Jason Voorhees, Diablo, Final Destination and The Blair Witch Project headline an expanded season of haunted mazes, scare zones and nighttime thrills

Six Flags is turning up the fear factor for Halloween 2026 with its largest collection of licensed horror attractions to date.

The amusement park operator announced 11 new haunted mazes inspired by major film and gaming franchises, including Friday the 13th, Final Destination, The Blair Witch Project and Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo. Returning attractions will feature characters and settings from The Conjuring Universe, SAW, Army of the Dead, The Strangersand Trick ’r Treat.

Altogether, Six Flags says its parks will offer 448 Halloween-themed experiences across North America, including 29 new and returning licensed haunted attractions, 196 scare zones and live shows, nighttime rides and 141 family-friendly daytime activities.

“We’re taking Halloween to an entirely new level in 2026,” Kelly Daugherty, Six Flags’ director of entertainment, said in the company’s announcement. “Guests won’t just watch these stories unfold—they’ll step inside them.”

New nightmares arrive at Six Flags

One of the biggest additions is JASON: Blood Reign, an attraction inspired by Jason Voorhees and the Friday the 13thfranchise. Guests will enter the dark woods surrounding the slasher’s legendary summer camp while retracing the events that transformed Jason into one of horror cinema’s most recognizable villains.

The maze is scheduled to appear at SCarowinds, Kings Island and Six Flags Great Adventure.

Fans of elaborate cinematic accidents can enter Final Destination: Death’s Playground, where death itself serves as the villain. Inspired by New Line Cinema’s Final Destination films, the attraction will place guests inside a chain of seemingly calculated disasters.

The maze is coming to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey and Six Flags Magic Mountain in Southern California.

At Six Flags Great America and Dorney Park, Blair Witch: No Signal will send visitors into a dark recreation of the Black Hills Forest. The experience will include abandoned camps, ritual sites, winding trails and the infamous Rustin Parr house.

Video game fans will also get their chance to enter the underworld. DIABLO: The Infernal Path will bring Blizzard Entertainment’s gothic franchise to Kings Dominion and Cedar Point. Guests will encounter characters including Diablo, Lilith, Mephisto and Baal while traveling through cursed cathedrals and scenes inspired by ancient rituals.

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Familiar horror franchises return

Several previously featured horror properties will return following what Six Flags described as strong guest demand.

The Conjuring: Beyond Fear will appear at Canada’s Wonderland, SCarowinds, Cedar Point and Kings Island. The attraction casts visitors as paranormal investigators attempting to contain cursed artifacts and supernatural entities, including Annabelle.

A separate Conjuring Universe attraction will return to Six Flags Magic Mountain, Six Flags Great Adventure, Six Flags Over Texas, Six Flags Fiesta Texas, Six Flags Great America and Six Flags Over Georgia.

Other returning experiences include:

• SAW: Legacy of Terror, featuring scenes inspired by Jigsaw’s traps
• The Strangers: No Escape at Six Flags Over Texas
• Trick ’r Treat at Six Flags Magic Mountain
• Army of the Dead at Six Flags Great Adventure

Knott’s Berry Farm will once again stage Knott’s Scary Farm, the long-running Southern California Halloween event. Six Flags Mexico will also present Festival del Terror, with additional licensed attractions expected to be announced.

More than haunted mazes

The 2026 Halloween season will extend beyond indoor attractions. Six Flags parks will feature themed scare zones filled with roaming performers, elaborate sets, fog, lighting effects and unexpected encounters.

Six Flags Over Texas will introduce Varnum’s Traveling Pit Show of Oddities, described as a premium scare-zone experience combining immersive horror, themed offerings and live entertainment.

Halloween programming across the company’s parks will also include monster bands, musical productions, stunt performances, parades and nighttime spectaculars. Roller coasters and other thrill rides will continue operating after dark at participating locations, with fog, lighting and sound effects altering the experience.

Scare zones, live entertainment and most nighttime rides will be included with regular park admission. However, admission to the haunted mazes will generally require a separate Haunted Attractions Pass in addition to a valid park ticket, season pass or membership.

Knott’s Scary Farm operates under a different system as a separately ticketed event, with its haunted mazes and entertainment included in the event admission.

