Nights of the Jack: 2022 Review

King Gillette Ranch, Calabasas, CA

Today, we take another break from the intense and scary and visit another family-friendly Halloween attraction, much as we did last Thursday. This time around, we're visiting a destination that we previously checked out three years ago: Nights of the Jack. This immersive experience, highlighted by an hour-long themed pumpkin trail, is located at the King Gillette Ranch out in Calabasas, and it offers a charming and whimsical series of photo ops, themed displays, and general October revelry that is suitable for guests of all ages.

Nights of the Jack is back for another year!

When we last covered Nights of the Jack, we had posed it as a friendly competitor to the similar Pumpkin Nights attraction in Pomona which had both risen from the ashes of the demise of Rise of the Jack-O-Lantern years prior. Well, since then, Pumpkin Nights has also gone by the wayside, and Nights of the Jack has endured as Southern California's pre-eminent pumpkin trail--as long as you ignore Carved! at Descanso Gardens (which, incidentally, we've also visited but as guests and never got around to posting an update about). But the Southern California Halloween event landscape is also highly competitive, so we were curious to see how, three years later, this event might compare to its previous iteration.

There are some talented pumpkin carvers there. However, the general area is the only place you’ll see real, organic pumpkins carved.

The short answer is that Nights of the Jack this year is very similar to how it was in 2019, with some minor changes in layout and content, and a smattering of new displays replacing some old scenes. While this might disappoint those who look for something new each year, it will be exciting to those who enjoy returning to an old favorite and reliving those memories for another year. And for those who have never attended, Nights of the Jack is an absolutely enchanting, dazzling, bewitching feast for the eyes.

The linear format of the main area is pretty straightforward to navigate.

This year, guests enter the parking off the intersection of Mulholland Highway and Wickland Road. Nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains, the site requires some mountain road driving, but everything is paved up until the parking lot itself. The organization of vehicular flow, parking, and navigation to the entrance is much more obvious this year than when we visited three years ago. The entrance is the same direction as what guests are facing when they check in with the parking attendant, and later, exiting is in the same direction off to the highway side of the lot.

The layout of Nights of the Jack has remained unchanged, with a wide central corridor flanked by food trucks, pumpkin carving displays, photo ops, a tarot card reader, and assorted merchandise booths along the side. Everything is laid out very logically, with improved wayfinding and clearly visible amenities like restrooms located at the ends of the general grounds. Guests can walk through the middle of this open forum, which features plenty of picnic tables for guests to sit down and eat and drink. Toward the back, the event's "Spookeasy Bar" offers alcoholic beverages to guests. Right before that are more Halloween scene cutout photo ops. To the left, the pathway continues towards Jack's Trail, the main attraction of Nights of the Jack.

Jack’s Trail

After enjoying a bite from one of the numerous food trucks and/or whetting one's thirst from the bar, it's time to take on Jack's Trail, a 2/3 mile-long route that winds its way through a small (relatively speaking) section of the King Gillette Ranch. We should mention that the event uses a timed ticket entry to control guests, and this extends to the trail as well, though it wasn't apparent how strictly they were enforcing ticket times for actual trail entry.

This year's trail features many of the same elements as what we saw in 2019, with one notable change being the reversal of direction of the path from our prior visit. This time around, guests make their way along a winding path that runs roughly counterclockwise around the grounds.

Who would win in a fight, an octopus or a shark? What if they were made of pumpkins?

That said, there will be a lot of familiar sights for returning guests, starting with an initial section that celebrates ocean sea life as well as a neighboring segment with plenty of prehistoric dinosaurs. This sets the stage for what guests can expect at Nights of the Jack. The displays represent a variety of figures and sculptures created out of [artificial] pumpkins, with carvings on the pumpkin faces to represent components of a larger figure or serve as accent theming for individual pumpkins scattered about the foreground to lend visual texture to the scene.

Next comes a brief but colorful Día de los Muertos scene, featuring colorfully lit sugar skull pumpkin mosaic displays and carved-out jack-o-lanterns sitting on hay bales. The path grows a little more wooded, but any wilderness moodiness is negated by the beautifully lit trees, strung up with thousands of yellow and orange lights and even little hanging pumpkin lanterns. If Disneyland has The Halloween Tree in Frontierland, this is a mini forest of Halloween Trees!

This Día de los Muertos display is festive.

Trees strung up in lights make for a luminous sight.

The route continues with more lit up trees flanked by pumpkin scarecrows. Then, things get a little webby as guests pass through one of several themed and lit-up archway stretches, this one covered with signs of an arachnid infestation. This serves a portal to a more simple exhibit featuring a line of jack-o-lanterns with various comic book and cartoon characters and carved and lit up.

These pumpkin carvings are pretty cool, but the pumpkins themselves are not real, since they have to be out in the elements all month.

The scenery grows more spectacular again with a third wildlife exhibit, this one depicting the plains of Africa featuring a series of displays showing an assortment of interconnected orange gourds forming giraffes, gazelles, lions, zebras, and other familiar animals of the African plains.

