My chaotic October: Four UK scare mazes, one ghost train, and way too much anime
Reviews of Halloween Haunt Fest, FEAR, Mary Shelley's House of Frankenstein, and more – plus Shōgun, Sword of Doom, Chainsaw Man, and a John Candy tribute
October 2025 did not go as planned. As a lifelong lover of horror, I look forward to Halloween each year not because I have any intrinsic love of pumpkins or elaborate costumes, but because this is the time I can best expect the rest of the world to align with my taste. Few things make me happier than a good scare maze, the opportunity to enter an immersive theatrical world where set, sound and costume designers collaborate to create elaborate experiences designed solely to suspend my disbelief and terrify me.
For better or worse, the vast majority of scare experiences cluster in October. I wish they’d happen in January, February and March instead, but that’s out of my control. For these reasons, whenever October comes around I make plans to take part in as many horror experiences as I can schedule before they disappear. This year was more disastrous than most. After a couple of good events and a couple of mixed experiences, Covid-19 struck again, forcing me to cancel a planned family holiday and all of the Halloween events I’d booked for us to enjoy together.
Here’s what October 2025 actually looked like:
The scare attractions that worked (and the one that spectacularly didn’t)
Farmaggedon
This was my first visit to Farmaggedon and it blew me away. Mark Edwards’ adults-only Halloween attraction has evolved over nearly two decades into something genuinely special – permanent sets and animatronics that rival major theme park haunts, all wrapped in a heavy metal festival atmosphere. If satanic imagery, underground temples and giant animatronic monsters are your thing, you have to visit at least once.
Halloween Haunt Fest
Thanks to exceptional marketing, I was incredibly excited about the UK’s first official Texas Chainsaw Massacre maze. I travelled halfway across the UK and spent hundreds on tickets and hotels. The roaming chainsaw-wielding performers were brilliant, but the moment you entered the scare mazes it became apparent they’d run out of money and nothing was finished. The organisers went into liquidation before making it to Halloween, leaving cast and crew unpaid. For years I’ve been fantasising about setting up UK scare events, but seeing the human cost when ambition outstrips budget has given me serious pause for thought.
Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein After Dark
The world’s first museum dedicated to Mary Shelley – who wrote most of Frankenstein in Bath in 1816 – transforms every October for After Dark sessions, plunging five floors of a 300-year-old building into absolute darkness. Ten chambers of terror with carefully staggered admissions. The darkness becomes overwhelming when invisible hands reach out – at one point an unseen pair stroked my face and I recoiled in genuine repulsion. The basement finale was relentless.
FEAR at Avon Valley
My third visit to what remains the most enjoyable Halloween event I’ve visited anywhere in the UK. Twice awarded Best Scream Park UK, FEAR divides across two themed zones with five scare attractions. The new Seeds of Evil is the park’s most theatrical and story-led attraction yet, whilst Vita Nova’s 1984-inspired psychological horror remains the crown jewel. What distinguishes FEAR is how much fun everyone clearly has – performers genuinely enjoying their work rather than relying on calculated provocation.
When Covid derailed everything else
After that haul, Covid struck and cancelled everything, though I managed to reschedule my Scarefest at Alton Towers tickets to another week, sans-Scarefest. Finally, in my forties, I rode The Curse, the ghost train I’d wanted to experience since watching Blue Peter’s segment about it when I was eight. Being a family ride, the 30+ year wait wasn’t entirely justified, but I was happy to fulfil that modest life goal. I also rode the Wicker Man again, reminding myself that rollercoasters absolutely terrify me but I can just about manage anything without a full inversion.
Most of the rest of October was spent watching an inordinate amount of television, because any time it became quiet my brain spiralled quickly into morbid fears, as seems to be my way when catching Covid.
Covid viewing diary: Samurai, chainsaw devils, abyssal horrors, and beloved comedians
Shōgun (2024)
When the new Shōgun series launched on Disney+ in the UK, my family were less enamoured with the barbarity of feudal Japan than I was. After two episodes they declined to continue, so I stopped and waited patiently for the opportunity to watch the remaining eight hours alone. Having finally done so, I’d describe Shōgun as possibly the most accomplished historical drama series ever filmed, one of the best arguments for international co-productions and an incredible exercise in bringing Japanese history to life for Western audiences.
Based on James Clavell’s 1975 novel and the first 1980 TV miniseries (which starred Toshiro Mifune and I’m now tempted to revisit), this version depicts the end of the Sengoku period in Japan, a time of civil war that preceded the country’s unification under a single Shōgun. Although there’s an East-meets-West element that was probably a prerequisite for the kind of budget spent here – Shōgun reportedly cost $25 million US dollars per episode, compared to typical Japanese TV budgets of $250,000 – this is still probably the most faithful reproduction of that period in Japanese history you’re likely to see on screen, bringing to life the customs, hierarchies, politics and warfare of the time.
Maybe my love of Japanese history blinded me to its faults, but I can’t recommend Shōgun highly enough. The series swept the 2024 Emmy Awards with 18 wins, but more importantly it’s filled with romance, poetry, gorgeous production design, and formidable performances. It brings to life a place and time we can never revisit, balancing accessibility for general audiences with enough integrity not to lose viewers closer to the original subject material.
Sword of Doom (1966)
On the subject of samurai, I don’t often feel the need to note celebrity deaths, but in November 2025 Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai passed away at 91, and I want to acknowledge the impact his starring role in The Sword of Doom (1966) had on me. Based on an unfinished serial novel unavailable in English, and following multiple earlier film adaptations, one interpretation is that it’s a collection of scenes edited together to create an unfinished snapshot from a larger story.
