the bar with a DJ and circus acts, and the entrances to the other two mazes. To the left there are a selection of decent food options and further on another large open area with a few fairground rides, shooting gallery and some portaloos. On a busy night, if people hang around enough we can imagine the compact site having a decent enough atmosphere.
Scare Factor
Sadly we didn’t get any scares during the four mazes. This seemed to be from a combination of too few actors in various sections, the mazes overall being too bright and quite a lot of space as you walked through meaning that it would be difficult for actors to get a meaningful scare when their movements would be telegraphed from quite a distance away. Where space wasn’t an issue the scares themselves were quite generic and very old fashioned for an event in 2025.
Theming and Design
On the maze exteriors there is zero theming. They are four tents on platforms in fields. On the plus side most of the actual queue area is under cover which is a nice touch if it rains. Inside the mazes there were some reasonable bits of theming, Texas Chainsaw Massacre in particular has some tableaus that will be familiar to fans of the film. Overall though it felt very unfinished, with large sections throughout each of the mazes feeling a bit last minute. We and many others also ended up going ‘backstage’ on a few different occasions as the route through the mazes wasn’t clear due to flaps for actors and flaps for the route being indistinguishable at times.
Actors and Performance
We loved the roaming street team, they did a fantastic job and must be commended for their efforts in keeping everyone’s spirits up throughout the night. In the mazes themselves we felt that there was a massive gap between the enthusiasm the actors clearly had, and their training in eliciting any scares. Some rooms in the mazes felt like they should have been a more theatrical experience and may have benefitted by having more controlled group timings to get the full benefit. Many things can be forgiven if the actors’ scares are great. Sadly we felt that much more training and experience is needed in getting the various maze troupes up to scratch in that regard.
Variety and Line-up
As mentioned the four mazes are an interesting mix of IP and original. We don’t feel that true IP related mazes are necessary outside of somewhere like Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. They didn’t really add anything to the scares. Texas Chainsaw Massacre for instance as a concept has been done to death with innumerable hillbilly cannibal chainsaw mazes. Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey had some nice nods to the films, but could easily have been any other cabin in the woods style slasher. EDEN as a sci-fi style horror in space had some nice touches in particular the monster design and The Trials of Jane Wenham, apparently based on local history, which didn’t come across during the maze, used a more modern layout design principle reasonably well.
Operations and Queue Experience
Sadly this is where the event felt particularly bad. It was the preview night of a brand new event so issues were to be expected. We didn’t expect to still be in a queue for the opening of the fourth maze at almost 10pm. The third maze opened a couple of hours after the initial event opening. We have no idea the nature of the issues that caused these significant delays in opening and hope that whatever the cause was can be swiftly rectified. As such it felt like the event as a whole was nowhere near ready to allow in paying customers, and should in hindsight have been cancelled for the evening. On the plus side they had massively reduced the group size from a publicised 16 to a more manageable number, but even then we experienced bunching very early on in most of the mazes.
Value for Money
At almost £40 for a standard ticket on opening night it’s really hard to justify any value for money, especially when there is such close competition from events such as The Howl only a 20 minute drive away, for not much more money and a very well-oiled operation with more mazes.
Final Thoughts
In its current state we couldn’t recommend Halloween Haunt Fest, we hope that the learnings from this preview night are taken on board as swiftly as possible before it opens to the public and throughout the rest of the season. We sincerely hope that with the necessary improvements in finishing the maze builds, significant in-maze actor training and sorting out the operations this will become a fun event in the future.
