Behind the scenes at the scream park: fear, fainting, clowns – and ‘code brown’

‘We always say to the scare actors, you’re going to think the boys will be the worst. They are not.” Backstage at PrimEvil, billed as “Norfolk’s premier scare attraction”, park director Ben Francis is sharing the advice he gives each year to his new crop of performers, before they set out to give punters the fright of their lives – or at least their Saturday night. As Francis covers each demographic, he ticks them off on his fingers. Teenage boys “scream like banshees, and run in packs”. Teenage girls tend towards being unimpressed: “Do your scare and move on, because they will get nasty.” And mixed groups? “There will be an alpha and he’ll be wearing a North Face top.” Francis’s advice is to not waste time. “He will not react to anything … Aim for the weaker one at the back.”

This is part of the workplace induction at PrimEvil, one of many immersive “scream parks” that pop up across the UK in the lead up to Halloween. For about £40 a ticket, groups of all ages spend the night roaming themed attractions and being terrorised by actors and special effects. Though the risks are minimal, the spikes in heart rate are very real.

For Francis and the rest of the team, PrimEvil is months in the making. The nightly production involves more than 100 actors and dozens of crew, spread across six themed attractions, each drawing from familiar horror tropes – the scary clowns at the Circus of Terror, the cannibalistic trailer-dwellers over at Route 666, the satanic cult of The Offering. The winding routes are designed to disorient you with strobe lights, smoke machines, mirrored walls, hidden doors, false exits and unstable floors. But it’s down to the performers to bring the nightmare to life.

“I think people who don’t know what to expect think it’s just a nice little walk round, where you see the odd actor, they have a chat with you, then you carry on,” says Francis. “Actually, what the industry does now is completely immerse you in the theme of this world for 10 minutes.”

PrimEvil is the special Halloween event of ROARR!, a dinosaur-themed adventure park a half-hour drive from central Norwich. That family-friendly attraction remains open in the day during PrimEvil’s run. Now, coming up to 5pm, an hour before the gates open, the transition from theme park to scream park is under way.

It’s Saturday, the second night of PrimEvil’s nearly two-week run. Yesterday, 1,400 people spent the evening here, despite steady drizzle; the same number are expected later.

At PrimEvil HQ, a purpose-built warehouse, actors start flooding in for wardrobe and makeup. For our interview, Francis and I hole up in the laundry room, out of their way. Still, we’re intermittently interrupted by performers, partway through changing into costume, looking for plastic gloves or spray-on blood. Francis himself is in high demand, not just as PrimEvil’s boss of operations but also as an old hand. This is the 17th year he’s been involved, having attended the very first event in 2009. Though there were UK scare attractions then – notably Tulleys Shocktoberfest, now 30 years old, and Fright Night at Thorpe Park – they were still fringe.

Francis didn’t know what to expect, he says. “I remember being absolutely terrified.” The following year, he applied to be an actor, and discovered a passion for scaring people. It’s not as sinister as it sounds, he insists. “It’s the best form of therapy, and you get paid to do it.” Francis was cast as a clown, “apart from one year where I was a hillbilly”. He found venting in character to be effective stress relief from his day job in the charities sector. “You shout at people, and they love it.” One evening in 2016, Francis arrived at PrimEvil in a foul mood after a board meeting had left him feeling disillusioned about his purpose. Martin Goymour, ROARR!’s founder and managing director, offered him a job. Both were in costume at the time, Francis confirms. “I was a clown, and he was in lederhosen.”

Goymour joins us in the laundry room now, looking for face paint. We met earlier, at ROARR!’s offices across the park; I don’t immediately recognise him in his brocade suit and top hat, his face white and bloody. To PrimEvil regulars, Goymour is a familiar sight as “Skullmore”, the dark Victorian ringmaster, sweeping the park on his Segway.

