Creepy and kooky, all together spooky
A kid-friendly ‘Boo 2020’ at Six Flags
Nowhere on the state’s list of “essential” workers are “zombies” named.
No mat ter. It ’ s Halloween time. A nd any half- dead, brain- eating semi- huma n creat u re s take center- stage as Six Flags Discovery Kingdom tweaks its usually variousstages- of- horror Frightfest to a modified, familyfriendly “Boo 2020” running Saturday through Nov. 1.
Sure, the popular Frightfest would be a welcome scare tactic for the 21st time. But, pandemic being a pandemic, “in a new environment that we’re in, we had to make some adjustments,” said Marc Merino, the theme park’s communications manager during Friday’s media day walk-through.
Rather than the various categories of horror at the indoor haunted houses on a “normal” year, “Boo 2020” features several photo opportunities with ghoulish characters on Halloween-themed stages, animals, and Halloween-only food. Kids can also get a photo with a “nonvenomous” snake, Merino said, and step on stage in the costume contest.
COVID-19 protocols are in place, he added.
“All of our performers are going to be behind a barrier of some sort to maintain social distancing. And it’s going to be a daytime event so it’s going to be more of a fam-ily- friendly affair as opposed to super- scary,” Merino said.
The staging and characters falls on entertainment supervisor Amanda Beckham, in her 13th year at Six Flags.
“This year is a little different,” she said, with six or so “characters” utilized “as opposed to a couple of hundred that we usually do” with Frightfest, said Beckham. “We have a lot of our people who are very committed here every year and they’re sad they don’t get an opportunity to scare people.”
Pre- COVID, there would be a stack of applications to sift through and auditions. This year, however, the park is using six of its current “team members” as characters. During the unveiling of sorts for the media on Friday, Ramon Higuera and Meganne Watts stood patiently as zombies.
The challenge, said Beckham, “is remaking everything and how we do everything from how we schedule people to how we get them in for make- up to how we deal with their breaks and social distancing. They only wear a costume once and we have to wash and sanitize. And our make- up artist has been working a lot of hours creating these masks they’re wearing from scratch.”
The entertainment industry “things are everchanging as is … but this year more than ever,” Beckham said. “We kind of just roll with it and everyone has a really good attitude about it. We just work as a team. We get ideas from everyone and just brainstorm together.”