Carnevil gets them screaming for more

About five minutes after the first ‘victims’ entered Carnevil at the Print Works on Market Street the screaming started.

Brendan Savage sighed with relief, smiled and said ‘My work here is done.’

‘Screams from all over the set are what we want to hear,’ he explains.

‘It tells us that we’ve got the right mix of terror and entertainment which people will enjoy and hopefully return for.

Carnevil opened at 7.00 on Thursday night and will run until midnight on Hallow’een.

After about fifteen minutes the first group to enter the attraction emerge pale-faced and shaken.

‘It was genuinely scary,’ said one of them after she had composed herself.

A couple of minutes later the next group appears, less shaken than the first but equally entertained.

‘It was really good. Scary but entertaining’, was the unanimous feeling.

Would they go back in?

‘Yes definitely …just not tonight!’

Visitors, or ‘victims’, walk through the purpose built rooms which are said to house what’s left of a seemingly innocent carnival which came to Galway over 150 years ago but left the city’s citizens so scarred and terrified that all records of it were destroyed…until now!

After being greeted by a very sinister ‘gentleman’ visitors are warned not to use the lights on their phones to help see, because this attracts ‘them’. Equally, hurrying through can be hazardous, as ‘they’ are attracted to motion.

Quite what ‘they’ are is never explained. It’s left to the imagination, which is probably worse.

There are lots of shocks and surprises waiting the unsuspecting, or even the suspicious, as the team behind Carnevil seem to have twisted minds…in a good way.

The attraction is fairly daunting with the lights on but in the dark it is genuinely scary.

If it gets too much there are designated ‘chicken doors’ where visitors can make an early exit.

It’s not for the faint-hearted but it genuinely fun.

For opening times and to book go to www.carnevil.ie