Goymour was inspired to start PrimEvil in the mid-00s, after visiting Hollywood and one of Universal Studios’ legendary Halloween Horror events. The first PrimEvil, in 2009, was a single maze, built within the steel frame of ROARR!’s office building, after construction was paused by the recession. The idea was to draw a new crowd to the park after dark, and “have some fun” themselves. It was half a decade before the event broke even.

Now PrimEvil attracts 20,000 visitors annually (Tulleys, the largest in Europe, boasts 150,000), while most theme parks stage spooky-season events. Their popularity has grown alongside the mainstreaming of Halloween and horror in the UK, driving up the standard. There is even a trade show, ScareCON, and industry awards, the SCARs; PrimEvil won the top prize in 2024.

Francis and Goymour tweak the attractions every year and regularly travel to the US to scope out new tech and props. There, a single scare attraction can gross nearly $1m per season, though that’s offset by mounting costs. Goymour told me he spent “quite a bit” on “gory bodies” last year – about £10,000. According to IT manager Richard Colsell, responsible for the technical aspects of PrimEvil, the innovation is focused on electronic control systems. These trigger features such as animatronics or lighting changes; increasingly, the industry is using AI to read and respond to visitors in real-time, and even track their gaze.

Wherever possible, Colsell prefers to leave control in the hands of the actors. “Sometimes less is more.” With each performance typically lasting less than 30 seconds (then repeated for hours), theatrical chops are less important than dynamic range across the cast. “We say to the actors, ‘You can’t all be jump scares,’” Francis says. “That’s what gets the reaction, and the adrenaline – but actually, you can be a creeper scare, a stalker, someone who just stands and stares …”

This year PrimEvil received an unprecedented 230 applications for about 132 paid spots. They were selected at a group audition, starting with a dance-off, then testing their improv skills. “The more of a prat you feel, the better you will be coming across,” says Francis. A self-avowed control freak, this year he “granted the gift” of assessment to his six team leaders, one for each attraction, who could also call dibs on performers. One man in his 70s was sought after by all six. “I had to shake a dice,” says Francis. The man wound up in Mayhem Manor, the haunted residential hospital where guests are chased by doctors and nurses wanting to violently uncover their “inner beauty”.

There are strict rules in place to protect actors and visitors, chiefly: no touching. Older women on a girls’ night can struggle with that one, says Francis. “They can get very touchy-feely.” Contracted security patrol the park for disruptive or intoxicated visitors. Performers are likewise instructed “no rude, lewd or crude” behaviour. People do strike out in terror, but actors are taught to distinguish between dodgy reflexes and ill intentions – and to watch visitors’ hands, which can suddenly spring up.

Still, accidents happen. “We have had code browns,” says Francis, though “not as often as you might think”. He estimates there are two each year, with more “code yellows”, though he assumes both are underreported. “Sometimes we’ll lend them trousers from our wardrobe, if they come and tell us.” Last night there were four panic attacks (about average, Francis says) plus two girls who fainted, and another who broke her finger. “She fell over while running away.” Most often, the on-site welfare team assists those wanting some quiet time-out.

As Francis and I talk, actors emerge from the wardrobe transformed. A young man has traded his trackies for a boilersuit; there’s an increasing number of nuns. Francis admits to feeling a little wistful. “I used to love being a scare actor.” When he took the job at PrimEvil, nearly 10 years ago, he was “adamant” he wouldn’t give up performing. Now, due to the demands of his job as park director across ROARR!, he’s had to quit the Circus. His costume is still stored in wardrobe. From a wall lined with grotesque masks, Francis pulls down one with demonic arched eyebrows and crazed red curls, and introduces me to Lofty the clown: his longtime alter ego. “No one’s allowed to touch my clown costume,” he says, fingering the satin sleeve. He declines to don it for a photo – soon, it will be showtime.

Across the hall, the makeup team is finishing up the final few actors with brisk efficiency. Kara Field is applying brown and purple shadows to a Route 666 cannibal, to create sunken-looking eyes. “If you do it wrong, they look like drag queens,” she warns. Taped to the mirrors are print-outs with guide images and keywords for each attraction. This year the clowns’ makeup is monochrome for greater impact under the Circus’ UV lights. “We decided to go a lot darker, with more depth, shadows and contours,” says Courteney Dunn, 28, head of makeup and props.

