Halloween
parkworld-online.com
Social media sells! To promote the attraction we partner with two local radio stations, Radio City and Rock FM, but social marketing is also really important to us. We’ve got 23,000 likes on Facebook and a good following on Twitter. Crucially we don’t pay anyone to do our social media, we do it all ourselves, and we keep at it all year. We track all the activity, and we see it generating a lot of sales via the links to our ticketing site.
that would not work if you were paying everyone. I think the event benefits from the enthusiasm of the volunteers that really want to do it and put so much into it, along with the professionalism of people who have chosen it as a career; the balance works.
Control the flow We train the performers on how to control the flow of people through the houses. Some scare attractions do that by making everyone hold hands on their way round but personally I hate that, it destroys the experience. If you have a well-trained bunch of people with an understanding of how scares work at various points, you can still control your audience pretty efficiently. There’s a huge amount to consider when it comes to the healthy and safety of the customers and staff. Whether it’s the lighting, the use of the smoke machines, how many people you put through and how you evacuate the space, everything is risk assessed. We believe that our theming is the best in the
country. The sets, the make-up, everything is full of attention to detail. There are no fashion haircuts on any of our performers, there will be no make-up stopping at the chin and not going any further, and you will not see a pair of Nike trainers underneath any of the costumes.
The experience has to happen from the moment you arrive, and the queue line is very important. We have to be firing arrows at you saying, “This is what you’re going to get when you go inside, only it’s going to be worse.” And then when you come out, there’s also little reminders of stuff you saw inside the houses. Whether it’s a character, a piece of scenery, etc, it gets you talking as you make your way home. We used to worry in the early days about people taking photos inside the houses, but to be quite honest if you try and take a picture in the dark with your phone you’re not going to get much. As for people giving out spoilers, we tend not to get it too much. Our customers tend to buy into the idea of, “I’ve had my scare, now I’m going to make sure you get yours.” And because we change a lot from year to year and because our cast is so vast, you are not going to get the same experience from one group to the next.
OCTOBER 2013 37
Our tickets go on sale in February and then we do a press night in the first or second week of September. From then until opening night at the start of October it’s all about selling tickets. Any Halloween attraction can sell out the last week of October, you could sell it twice over, but we are doing the event now over a 22-day period so you’ve got to start making a noise quite early on. The second the kids are back at school in September, that’s when you ramp it up because once the back to school stuff comes off the shelves in the shops, the Halloween stuff goes up and you need to be there with it. We don’t release any attendance figures, but our numbers are higher than anyone elses! Recently we’ve started talking about the possibility of doing stuff at other times of year that would lend themselves to it, but it may turn out to be one-offs rather than a full season, Friday the 13th or Valentine’s Day, something like that. Farmaggedon does seem to have become a bit of a monster – in more ways than one – and planning it is more or less a year-round pursuit; we never come off the clock. However as long as there is growth in the Halloween market, we should be able continue on an upwards path for some time to come.
farmaggedon.co.uk
Farmaggedon’s 2013 run comes to a close on 2 November. Tickets range from £16.00 ($25.50/€18.85) to £18.00 ($28.70/€21.20). Richard Cottier was talking to Owen Ralph.
‘The actors put a lot of energy
into it’ Park World sent reader Andy Smith to experience Farmaggedon as part of the press night in September. So how did he get on?
“We arrived on a mild autumn evening, with still over a month to go until
Halloween, not quite knowing what to expect. The entrance with the dancing girls looked really cool, in fact the theming and decor throughout was very well done; it wasn’t just thrown together. Before you entered Insanity they held you in a waiting room where you could hear the screams ahead; that really got my nervier mate going! There were some good characters; and the actors were really putting a lot of energy into it. At one point, one of the characters tagged along with the group behind us, which was quite funny. If I had one complaint it would be that although the haunted houses all looked very different, by the you got onto the third one the scares were pretty much the same – just people jumping out at you – although there were things like a revolving tunnel to break it up, which was effective. I would certainly recommend Farmaggedon to my friends, however, and it was a great night out.”
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