Night of Terror 2020 Review
Located on the Creamy Acres Farm in Mullica Hills, NJ, Night of Terror is a full night of fun and excitement. This haunt has four attractions: The Ride of Terror, The Harvest, The Playground, and Dark Dreams. For those who are interested, there is also a Haunted Paintball Hayride where you get to shoot at live zombies.
Much credit goes out to the team at Creamy Acres for their line management set up. There is one entrance to Night of Terror and attractions are sequential as each attraction goes one after the other. As intimidating as the line for the Hayride looks, it doesn’t feel long. On a busy night it’s easy to wait in line for an hour or more to get on the hayride, but it is the only wait and it doesn’t feel long because it keeps moving at a steady pace.
The Ride of Terror hayride builds up as the ride goes along and it has plenty of time to build. It’s one of the longer hayrides and is packed with a dozen or-so scenes as the tractor meanders through a creepy forest. Starting off easy and manageable, each scene becomes larger and more intimidating than the previous ones with huge animatronic monsters and surprise pyrotechnics. At Creamy Acres, they don’t just randomly put animatronics throughout the hayride. Whether the creators find the animatronics to fit their scenes or if they build their scenes around their animatronics, we don’t know. What we do know is that the animatronics fit the scenes perfectly and are well placed. This ride had scenes that none of us in the HRC remember seeing anywhere else. This includes what seemed to be a vertical swamp we passed through. Creamy acres is known for its fun attraction all year round, so the crew here is no stranger to hard work when it comes to building set designs and hard work. The actors are well placed throughout the attraction as well. You never know where they are going to come from. They may come at you from the sides of the hayride, from up above, or be right in front of you on the ride itself. COVID precautions are in play after each ride ends. Once all the patrons are off the hayride, one of the staff members gets on to spray it down and disinfect it in time for the next group. We thank the crew for that.
Ride of Terror ends and The Harvest begins. A tightly packed trail through the corn has many turns and corners. This makes for great hiding spots for actors to surprise their unsuspecting guests. For those actors who don’t have a corner to hide, there are monsters in camouflaged costumes hiding in plain sight. When the hidden actors aren’t around, high tech mechanical monsters can be found everywhere and throughout. You will definitely want to be sure to wear good walking shoes since the ground here can be muddy and some areas you go downhill.
The Harvest dumps out to The Playground. For the HRC, this was a highlight attraction. It is a 3D nightmare of a circus designed to be disorienting for adventurers in 3D glasses. In each circus themed room, faces and other painted images seem to float off the walls. Clowns hide and seem to come out of nowhere as rooms twist. The Playground is sensory overload in the most freakishly entertaining way that ends in the most unique way before entering Dark Dreams. In all the years we have been going to haunted attractions, this is the best 3D attraction any of us remember seeing.
Dark Dreams is an indoor adventure constructed to maximize actor and mechanical surprises. It’s impossible to predict where surprises hide as they come from all directions. The 360 degrees of screams and disorienting tickles seem to come from everywhere and nowhere which makes Dark Dreams an intense way to end the night. Night of Terror throws everything it has in this attraction and lays it on the line to finish the evening on a strong note.
After the night of screams is done, sitting down and having a bite to eat is a great way to come down off the adrenaline rush. Between food trucks, dessert concessions and Creamy Farms hot dog stand, there is no shortage of food options along with honey and preserves to take home to the family.
Buy tickets online for specific time slots and expect to spend a whole evening at Night of Terror at Creamy Farms. Don’t forget to visit during the winter holiday season for Night of Lights for an evening of Christmas lights and games for the kids. A definite year round thumbs up to the Creamy Acres crew and staff.
