Knotts Scary Farm Review (2026)

Knott’s Berry Farm is a theme park, albeit a small one, and this means that parking and entry can be quite an undertaking, with lines of cars winding around the park. There are multiple parking lots, and unless you want to shell out for the Preferred lot, you can expect to walk a certain distance. When we attended, we paid $45 for general parking: more than the cost of admission to some smaller attractions.

As we walked from the parking lot to the entrance of the park, we noticed that several of the shop fronts were already decorated for Christmas. We were tempted to deduct points for the guest experience for that reason alone: we were here for Halloween, so where were the Halloween decorations? We ultimately decided it wasn’t fair to blame the Scary Farm event for what the shops were doing, even though they all belonged to the same park, but it was annoying nonetheless.

Once we made it through security, we were allowed to enter the park about half an hour before the event officially started. Those interested can wait behind stanchions outside of Ghost Town for the stroke of 7pm, when Knott’s Scary Farm mascot Sarah Marshall, a vengeful witch, appears to herald the beginning of the event for the day.

We didn’t have a great vantage point for the show, but our spot allowed us to quickly stream through the fog, where we began to beeline towards the attractions, hopeful that we’d avoid some of the lines. We recommend doing it this way; Knott’s Scary Farm is another attraction where queuing can take hours during the busier evenings.

In terms of creating a large-scale, immersive atmosphere, Knott’s Scary Farm is one of the best in the business. From the moment you enter, each part of the park is blanketed with fog and shrouded in low, sickly lights in colors like green and purple. There are few areas you can walk to and be completely free from the risk of encountering a scare actor; Knott’s also happens to be the birthplace of the haunt tradition of sliding; as such, you might encounter sliders as you make your way from one area of the park to the next. When we attended on Halloween night, there was light rain for much of the night that we believe limited some of the activity that would otherwise be taking place throughout the park. Nevertheless, we encountered a few fearsome characters who braved the elements to put on a show for us as we maneuvered our way throughout the park.

Inside the mazes themselves, the impressive commitment to immersion continues, thanks mostly to the extremely elaborate sets that draw guests in. For example, one of the new mazes, Unearthed, took us into an archaeological dig in Egypt that had accidentally unleashed some ancient entities upon the modern world; this took us into the depths of a long-lost tomb, where roots crept across the walls and cryptic hieroglyphics glower with an otherworldly light. Sensory effects and committed actors helped to further sell the illusion, allowing us to the fully immersed in the darkly fantastical world they had created.

There are plenty of treats for fans of special effects in the mazes at Knott’s Scary Farm; these range from cutting-edge digital effects to classic magician’s illusions, each of which serves to help establish the narrative of the specific maze. Many of our favorite effects were found within the new maze, Inked, which we did three times and ended up being our favorite for the night. This maze deals with a Depression era cartoonist -ala Max Fleischer or early Walt Disney – whose work comes alive to wreak havoc.

There were many great effects in this maze, but we particularly enjoyed how the creators elevated a few of the classics. For example, the frequently-overused claustrophobia tunnel was made fresh by being well lit, rendered in white, and having spider effects projected onto it. Similarly, the hall of mirrors became a portal to Hell, complete with smoke and digital flames to sell the effect.

We’re typically not fans of digital effects in haunts, because we want to see real-life scares rendered in the real world, not just two dimensional effects on a screen. After all, if we just wanted to watch our haunted entertainment on a screen, we could have stayed home and watched television. While certain mazes unfortunately overemphasized the digital elements (such as Origins: the Curse of Calico, which told a lot of its story using uninteresting cutscenes), we thought Inked was an example of digital effects used correctly, as they were seamlessly merged with the other effects. Two-dimensional imagery also works better when the premise is a rebellion of cartoon characters; after all, they are supposed to be 2D. Killer cartoons were projected onto screens which allowed them to seemingly stab three dimensional animatronic characters, which we found especially fun.

There were also some amazing traditional animatronics: my favorite was the gigantic mouth in the Eight Fingers Nine: The Boogeyman maze, which attempted to chew me up when I walked into. Since I genuinely didn’t see that coming, I was effectively startled by such an over the top and whimsical effect.

You’ll meet a wide variety of unsavory characters at Knott’s Scary Farm, although you will probably only interact with a few of the ones you encounter in the scarezones. We met a strange cowboy as we waited for the Room 13 maze, who mocked us for attempting to shield ourselves from the rain. We also encountered a sheriff as we waited for Origins: the Curse of Calico, who warned us of the terrors we might face within.

These actors provided improvisational humor as we waited in line, although we should note that the hype they attempted to generate for the mazes didn’t always pay off. We attended on the night of the 31st, and noted that, at least on Halloween itself, the mazes felt short staffed at times. We expected certain effects that didn’t take place, simply because it didn’t seem like there was an actor to man them: for example, there is a gigantic chainsaw that is supposed to be wielded by a masked maniac in the Cinema Slasher maze, but when we went through, that slasher was nowhere to be found, and the chainsaw hung limply and nonthreateningly (we did do that maze again a few hours later and the maniac finally turned up). Similarly, when we did the Origins maze, which is centered around a witch, the witch herself never appeared, even though she was clearly meant to be flying over our heads.

Knott’s Scary Farm is a relatively family friendly event, and we saw plenty of children there, some of whom seemed to be younger than ten. As such, it’s not likely to generate any especially intense scares for adults or teenagers; there are a few startling effects, and occasionally a slider emerging from the fog will make you jump, but for the most part, don’t expect to be shaking in your boots here.

Knott’s Scary Farm places far more emphasis on the fantastical side of Halloween than the frightening, and this is an element they achieve extremely well. But if you want a truly scary haunted maze, you are probably better off going somewhere else.

Rating the value for any of these theme park attractions is difficult because they are so expensive; when you factor in tickets, parking, and perhaps a snack, a visit to Knott’s Scary Farm can easily run you several hundred dollars. You may be tempted to sit the attraction out simply because of the sticker shock, and we wouldn’t blame you. We paid $85 per person for general admission, and on some busy nights, prices were even higher than that.

If you do decide to spend the money, there are a few ways to get a little more bang for your buck. We were “lucky” because we attended on a rainy night, meaning the crowds were not as big as they probably otherwise would have been; as a result, we didn’t have to wait in many lines, and most of the mazes were entirely walk-ons (the theme park rides, however, remained extremely popular, with the line for the Ghostrider roller coaster being as long as three hours at times). We didn’t manage any rides, but we were able to do all the mazes in about two hours and then simply start repeating the ones we liked the most. We managed to do six of the mazes once, three of them twice, and one of them (Inked) three times. If you can arrange being there on an “off” night, such as a weeknight or perhaps earlier in the season, you’ll likely find the value to be much better.