Track or Treat 2: It's Coming Home
Thorpe Park Fright Night 2008

Page 2

This is a report of a special trip I went on organised by the company I worked with. They organised a special event to Thorpe Park, where it was hired for the evening exclusively for the use of employees of the company for the evening.
It's quite a big company so it was still a very busy trip, with queues of over an hour for some of the coasters. The big bonus though was that the 4 special horror mazes were open for the evening. This was an especially big bonus as this was the day before the mazes opened to the public, so we got to try them before anyone else.

It's Six o Clock, all the normal visitors have left, and now a couple of thousand new visitors are heading in to the park.

Here's a view of Thorpe Parks new Gerstauler Eurofighter for 2009. Here you can see the signature vertical hill lift and 97 degree first drop.

Speaking of new rides, this is the new horror maze for this year.

It's set in this tent, located in one of the kids pools that's been drained to make room for this. It hadn't opened this early in the evening, but we'll be coming back to it later.

Here's the advertisement for 2009's new ride. It's now been confirmed it will be called "Saw: The Ride." When I heard this I did genuinely make jokes about it being based around being tortured by a serial killer, and how we'd done a maze called "Seven" at the park. Then I saw the official site at http://www.sawtheride.com/ and realised it really was linked in with the horror film franchise.

It has occurred to me that this being the U.K.'s third Gerstauler Eurofighter, do Thorpe Park really want to be associated with a franchise known for it's inferior sequels.

Here's a shot of the hill lift.

This photo shows the skeleton of a large building they're constructing as part of the theming of the ride.

A close up of some of the ride that looks like it will be enclosed when the ride opens.

After checking out Saw: the ride we headed over to the first ride of the evening, one of the four horror mazes called Hellgate. Because everyone else was heading towards the big 3 roller coasters first we were the first two people to get to it. This was a bit of a problem as we had to wait for a few more people to get a large enough group. My attempts to tempt a few people in the Colossus queue over fell on deaf ears, luckily we were shortly joined by a few other people and we got to be the first visitors of 2008 to try out Hellgate.

Of all 4 of the mazes I think Hellgate was my personal favourite. It's well themed, and had some good scary moments created by some of the actors.