Halloween is a time when people like to feel chills of fear and the hair standing up on the back of their necks from sudden frights. Every year around this time at Everland, Korea’s premier theme park run by Samsung C&T Resort Group, there is a Halloween festival to thrill and delight visitors young and old.
This year brings the visual genius of last year’s big hit streaming series Squid Game to Halloween at Everland. From 80 days beginning Sept. 2 to Nov. 20, audiences will feel a combination of fear and uncanny attraction at the Blood City attraction. And for people who would rather focus on nature than horror, Everland has countless beautiful autumn flowers to dazzle the eye too.
Bloody Blood City 6
Hardcore horror fans should make a beeline straight for Blood City 6. For the last 5 years the temporary Blood City feature attraction has built a name for itself among fright fans for its thrills and chills. This year, in its 6th incarnation, Blood City 6 is set in a city teeming with hungry zombies. To flee the undead horde, visitors must make their way to the 199 Express train (the T-Express rollercoaster) and take a scary ride to safety. Appropriately, Everland’s Alpine area has been transformed into a massive train station.
Here is where the production designer of the scary series Squid Game enters the picture. Chae Kyeong-sun, who won an award at the 26th Art Directors Guild Awards last March for her work on the hit streaming show, has collaborated with Everland’s team to create the eerie and gloomy train station set, complete with derailed trains, tunnels, and neon signs at a scale to overwhelm visitors and make them feel as if they are characters in a horror movie.
To add real detail to the set, two actual train cars were airlifted into the theme park to create the feel of carriages wrecked by zombies. At Blood City’s entrance, a 30,000-lumen 4k ultra-high-definition projector plays video images that perfect the chilling atmosphere.
Blood City also has the familiar horror maze, this year scarier and more a-maze-ing than ever, to give a bone-tingling experience to already nervous visitors.
Performances, shows and experiences
To keep the frightful theme going, Crazy Zombie Hunt performances will feature on the special stage at Blood City, depicting humans chased by zombies, and 3-meter-tall zombies will appear unannounced on the streets of Blood City to give photo opportunities to visitors after they get over their shock.
Further special live Halloween shows will be held featuring scary performances to give audiences a thrill. The daily Halloween Wicked Parade (with cute skeletons, witches, and walking pumpkins) and Sweet Savage Trick or Treat will be performed during the day, giving equal measures of fun and fear to viewers. After dark there are nightly Ghost Mansion shows in the Four Seasons Garden. And every Saturday evening from Sept. 17 to Nov. 5 there will be Fall in the Garden Concerts, put on in collaboration with the CJ Cultural Foundation.
Meanwhile, at the entrance of Blood City, a new White X’s Secret Dressing Room has been opened so that visitors to Everland’s Halloween festival can be transformed into a zombie character with makeup applied by expert makeup artists.
Blooming autumn
The 10,000 square meter Four Seasons Garden has been transformed into a Halloween-themed garden bursting with autumnal blooms such as chrysanthemum, burningbush (Kochia scoparia, also known as Mexican firebrush and fireweed), celosia, dianthus, and more. The garden is also decorated with colorful pumpkin sculptures.
A bed of 200,000 orange marigolds has been planted in front of the Four Seasons Garden’s huge LED screen, creating a Halloween infinity garden of marigolds that seems to go on forever.
Also, Everland has been engaged in industry-academic cooperation together with a team of students from the landscaping department of the University of Seoul to create a theme garden of burningbush along the Sky Plum Blossom Trail, Everland’s most beautiful walking path.
More details can be found on Everland’s website.
