Visiting The Howl Scream Park at Mead Open Farm in Bedfordshire for its 10th birthday celebration was, without question, the most fun that I’ve had at any UK scream park. I’ve spent the last four years driving back and forth across the UK attempting to reach all the biggest and best-reviewed Halloween haunts on offer.
We attended on Saturday 17 October 2026 with two VIP fast-track tickets provided for review purposes. The atmosphere, the variety of things to do, the strength of the performances, costumes, set design, lighting and the sheer enthusiasm of everyone involved elevate The Howl to something way more than the sum of its parts.
Visiting The Howl is like a night at the most interactive, fun festival you can imagine, all catering for people who love horror. There was even a massive tenth birthday cake prop that the cast often posed on.
There are seven separately queued mazes, with unlimited entry to each included in standard admission. Being able to go back became one of the best parts of our night.
The Tulleys connection
There’s a lot of shared DNA between The Howl and Tulleys Shocktober Fest, from the signage and layout to the roaming actors with performances to encounter and sometimes participate in.
The connection goes back to The Howl’s launch in 2015. Mead Open Farm directors had seen the potential for evening entertainment after visiting a scream park on a family holiday. The events still share performance supplier Scream Park Entertainments, whose work includes scriptwriting, costume design, training and street theatre.
My own experience of Shocktober Fest was that the event was incredible, but the footfall created a conga-line effect and heavy bunching that minimised the scares. It felt like queuing through areas that should have been the most impressive and fun. Even with a fast-track ticket, I only just managed to make it through every maze on a Saturday at the start of October.
The Howl applies that shared approach to a tighter layout, more focused theme and some brilliantly inventive scare mazes. There was still easily enough entertainment to keep us busy all night and wishing for several more hours at closing time.
Noxious Alley
We started in Noxious Alley, expecting it to be the weakest of the seven mazes. The concept seemed incredibly similar to Electrick Circus at Tulleys, another clown theme with a slight twist. I’m so bored of clowns in scare mazes…
Noxious Alley applies something of a steampunk aesthetic to the branding and associated roaming actors: the top hats and goggles of crazed inventors. But within the maze itself, chaos reigns!
The sets, costumes and facepaint are fluorescent and lit by ultraviolet light, creating a dizzying, in-your-face experience. Clowns jumped up and down on the bonnets of cars, disoriented us with blasts of air and hunted us through spinning tunnels that left us dizzy and vulnerable.
I was blown away. From not having much interest in Noxious Alley at all, this became the first maze that we repeated during the night, because it was so thrilling.
RED
This Little Red Riding Hood-themed horrorshow was our next stop. A lot of the cast wore red capes and satanic facepaint, mostly seeming on the verge of sprouting hair in unusual places. They spoke in an affected gibberish that I think was supposed to evoke witchcraft and dark magic, but instead reminded me of The Sims and had one of my companions moaning that if it didn’t mean anything it was wasted breath.
The cast were spirited and there were some excellent effects, including an inflated claustrophobia tunnel and tree branches obscuring the path through the forest. Unfortunately, I ended up at the back of the group and missed the grand finish. I did manage to see something massive retreating into the wall, but overall this was one of the weaker mazes on our visit.
Full Moon Manor
Full Moon Manor was a completely immersive, captivating experience that never let up. The first room was styled as a hotel reception, complete with a bellhop with incredible red eyes, perfectly miming the safety recording while we waited for the lift to arrive. It was a standout performance of the night.
The lift rattled and shook as it took us to our destination, and we explored a hotel descending into monstrous anarchy, including a birthday party gone wrong and a steam room filled with smoke and bright white lights that hid roaming actors.
One of the highlights of my visit was my second go through Full Moon Manor, when many of the cast recognised me and welcomed me back, happy that I’d returned to the party. In terms of immersive theatre, that attention to detail elevates your encounters and adds more than any number of extra jump scares could.
ShriekEasy
The newest maze in the park, ShriekEasy opened in 2025 and is up there with the most innovative and interesting scare mazes in the country. We’d been primed by numerous encounters with roaming mobsters through the streets beforehand, and were not disappointed.
You have to give a code to be allowed through the shopfront, entering a hidden world of lindy-hopping, gambling and bootlegging. During my journey I played cards to be allocated a route, admired a dancer onstage in the club and was accosted by her boyfriend.
I eventually escaped into a hidden bar, where a group of undead cheerleaders were queuing for cocktails and denigrating the men around them. I’d love to see more horror events take this much care with their theming and immersion.