Alternatively, thanks to Nakadai’s mesmerisingly bleak performance, I’d argue The Sword of Doom is that rare example of a perfect film. Relentlessly dark, nihilistic and fatalistic, this story of a master swordsman utterly devoid of morality depicts events I choose to interpret as his descent into hell. Cold, hollow and ferocious, Nakadai’s performance is unforgettable and a source of endless inspiration to me.
Chainsaw Man (series one)
Based on Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga, Chainsaw Man is simultaneously wildly inventive and staggeringly conservative, embodying all the best and worst traits of Japanese comics published by shonen giants like Weekly Shonen Jump. The story follows an impoverished teenager who fuses with a cutesy chainsaw devil, gaining the ability to transform his face into a chainsaw and rejuvenate himself by drinking blood. He joins a government agency of publicly-funded devil hunters and begins fighting fantastical monsters in modern city settings, living like a mayfly but still finding time to obsess over what it would be like to touch a girl’s boobs.
If you think that sounds like conceptual whiplash, it is – but the story follows a proven pathway that almost exactly mirrors series like Jujutsu Kaisen. Insane creativity matched by structural conservatism. I’m reminded of growing up with punks in my home city sporting spikes on leather jackets and brightly coloured mohicans. Visiting Camden made me feel like a country bumpkin, because London punks had two-foot tall rainbow mohicans and massive spikes. Years later on my honeymoon in Harajuku, the punks there had three belts, spiked leather jackets layered over more spiked leather jackets, and triple mohicans. That’s how I feel about innovation in manga – bigger, better, faster, more, but not necessarily in a meaningful way.
What sets Chainsaw Man apart are the dark horror elements and overt, bloody violence, though these ultimately prove to be window dressing. More significant is the nihilism: people driven by poverty to make abhorrent choices, life rendered cheap, and idealistic lovelorn teenagers dying in droves. This lends pathos and weight in surprisingly subversive ways. For that reason alone, I loved it and can’t wait to see the Reze Arc film that premiered in September 2025.
Made in Abyss (series one, Dawn of the Deep Soul, and half of series two)
My 16-year-old son implored me to watch Made in Abyss, recommending it as seriously dark and definitely relevant to my interests. I can see why he thought that way, though I’d describe it as intriguingly dark whilst riffing on established tropes rather than offering anything truly original.
Made in Abyss plays out like a fantastical, Nausicaa-inspired children’s version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, substituting Jules Verne’s subterranean world with analogies for Dante’s Inferno. An orphaned child and her mysterious robotic sidekick venture into the seemingly bottomless abyss to find her mother, traversing concentric layers filled with monsters and mortal peril.
If you’ve read Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’ Locke and Key comic series, which treated magical adventures of child protagonists as if the stakes were real and their lives at risk, Made in Abyss applies similar philosophy to chibi-style pre-teen children. This is where darkness enters: a sweet little girl who sometimes overcomes the odds, is occasionally exploited by evocatively sinister and unpredictable adults, and is forced to confront realities of mortal wounds, mercy killings, and grotesque, irrevocable consequences.
There’s narrative and thematic unity in Made in Abyss that ensures none of the pain happens without strong reason, tying disparate threads together more often than it fails. However, as with many Japanese animations, there’s cultural disconnect in the English translation – recurring jokes about the robot boy’s erect penis despite him being clearly pre-pubescent, plus recurring imagery of the pre-pubescent girl washing blood or urine from her underwear. These fetishes aside, this remains a series about children trying to survive in an adult world and, being told from the child’s perspective, it doesn’t have the narrative weight or pervasive darkness of anime told from older perspectives.
I’m curious about how the rest unfolds and not sorry to have watched it. The storytelling suggests I can trust there’ll be compelling resolution. But there’s no question that imposing such horrific consequences on child-like characters is more shock tactic than bold storytelling frontier.
John Candy: I Like Me (2025)
Growing up, I would happily rewatch comedies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), and more specifically family comedies like The Great Outdoors (1988) and Uncle Buck (1989), on repeat. As a child whose parents split up long before I’d formed any memories of them being together, The Great Outdoors particularly represented the kind of robust and chaotic family life I always craved, with John Candy as the heart of the movie, the father who holds it all together. Even in Uncle Buck, when he plays an irresponsible avatar for chaos, Candy still overcomes his shortcomings to stand up for the children and offer them the stability they need.
There aren’t many artists who leave behind that kind of legacy – making children feel seen, valued and supported in the way Candy’s work did. The world became a smaller place following his death in 1994.
I can’t give you an objective review of Colin Hanks’ documentary, other than to say I found it a long overdue appraisal of the Canadian actor’s life, legacy and relationships. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by interviews with his peers, friends and family, and I learned context about his career and achievements that was new to me. Over 30 years have passed since Candy’s death and it is my hope that there are no revelations waiting to sully the waters of his achievements. I’m sure he wasn’t perfect, nobody walks this earth without hurting people along the way, but in John Candy’s case, maybe just once we can be allowed to remember his gifts to the world and be thankful for everything he created.
I’m P M Buchan. From Plymouth, Devon, I cover dark culture across every medium, spanning literature, art, film, music, theatre and immersive experiences. I’m a former columnist for Starburst and SCREAM magazines. I’ve written for Times Literary Supplement, Bleeding Cool, and Lionsgate Fright Club and been interviewed by Rue Morgue and Kerrang!. As a comic-book writer, I’ve also collaborated with bands including Megadeth and Harley Poe, and award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith.
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