The trail then shifts back to the animated aesthetic with a visit to Spongebob Squarepants' Bikini Bottom. This year's display seems slightly sparser than what we saw three years ago, but it's still fun, with all of the show's familiar characters like Spongebob, Patrick, Squidworth, and company visible.

The fiction theme continues with a scene that was new to us. Some aliens had landed their giant pumpkin-shaped spacecraft in a field and had emerged to seek out Earth's leader. With several rows of jack-o-lanterns featuring space and extraterrestrial scenes and fog billowing out of their UFO, this was certainly a silly but fun display.

Next, it's a return to another familiar sequence, the trail of planets carved out on pumpkins to connect with the recent alien scene. One would think that this would come immediately after the aliens, but the Nights of the Jack Express actually interrupts the two, showing a cute train chugging along.

All aboard the Nights of the Jack locomotive!

If aliens are strange enough, the ensuing scene takes us to the world of Wonderland, where all sorts of odd plants and animal hybrids have taken on--naturally--pumpkin form. The Caterpillar smokes his hookah on one toadstool, while a menage of other carvings dot one of the more extensive pumpkin landscapes along this trail.

Alice in Wonderland is pretty impressive, visually.

As guests near the lawn set in front of the King Gillette Dormitory Building, they see a dazzling display of flower luminaires lined across the field, pulsating and changing colors, similar to the first scene at Descanso Gardens' Christmas-time Enchanted Forest of Light event. This is augmented by a cube-framed structure with a series of hanging lights that create a screen with jack-o-lantern animations flowing across.

The most dazzling part of Jack’s Trail is this field of lights.

To the left, along the Gillette Mansion, a pumpkin motorcycle gang has set up a rest stop. Beyond, the mansion itself has been washed in purple and magenta and orange lighting and tangled up in cheesecloth cobwebs as well! The lawn area in front of the residence features a field of dozens or even hundreds of jack-o-lanterns, each with a different little scene and lit in a different color, creating a rainbow matrix of pumpkins.

The Gillette Mansion is decorated with gourds galore.

As the path arcs around the field, guests can catch different angles of the light-up flower field. But this route also takes guests by the castle of Disney princesses, complete with a series of jack-o-lanterns featuring the likes of Rapunzel and Jasmine and Aurora and Merida and more. There's even Cinderella's carriage, turned back into a pumpkin, sitting nearby!

Disney characters line these castle turrets.

Then comes the Hollywood section of the trail, highlighted by a big HOLLYWOOD sign and featuring plenty of jack-o-lanterns with carved-out portraits of Hollywood celebrities and stars. This part makes for a game of star watching, as guests point out recognizable actors and actresses.

A moving light tunnel takes guests into the graveyard, which is beautifully and colorfully lit and feels very much like a very elaborate haunted yard display. In Haunted Mansion fashion, the gravestones feature punny names, and the eerie and dramatic lighting creates yet another lovely photo op for guests to take advantage of.

This moving light tunnel is pretty neat and another great selfie spot.

The graveyard is one of our favorite parts and spookier than much of the rest of the trail.

Around the corner, the cemetery makes way for another villain's row, this one devoted to classic monsters of horror movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, Pennywise, The Mummy, and more.

As guests near the end of the trail, they pass by a winter pumpkinland, signifying that Christmas is never far behind Halloween. The scene is pretty adorable, though, with pumpkin penguins and a cool, blue lighting hue and projections of snowflakes against the back of the Dormitory Building beyond.

Finally, before the trail ends, is a section on "LOVE" and relationships, portraying famous Hollywood couples. But next to that is another celebrity section, this one dedicated to sports stars like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan and even professional wrestlers like Hulk Hogan.

With the conclusion of the trail, guests head back toward the start, exiting next to where they entered, beside the end of the Spookeasy Bar. The whole experience takes about sixty minutes at a leisurely pace, and the different scenes are certainly very charming and captivating--even if they don't seem to always progress with thematic consistency. At its heart, Nights of the Jack is just a lovely immersive event where guests can take plenty of pictures to share with their friends and just enjoy a cheerful Halloween ambiance!

I wonder do they replace the pumpkins if the celebrity couple breaks up?

Nights of the Jack continues its run across select nights through Halloween night, from 6:00pm - 10:00pm each night, rain or shine. The parking lot closes at 9:15, and Jack's Trail, food trucks, and bars close at 9:30. Tickets range from $29.99 to $44.99 for guests 3 years or older (children 2 and under are free) but must be purchased in advance online. There are no ticket booths on site. The timed ticket system also requires guests to choose a time, for which they are allotted a thirty-minute window to enter that expires upon the time of their ticket.

Nights of the Jack is a wonderful Halloween event that is well worth checking out for Halloween fans who've never been before and great for guests who want to relive their prior year's visit. It is certainly a highlight among Southern California's all-ages Halloween attractions, especially among a wealth of more mature and scarier attractions! And later at the end of the year, the Christmas-themed Holiday Road will return for its third year in the same King Gillette Ranch, so there’s also that to look forward to!