Six Flags parks are heavily decorated for Fright Fest, and mainly feature haunted attractions at an extra charge, as well as live entertainment and scare zones. Six Flags Discovery Kingdom held a different event called Boo 2020! for the 2020 season, as the park operated as a zoo for the season to act in accordance with local government guidelines with the state. The change from Fright Fest to Hallowfest included no haunted houses or indoor shows. To comply with the new health and safety protocols implemented by Six Flags due to the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020, the company announced that their Halloween event will be rebranded to Hallowfest.
In 2018, Fright Fest returned to Frontier City and Darien Lake, two former Six Flags parks re-acquired by the company on May 22, 2018. Since then, Six Flags has licensed other intellectual properties for mazes and scare zones, including the Saw films and DC Comics's Suicide Squad. The next year it became just simply "Brutal Planet" and dropped the Alice Cooper theme. In 1999, Six Flags licensed and opened Alice Cooper's Brutal Planet haunted houses at some parks, featuring music from the album and using similar elements in each house. It featured haunted houses, a trick or treat trail for kids, and more. Like the parks in Texas and Missouri, Freddy Krueger was the central figure of the event. In 1989, Fright Nights debuted at Six Flags Over Texas. The all-new Fright Nights featured House of the Living Dead, a walk-through inside of the ride building for the Time Tunnel dark ride, as well as the "Terror Train", a horror train show on the Tommy G. Six Flags Over Mid-America was the third park to introduce Fright Nights in 1988 with Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street as the event's "entertainment chairman".
Six Flags Over Georgia was the second park to introduce the event. In 1987, the event began to be expanded to Six Flags' other properties. History Fright Nights era (1986-1993) Īfter testing various Halloween-based seasonal events throughout the 1970s to mid-1980s, Six Flags, then owned by Bally Manufacturing, created an all-new Halloween event for AstroWorld in 1986 that they named Six Flags Fright Nights.