Halloween fun for younger visitors

Not every seasonal attraction will be designed to terrify guests.

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Before the nighttime scares begin, participating parks will offer daytime activities for families and younger children. Programs such as Kids Boo Fest, Tricks and Treats and Camp Spooky will feature trick-or-treating, pumpkin-themed activities and interactive entertainment.

Select parks will also hold Oktoberfest celebrations featuring seasonal food, beverages and live entertainment.

The family-friendly activities will generally be included with daytime park admission.

Dates and ticket details are still coming

Operating dates, attraction availability and ticket prices will vary by park. Six Flags said individual parks will release their complete Halloween schedules and ticketing information between mid-August and early September.

Guests should also review each attraction’s age recommendations, health warnings and accessibility guidelines before purchasing tickets. Haunted mazes may include darkness, fog, loud sounds, flashing lights and intense imagery that may not be suitable for every visitor.

With iconic slashers, supernatural villains, video game demons and hundreds of seasonal attractions, Six Flags is betting that horror fans will be eager to spend part of Halloween 2026 inside their favorite nightmares.

For park-specific schedules and ticket information, visit Six Flags.

Source: Six Flags Entertainment Corporation press release. Attraction schedules and availability are subject to change.

Source

• Six Flags Raises the Fear Factor in 2026 — Original Six Flags Entertainment Corporation press release.

Related Links

• Six Flags Magic Mountain Fright Fest — Details about the Southern California event, including Final Destination, The Conjuring Universe and Trick ’r Treat. The 2026 event runs on select nights from September 18 through November 1.
• Six Flags Great Adventure Fright Fest — Official information for the New Jersey event, featuring haunted mazes, shows and nighttime attractions.
• Knott’s Scary Farm — Official information for the separately ticketed Halloween event, scheduled for select nights from September 17 through October 31, 2026.
• Knott’s Spooky Farm — Family-friendly daytime Halloween activities offered on select days from September 24 through October 31, 2026.
• Six Flags Great America Fright Fest — Official details for the Illinois event, including haunted attractions and scare zones.
• Six Flags Great Adventure Seasonal Events — Calendar of Fright Fest, Oktoberfest and other seasonal events at the park.

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Aarushi Bhandari, Davidson College

In the trailer for “Toy Story 5,” a little girl named Bonnie is playing with her toys when a package arrives in the mail.

She opens it to find Lilypad, a tablet for children.

The iconic toys from the series – Woody, Buzz Lightyear, the Potato Heads, Forky and Slinky Dog – then watch in dismay as Bonnie casts them all aside in favor of the bright tablet screen. Rex the dinosaur exclaims, “What? Extinction? Not again!”

The film zeros in on a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: the “iPad kid,” a term used – often disparagingly – to describe a generation of children who grew up enchanted by screens.

A lot of the discussion around tablet use among kids shames parents, framing it as an example of lazy or bad parenting. Yet factors such as long working hours and lack of access to affordable childcare compel many parents to rely on tablets.

As a scholar of the attention economy – and also as a mom to a 4-year-old – I’ve noticed a disconnect between the resources U.S. society offers parents versus what’s expected of them in the digital age.

’ Woody, Buzz and the gang must prove that traditional toys still matter when Bonnie becomes captivated by a high-tech tablet named Lilypad.

The pandemic and the ‘square au pair’

When the first “Toy Story” came out in 1995, many single-income families could still afford to comfortably raise multiple kids. It was more common for new parents to live near their extended families, such as grandparents, to provide childcare support. Federal policies provided some low-income families with cash assistance that helped ease the cost of transition to parenthood.

Since then, parenting has become a lot more challenging. Single-income households with kids under 18 have steadily declined as wages have stagnated, forcing both parents into the workforce. At the same time, it’s harder to qualify for government benefits.

And even when moms do earn a paycheck, working moms experience what sociologists call the “motherhood penalty” – career disadvantages, such as lower wages and promotion barriers, due to childbirth – even as U.S. parental leave policies remain weak.

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So it’s hardly a surprise that fewer Americans are choosing to become parents under these conditions. But those who did have kids in the years leading up to 2020 ran smack into the COVID-19 pandemic.

