Knott’s Scary Farm will soon retire an aging maze that takes visitors inside a madman’s gruesome laboratory filled with hot cauldrons of bubbling wax when the granddaddy of all haunted events returns to the fog this Halloween season.
The 2019 Wax Works haunted maze will be back for one final year during the annual Halloween Haunt event at Knott’s Berry Farm before going away for good.
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Knott’s Scary Farm returns on select nights from Sept. 19 through Oct. 31 with more than 1,000 monsters lurking in the haunted mazes, scare zones and fog-filled streets throughout the Buena Park theme park.
The Wax Works maze takes over an abandoned wax museum where a once-prominent plastic surgeon has set up shop, according to the backstory created for the haunted attraction.
Dr. Augustus Scratch dips his victims in a hot cauldron of bubbling wax to create his terrifyingly lifelike masterpieces. The madman’s gruesome works of art entomb bloody flesh inside a molten layer of wax.
While Wax Works featured a few good scares through the years, the maze-making abilities of the Scary Farm creative team has improved by leaps and bounds since 2019 — and the tired and tiresome Wax Works pales in comparison to the newer mazes.
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One more year of Wax Works hopefully means the Scary Farm crew will have more time to dedicate to the new mazes debuting in 2024.
The return of Wax Works almost certainly means a pair of 2018 mazes – The Depths and Dark Entities – will be retired in 2024 to make room for something new.
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The Depths, Dark Entities and Wax Works have been showing their age for some time now and likely only survived for so long due to the pandemic impact on Haunt events and the theme park industry in general.
Knott’s Scary Farm will announce the 2024 lineup of new and returning mazes during the sold-out Nightmares Revealed fan event on Aug. 22.
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Knott’s typically adds two to three new mazes each year to a lineup that usually includes about 10 mazes.
Last year’s 50th anniversary event brought three new mazes to the lineup — Chilling Chambers, Cinema Slasher and Room 13 — which will almost certainly be returning for Scary Farm 2024.
It’s a fair bet that the two new mazes from 2022 — Bloodline 1842 and The Grimoire — will be back as well.
Less certain are the fates of two older mazes: Mesmer: Sideshow of the Mind from 2021 and Origins: Curse of Calico from 2019.
The Curse of Calico is the more essential of the two — serving as a prequel storytelling tool tying together a sprawling original backstory for Scary Farm.
It would make sense to bring back the Curse of Calico with a complete makeover and keep the maze as a perennial attraction that continues to expand and enhance the Scary Farm backstory.
