Written on 02 October 2022.

Tulleys Shocktober Fest 2022 - review & photos

The legendary Tulleys Shocktober Fest returns for 2022, with its biggest and best lineup! The UK's ultimate Scream Park now includes 11 attractions plus live music stages, street theatre, fire pits, food stalls and bars.

We were invited to the 2022 press night where a host of celebrity guests and other VIPs hit the 'black carpet' and braved the terrifying haunts.

The scale of the event is once again unrivalled, with the attractions spread across a huge site from Main Square and The Yard at one end to Main Street and The Courtyard at the other end. The two largest bars are the Shock Bar and Saloon Bar. There's also a selection of thrill rides including Sling Shot, Roller Coaster and X-Scream. Other optional extras are Zombie Paintball and Axe Throwing.

New for 2002 are Doom Town and Electrick Circus, alongside the nine returning haunts and countless roaming scare actors.

Doom Town (NEW)

Hell is bubbling over and the dead rise to walk in the realm of living. The molten evil rises and seeps out from every opening, every passageway into a purgatory of a time gone by. Doom Town is governed by evil and inhabited by the dead; walking corpses whose only need is to earn back their place back in Hell. Find sanctuary if you can. Find a Priest. Find salvation. Not even the church can stop the Hell Mouth from opening wide and spitting from them an army of the dead. Dare you enter Doom Town? Will you be the saviour of the past? Or will you be trapped forever in an 80’s Video-Nasty? Use your… BRAINS…

Travel back in time to the 1980s and an English town on the edge of London that has been overrun with zombies.

To create the new scare attraction, Tulleys has built a huge indoor and outdoor set complete with a pub, newsagent, greengrocer, hairdresser, video rental, takeaway, cinema, public toilets, church and a funeral home. In the streets there is a milk float, minibus, van and a hearse, all on tarmacked roads with pavements, traffic lights and a phone box.

We were blown away by the sheer scale and creativity of this latest addition to the event. The attention to detail throughout the attraction is remarkable, with carefully placed items and so many design touches that recreate places and moments in time perfectly.

The expert creative team at Tulleys has pulled out all the stops and delivered a tremendously immersive scare experience, that's packed with humour as well as scares, with plenty of jokes and rude-sounding names to enjoy along the way.

With a selection of 80s music pumping out in the right places, you're completely immersed in this new themed environment. For key scenes, light and smoke effects are also deployed for maximum impact, including a hilarious zombie disco.

It was also brilliant to see how the scare actors interacted with the spaces and us, with some proper dialogue in places as well as the predictable moans and groans that you would expect from a cast of zombies.

Doom Town was so much fun to explore that we had to experience it more than once to take everything in. It's a must-visit scare attraction in which Tulleys somehow manages to surpass itself once again.

Electrick Circus (NEW)

So say the new inhabitants of the Electrick Circus. This isn’t just a twisted re-wire of an abandoned Circus plot, this is a whole new SHOCK! A super-charged journey that will create sparks and cause jolts of excitement and terror. So if all the clowns are dead, then who runs the show? Meet Sparky… The new ‘clown’ in town.

Replacing the former scare maze Twisted Clowns 3D, this new clown caper sees a complete transformation of the past experience with very little of the previous incarnation still evident.

It is estimated that 12% of the UK population suffers from a fear of clowns (coulrophobia), and they're not going to enjoy this one! There are angry clowns, cheeky clowns, evil clowns, tormented clowns, creepy clowns and demented clowns. Basically, lots of clowns!

With a seemingly endless number of clowns roaming the smoke filled rooms and corridors, joined by some animatronic accomplices, you're guaranteed a few shocks.

In this rendition of a classic clown maze, the clowns are busy trying to electrocute each other, themselves and... YOU! The sets are basic (the majority of budget for this year clearly went on Doom Town) but the jump scares are effective and sparks will fly!