BUENA PARK, Calif. — If there’s one thing Daniel Miller hates, it’s the feeling of spider webs.
Every night, when he walks his dog, Blondie, a terrier, it seems like he has a penchant for running into them.
“It always freaks me out, that feeling of a spider web coming over you,” said Miller, a creative designer at Knott’s Scary Farm. "You get these chills."
And that’s when he had an epiphany.
As he and his team at Knott’s Berry Farm were preparing for new maze ideas for Knott’s Scary Farm this year, Miller wanted to recreate that icky feeling.
After a conversation with a friend about what scares her the most — nursing homes — he put two and two together.
"[Widows] is a convalescent home overrun by spiders," he said. "It's black widows versus elderlies."
Miller’s Widows is one of two new mazes featured at this year’s Knott’s Scary Farm, which runs on select nights until Nov. 2.
Tickets start at $60.
The annual event, which kicked off on Thursday, is one of Knott’s Berry Farm’s signature events.
This year, the original Halloween Haunt features the Mistress of the Dark, Elvira in a new show called Yours Cruelly, Elvira Exxperience at the Walter Knott Theater.
There are 10 mazes (eight returning), five scare zones and several show favorites, such as The Hanging: The Errors Tour and Conjurers.
Gus Krueger, a maze designer, created the other new maze, Eight Fingers Nine: The Boogeyman.
An inhuman monster who has a sick penchant for eating fingers has come out of a forest and taken over an 18th century colonial township, and “attacks people while they sleep,” said Krueger to Spectrum News.
The haunted maze features plenty of gore and scare monsters dressed in colonial era clothing. Krueger said classic Grimms’ Fairy Tales inspired him.
“I wanted to focus on one central monster,” said Krueger to Spectrum News. “I wanted to create a unique boogeyman type character.”
The maze has a story book vibe, he said. There’s beautiful painted murals on the wall and 3D architecture.
“It’s like walking inside a storybook,” he said. “Maze inspiration can come from everywhere because there are so many horrors in the world.”
During opening night last Thursday, visitors packed the new mazes, including Widows.
Visitors walked into a haunted convalescent home inside a Victorian mansion.
Spiders hung overhead, scare actors dressed as seniors and white and transparent string hung from the ceiling. It felt like running into cobwebs.
The spiders did indeed take over.
Miller, the maze designer, said there’s an Easter egg for hardcore Knott’s Scary Farm inside the maze.
One of the elderly residents is Gertrude, a voodoo priestess, from a former Scary Farm maze.
“It’s sort of a legacy maze,” he said. “This Voodoo priestess has opened a portal to the goddess, Arachnid, and now all of these underground spiders have come spilling to this portal and attacked these [residents].”
There’s a venom hall, a birthing hall, a temple and at the end meet the spider goddess.
“It’s a creepy maze with spider webs everywhere,” he said. “It should be really fun.”