Auntie Murial
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Thorpe Park Fright Nights - John Lewis special event - 12octThe John Lewis Partnership which i work for organised a special event for the staff at all of their southern shops and department stores from 6pm til 11pm on sunday 12th October. As well as all attractions and shops ( subject to availability ) they also opened up the Fright Nights mazes 1 day early just for us, so i got to get a sneak peak.
The Evening for me started at 4pm when i picked up my friend and work colleague, Laura from her house in Reading. We then grabbed something to eat at a baguette shop and started our journey to the park. For a sunday evening the traffic was really heavy on the M4 so i am glad we left a little earlier than we would normally need too. It usually taked me 45 minutes to get to and from the park, but it took me 1 hour on this occasion, the roadworks at the Windsor jct of the M4 did not help matters though. On a possitive noth the return journey only took 40 minutes and that included dropping my friend off.
Well we arrived at the park at 5:15 with the general public still leaving the park, i have to say that I did not think much of the car park organisation, the staff did not really know what and where to put us. We then went and joined the queue outside the park, waiting for 6pm to come round for us to enter. 6pm came around and we all flooded in, the atmospehere was fantastic, and Saw : The Ride looks amazing from the Car Park and Bridge. We were one of the first lot of people to be allowed into the park, so everything was really quiet at this point ( the story would so change later on when there would be some 11,000 people in the park ), and we headed straight for Nemesis Inferno for a quick go. The Staff on Inferno must be congratulated, cos her throughput was amazing, they were dispatching a train from the station before the other had even entered the break-run, bravo, we need more ride teams like this in this country. I understand that sometimes there will be loading problems and difficulties, but not on every single dispatch which is so common.
For the rest of the evening we did a selection of rides and three of the parks four mazes. I wont go into detail about the rides, apart from Loggers Leap, which had some nice haunted theming round her. You also get some awesome views of the parks new roller coaster from The Queue line to the Log Flume and also from the first part of the ride itself before you reach the tunnel. At this point i do think that track work is fully complete for Saw, well from what we SAW anyway lol lol 
Warning - potential spoilers ahead !
Onto the Fright Nights Mazes, the part i was most looking forward too, as i said earlier, i only did three of the four mazes as time did not permit for the last one. However, i foresaw this happening and strategically made sure that Hellgate was the one to do last as it has been the one that ahs dissapointed me the most over the previous years.
So first we went into Assylum : Pure Excellence in my opinion, alot of people do not like the strobe lighting the whole way through the attraction, but to me it is what makes it. Seeing the actors coming towards you bit by bit as the light is flashing on and off, its amazing. Theyre seemed to be more actors in this maze this year and a better sound system aswell. Scares were coming from all directions, angles, heights etc, at one point out group was cornered by 4 actors. Awesome.
Next up was The Parks new attraction, The Curse : I was well....... Disapointed by this attraction. On the lead up too Fright Nights I read the synopsis and was impressed by the storyline. However when i was in the attraction i did not feel as if the storyline was portrayed in anyway. It was too dark, you could not really see any of the actors, so it did have that element of surprise, but i like a good mix between dark and dimly lit sections. There were a couple of good special effects though.
Then we did Se7en, in my opinion the best of all the mazes at the park. Good atmosphere, awesome lighting and special effects, wonderfully made up actors, and some impressive scares, the one maze where i saw grown men coming out screaming at the end.
Ride availability was very strong all evening, however Stealth was only open for about an hour of the evening before she broke down for the rest.
The most notable thing for me though was whilst waiting in line for Se7en. We were the next group to go in and the crew member was running through the no running, no dancing, no bla bla bla speech when his supervisor came running out from the back and whispered something into his ear. He then told us that we wont be able to go in for a while due to 2 medical emergencies. Apparantly one person collapsed in the attraction and one of the actresses dislocated her thumb when she hit a wall at a funny angle whilst trying to create a scare.
All in all it was a fun evening, and the park sure does look great when it is lit up at night.
For anyone who gets to do Fright Nights this year - enjoy.
Ian Gulliver aka Auntie Murial 
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