Most of Dunn’s team of eight makeup artists are “obsessed” with horror. Watching the new Insidious film with her partner, “he kept jumping, while all I was doing was looking at the makeup, literally taking notes.” Where possible, makeup artists work with the actors’ style: unnatural hair colours or facial piercings might suit workers at the toxic Werehouse 51, but not the plague-time nuns of The Crypt. Dunn appraises me: “I feel like I could put you in Route 666.”

With 20 minutes before the gates open, actors are applying finishing touches to their looks, bloodying blond wigs or blackening their teeth. The scene is less nightmare than fever dream. There’s a nun, texting intently; two pilgrims at the sink, filling up their vapour-powered torches; a clown juggling a can of Monster, a vape and a sausage roll. More than once, catching someone’s eye, I’m startled by their red or white irises.

An estimated 50% of this year’s cast are returning, motivated by the experience as much as the work. “It’s a good way to make money, but it’s also really fun,” says Mia McConnell, 19, hanging out the front of the warehouse, vaping with friends. A shop worker by day, tonight McConnell is a mutant nurse. “The best way to scare people is to hide in the smoke. They don’t see you coming.” Sometimes the shock is mutual. Last night a trainee drama teacher (who requests anonymity) came face to face with some of her pupils, “super-excited to see Miss outside school,” she tells me, wincing beneath her bloody head bandages. Yesterday’s costume offered less coverage. “If I’d looked like this, I’d have been fine.”

A slowly clanging bell gathers everyone to the front of PrimEvil HQ for Goymour’s pre-curtain pep talk. In character as Skullmore, he greets his “children of the fright” and urges them to “speak up, entertain” – and stick to their assigned spots. Then, after a team chant of “PrimEvil”, the horde is released into the park, grabbing a fortifying Mars bar from the box Francis is shaking.

Scarlett Morris, 23, a barista and musician, is playing a ditzy sheriff at Route 666. In ordinary life, Morris tells me, she can be self-conscious and never leaves the house without makeup. “PrimEvil is the place to go to leave everything behind … it’s good for your confidence, dressing up and doing something you’d never do in real life.”

That might also explain the draw for punters. Research into “recreational fear” suggests it’s not just thrill-seeking but also a form of play, offering people a safe way to engage with difficult emotions. A 2025 study found that groups who went to a haunted house attraction reported feeling closer to each other, the “collective storytelling” solidifying their bonds.

For some actors it seems akin to a calling. This is Neville Everett’s 10th PrimEvil, and at the moment his only gig. “I’m a man of leisure,” he says, eyes mischievous beneath his evil-clown makeup. Everett sticks largely to the same playbook, loitering by the Circus’s exit and jumping out just when people think they’re safe. “Then I chase them,” he says. Usually he has a chainsaw going.

He struggles to articulate the precise appeal. “It’s just something I like doing … You get rid of your frustrations on people.”

Watching Everett in action, however, this sells him short: his dance with the public seems both conscious and two-way. A group of teenage girls literally plead for his attention (“Hi! Hi! Shalom!”), squealing in delight when he duly revs his chainsaw. When a pair of boys pass by, studiedly aloof and above the game, Everett calls their bluff and ignores them; they can’t hide their disappointment.

Judging by the screams coming from the nearby Werehouse 51 and the whacks reverberating along the corrugated-iron walls, PrimEvil is in full flow. In the now-quiet warehouse HQ, Francis settles in for the late evening, keeping things ticking over until the gates close at 11pm, and beyond. One of his tasks is doing “constant” loads of laundry, washing and drying the black bags that go over visitors’ heads for The Offering.

For all the hard work that goes into designing a frightening night out, ultimately it’s all about the visitors’ imaginations, Francis says. A sign hangs in his office, gifted to him by Goymour: “The biggest fear is the fear of the unknown.”