Howl Valley High
After offending the cheerleaders in the hidden bar, we made our way to Howl Valley High to find out what had infected them. Like ShriekEasy, the set design here was next level.
We were chased through hallways of lockers, shouted at by teachers and harassed in the gymnasium. The cast were dressed in varsity jackets and hidden behind pom-poms, covered in blood and back from the dead.
Although this wasn’t the scariest maze of the night, it was certainly in competition for the most enjoyable. In an industry filled with cannibal rednecks and clowns, The Howl’s commitment to telling different stories is really appreciated. Where else can you be accosted by a monstrous wannabe prom queen while the winner cackles with glee and people run past you chased by something horrible in the darkness?
The Shed and Squealers Yard
Without meaning to, we left two of the longest-running mazes until last, and my memory of the two blends together a little. Both were part of the original 2015 line-up.
These were much more traditional scare mazes, the kind where dirty gap-toothed cannibals leer at you on entry, hide in the dark wielding chainsaws and send you running in and outdoors past flickering campfires and cages filled with failed experiments. Significantly darker and more visceral than the other mazes, there were more scares to be had here, with longer routes to get split up and lost in.
Squealers Yard had new scenes for 2026, and although I can’t compare it to what came before, I can attest that this iteration was an assault on the senses: dead bodies hanging on hooks all around, many chainsaws and a cloying bacon smell in the rooms where corpses were being cooked. Completing the two mazes consecutively really delivered all the thrills and stimulation that you could look for in a horror event.
Entertainment all night
Even with all seven scare mazes completed, there was still plenty to do. The roaming actors seemed to get more excitable as the night went on, creeping up behind people to pop balloons, showing off the contents of their coffins and chasing people with power tools.
The Circus of Screams had a packed-out audience when we entered. A card game gone wrong ended with an audience member stapling playing cards to the torso of one of the entertainers.
There was lots of fire, sword swallowing and acrobatics, plus motorcycle stunt riders crisscrossing in a globe of death. Added to all the scares and general merriment of the evening, it was a lot to take in.
At 10pm, the roaming actors assembled onstage for Ding Dong Die, the new gameshow for 2026, inviting audience members up to find the monsters hidden behind each door. Think The Generation Game but with zombies and werewolves.
Afterwards, we all raced around the park buying souvenirs and jumping back into our favourite mazes before closing. We’d also had time to eat, grab a few drinks and even join some of the actors on the dancefloor.
Tickets and queues
I’d give The Howl a full evening, especially if you want to catch the shows and revisit your favourite mazes.
The queues were sizeable at times on our Saturday visit, but The Howl has an app that you can use to check queue times. The displayed waits never seemed to go much over 45 minutes, though we found that the listed times had little bearing on the length of the fast-track queues.
We never had to queue more than around 10 minutes, apart from for Squealers Yard, whose fast-track queue consistently looked longer than the main queue until much later in the night. Staff told us that because of the updates for 2026, returning visitors all made a beeline for the cannibal adventure. With our VIP tickets, those short waits elsewhere gave us time for repeat runs as well as the shows.
The verdict
For all my enthusiasm about the more inventive mazes, Noxious Alley and the final two attractions also showed how much fun there’s still to be had with familiar horror themes when they’re done this well.
The Howl cemented my opinion that it’s easy to put on an “adult” experience with lots of offensive language and insults, easy to cover everything in fake blood and chase people with a chainsaw, but real immersive entertainment takes dedication, imagination and hard work. That’s what seems to power The Howl, all in the service of providing a good time.
If you had asked me last year what the most enjoyable scream park in the UK was, I’d have named FEAR Scream Park at Avon Valley. There’s wall-to-wall entertainment there, some innovative mazes, and always a dance routine or laser show to watch when you’re queuing. But The Howl was a cut above, from its werewolf theming throughout to the dedicated performances of its actors, both the scarers and the hosts, and the density of different things to do.
If you’re like me and don’t mind travelling for the best, and only plan to visit one scream park this year, make it The Howl.
Visiting The Howl in 2026
The Howl runs on selected nights from 9 to 31 October 2026 at Mead Open Farm, Billington, near Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, LU7 9JH. Gates open at 6pm, with the mazes open from 6.30pm until 11pm.
Standard admission starts at £32 and includes unlimited maze entry and the circus. Packages with three fast-track passes start at £42, seven passes from £52, or unlimited fast-track from £62. Prices vary by date. Check dates and tickets.
The minimum age is 12, and accompaniment rules apply. Parking is free and the site is cashless. The mazes are not wheelchair accessible. Check access information and visiting rules before booking.
