Spooktacular October Festival, Tulley's Farm

Allow me to be forthright for a moment. If you want to enjoy a family Halloween event without being patronised and embarrassed do not visit Chessington World of Adventures.

Furthermore, if you don’t want to pay the best part of thirty quid for the privilege and be faced with the prospect of last orders being called at 5pm, or – at the very latest – 8pm, can I kindly point your wallet towards Tulley’s Farm near Crawley in West Sussex.

Every year I have to think of a different way to write the same old complaints about Chessington’s Halloween Hocus Pocus, so here’s this year’s review:

Park looks alright, but there’s nothing to do.

The allure of Scooby Doo may be too much for your children to resist, but resist they should, and as a discerning parent you should do everything in your power to cart your kids kicking and screaming to Tulley’s Farm instead, where you can enjoy the whole farm for less than a tenner.

All too often I find myself grudgingly awarding a full compliment of stars to rides and events that do the bare minimum they can to achieve their set criteria. Tomb Blaster is a good example of this. There are just so many faults with the ride, but for all intents and purposes it achieves what it set out to do, so almost by default gets five out of five.

There are too few rides and events that actually receive our top accolade through hard graft, but chalk up Tulley’s Spooktacular October Festival as being a thoroughbred success, so – if possible – grab a few children* and get along to Tulley’s Farm to see the results of what is clearly a massive undertaking for a relatively small tourist attraction.

[* We not condone kidnap, by the way]

It’s fair to say that Tulley’s Farm owes a lot to Adrian Fisher. Mr Fisher is the talented individual behind the company that has designed an annual ‘Maize Maze’ for the West Sussex farm since 1998.

Each of these seven-acre behemoths has helped Tulleys’ reputation climb the dizzy heights of the finest leaflet racks in the southeast, with more and more visitors discovering the quaint catalogue of countryside attractions.

Their Halloween efforts have been gathering momentum, too, with the Haunted Hayride and more recently the Creepy Cottage forming an ever-important mantle to an otherwise quiet time of year, this year being the first for a new attraction, the Field of Screams.

I was expecting to have to tiptoe the thorny issue of having to compare a country farm’s Halloween festival to a theme park where families, apparently, come first, with the misty financial and creative gusto of Tussauds behind it. The thesaurus was bookmarked at ‘quaint’, a backhanded compliment if ever there was one. Frankly, the idea of comparing the two was something I was happy enough to forget.

Yet, out of Chessington and Tulley’s Farm, only one has three major attractions for families to do, only one has numerous actors – not only in attractions, but around the park, only one outfits every member of staff with a special Halloween uniform, and only one gives every shop, every café and every attraction new Halloween names and signage.

Yes, the more I think about it the more idiotic it is to compare the two. It is – of course – Tulley’s Farm that is leagues ahead of Chessington in offering wholesome family entertainment.

The Spooktacular Halloween Festival is built around three main haunts; The Haunted Hayride, a trailer ride through spooky tableaux in the woods; Creepy Cottage, a walk through Haunted House; and the Field of Screams, a meandering pathway through a creepy cornfield with a few surprises along the way.

Already seeing stars, as Chessington’s offer to meet Scooby Doo suddenly seems quite, um, quaint, Tulley’s Farm go for the knockout blow. For younger children, there’s the Boo Barn (haunted walkthrough), Pumpkin Typhoon (bouncy play area), Pumpkin Chuckin’ (pumpkin catapults) as well as ghost stories in the barn and fancy dress parades.

So, the attractions are there – but what are they like? Quaint? No, of course not. They’re great.

Let’s start with the best – the Haunted Hayride. This really is the attraction that has put this event on the map, and not without good reason. With around thirty people sitting in a surprisingly well-appointed tractor-trailer, you embark on a ten-or-so minute journey around the dark woods of Tulley’s Farm with a few choice encounters throughout.

This is definitely best left to dusk at the very least, and offers wholesome scares for children and parents alike without the prospect of giving them nightmares.

Your journey through the atmospheric woods takes you through many different scenes, all of which have excellent scenery and often conceal actors who jump out at the trailer full of hapless victims.

Your tractor ride will take you past the scene of a light aeroplane crash, a UFO landing site as well as a sinister car dump with half-submerged cars, lights flashing and engines revving as a car speeds towards you.

Other scenes include a toxic waste dump and some gallows, where one of the apparently hung victims jumps onto the trailer shouting “I’m free!”.

You are also pounced upon by a man wielding a chainsaw that gets the biggest scream of the journey, while undoubtedly another highlight is when an abandoned fairground littered with skeletons and cobwebs comes to life as a demented clown jumps onto and rolls across a net suspended only feet above your trailer.

This sounds pretty intense and scary, I’m sure, but please take my word for it when every scare is good natured, and in the context of the Haunted Hayride, the ride is a complete riot from start to finish. Children and parents alike adore this ride in equal measure.

What impressed me, though, were the little touches. As well as the audaciously grand sets (crashed planes, speeding cars, UFOs etc), each scene had themed sound effects or music from the onboard sound system, and each was atmospherically lit, despite covering a massive area in woods, not often noted for their abundance of power points. Colour me impressed.

The other main attraction, Creepy Cottage is – I’m sure – easily missed. Nestled in the main covered courtyard, this is an impressively long walk through Haunted House.

The cottage is mainly creepy eye candy, but there are a few actors making use of a few cleverly concealed hiding places. There are a few nice touches, too – nylon string hanging from the ceiling brushing across the face is an age-old trick, but put to good effect, while a wall of what look like lifeless hands isn’t actually as lifeless as it first appears.

Again, like the Haunted Hayride, there’s much to look at, and everything is done to an impressive standard for a temporary attraction.

The closest thing to a disappointment at Tulley’s Farm was the Field of Screams, which is a shame as it has the potential to be amazing.

Field of Screams is a long and winding pathway through a large cornfield. By night, this is absurdly atmospheric, even more so with lights creepily flickering through the 7ft high corn with sporadic scarecrows staring through the chickenwire fence out of the darkness.

I hoped – in vein – that there would be at least a couple of ‘real’ scarecrows roaming the lesser-trodden paths of the Field of Screams, but it wasn’t meant to be. The inclusion of a few actors in Field of Screams would have made this a must-see attraction, while it comfortably falls into the unfortunate ‘do if you have time’ category.

The other attractions, such as the Ghost Stories and Pumpkin Chuckin’ are extremely popular and effortlessly entertain without coming across as condescending. It can often be embarrassing as a parent, but Tulley’s Farm will bring out the best in your children and will fall short of embarrassing parents.

One thing that I was ready to forgive Tulley’s Farm for was a sloppy infrastructure; you know, things like signage, car parking and offering food and drink. This is a working farm, after all, and would surely always compare poorly to corporate-run theme parks.

But, of course, Tulley’s Farm triumphs. Car parking was well organised, everything was specially signposted with Halloween signs, and every single member of staff seemed to have radio contact with colleagues and special October Spooktacular Festival fleeces or sweatshirts. And while Thorpe Park still experiment with ways to keep queues down on their haunts, Tulley’s Farm give you a credit-card sized programme of events with boxes on that are marked as you do each attraction.

Things like this make almost any Halloween even in comparison look like a ham-fisted last-minute ordeal. I can’t think of many parks that couldn’t learn a trick or treat from Tulley’s Farm.

If you’re expecting a bloodbath of a Halloween event, enter at your peril, but I challenge you to find an event that better fulfils the remit of wholesome family Halloween entertainment than Tulley’s Farm’s October Spooktacular Festival.

MS 18 October 2005