The lockdown that started in March 2020 following the outbreak of the pandemic led to closures of schools and many workplaces. Many parents either worked from home or provided critical work in grocery stores and hospitals. Kids stayed home and schools transitioned to remote-learning models.

It’s important to remember that many institutions with social legitimacy and authority encouraged the use of tablets during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

School systems around the world normalized their use for remote learning. Children as young as 4 were given tablets, which gave their parents space to complete their own remote work and other household tasks, with some moms referring to it as “the square au pair.”

In this sense, the tablet became a form of school-sanctioned childcare.

Economic activity was minimally disrupted. Productivity hummed along. And the kids? Comfortably distracted.

For some households, there’s little choice

When lockdowns ended, tablets remained integrated into the education system. In 2021, 4 in 5 U.S. households with children had a tablet. Beyond schoolwork, kids also use tablets for activities, such as video games and watching TV.

The adverse impacts of excessive screen time in general has been well documented for decades. But scholars have only recently unpacked the specific harms of interactive tablet use among young children.

Children who use tablets are more likely to experience emotional dysregulation and dependency on screens. Researchers have also found tablet use among kids to be significantly associated with ADHD diagnoses.

At the same time, research shows screen time use among children is tied to social class.

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Parents from working- and middle-class households are more likely to rely on screens compared to high-income parents, who can hire childcare services, such as full-time nannies.

Parental education is also a factor. Americans generally have little grasp of digital hygiene – knowledge about best practices to minimize negative effects of screens. But households with parents who didn’t graduate from college are even more in the dark.

And while schools hand out tablets, most of them fail to provide students and families with a comprehensive education on the adverse impacts of excessive screen time.

In other words, this isn’t a Generation Alpha problem. Most people – adults included, with or without children – aren’t properly educated and informed about their choices around technology use. Yet adults continue to be shamed if they hand their kid a tablet. All the while, parents navigate the added burdens of challenging the educational status quo around tablets.

Frankenstein’s village

When work is the only sturdy pillar in a society where government benefits for low-income people, family ties and community institutions have eroded, tablets replace the metaphorical village – the web of social support that helps families thrive.

In pursuit of jobs or affordable housing, many young parents move farther from their extended families and the communities where they grew up. The working parents who are forced to rely on daycare – sending kids as young as a few weeks old – end up spending an exorbitant amount of money on the service.

Meanwhile, the persistence of traditional gender roles ensures that many moms still go home to a second shift: Working women continue to disproportionately cook, clean and care for children. No matter how overworked or exhausted some parents are, they cannot afford to hire help as the inflation and cost-of-living crises hit historic highs.

Big Tech takes advantage of this crisis with a “solution” that ultimately treats children as products, manipulating their emotions and mining their data. As I argue in my book, “Attention and Alienation,” children’s dependency on screens is a key component of the attention economy.

The earlier a life is monetized, the longer it is profitable.

“Toy Story 5” and its critical take on the tablet may be helpful. But it will take more than a blockbuster movie to protect small kids from the harms of too much screen time. Instead, I think it will require strong parental leave policies, expansive and affordable childcare access, fair wages and shared household labor.

In other words, there needs to be a full rehabilitation of the village.

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Aarushi Bhandari, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Davidson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Celebrate America’s 250th Birthday with Summer Deals, Savings and Prizes

(Feature Impact) America’s 250th birthday calls for celebration, and this summer, it goes well beyond backyard barbecues and poolside parties.

Watch this video to learn more

To help mark the milestone, Circle K is rolling out refreshing deals, new merch and exciting prizes as America’s Party Stop – the one-stop destination for summer value and fun. The free Inner Circle rewards program is your ticket to the party – join by downloading the Circle K app and creating an account.

Rewards members can enjoy any size Polar Pop for just 25 cents on July 1 at participating locations. Fans can also grab limited-edition merchandise like hats and shirts to show off their love for the iconic drink. From July 1-Sept. 1, anyone can play the new Scratch & Win game daily in the app for instant prizes with members unlocking exclusive eligibility for weekly cash prizes.

The fun extends beyond the store, too. Throughout July, you can support the American Red Cross by rounding up in-store purchases to help disaster relief efforts and first responders across the U.S.

Download the app, join the free rewards program and find more ways to celebrate America’s birthday by visiting CircleK.com/America-250.

SOURCE:

Circle K

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