An article concerning Halloween Horror Nights 2012 (Hollywood) written by Kelli Skye Fadroski on the Orange County Register:
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September 26, 2012 at 9:25 am
Every day is like Halloween for John Murdy. The creative director and producer of Universal Studios Hollywood’s annual Halloween Horror Nights – which kicks off this weekend – prides himself on bringing branded horror to life.
Each year Murdy, along with art director and production designer Chris Williams, comes up with ideas for new gore-themed attractions and mazes with exquisite detail. There are three things they look at when deciding upon creating something new and that’s awareness, environments and characters.
“We want to make sure it’s something that people are aware of and will have a passion to come see it themselves,” Murdy explains as we tour through one of the latest attractions and one he worked on with his childhood idol and shock rocker Alice Cooper, “Alice Cooper Goes to Hell 3D,” which was well under construction earlier this month. “We also want to work with a variety of environments that we can replicate in a live attraction and the third thing is that there needs to be iconic characters that we can replicate with live actors.”
Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” was a successful feature attraction last year, so Murdy teamed up with the rocker once again to go bigger, scarier and in 3D with the sequel.
HHN worked closely with Greg Nicotero, co-executive producer and special effects make-up artist for AMC’s Emmy Award-winning TV series, “The Walking Dead,” to bring dozens of zombies (known as “walkers” on the show) to Universal in the maze, “The Walking Dead: Dead Inside.” The famous Terror Tram will be abandoning guests in the middle of the Universal back lot, which will be crawling with flesh-hungry walkers as well.
The park will also host,”Welcome to Silent Hill,” which is based on the graphic horror video game and film franchise. With the sequel to the 2006 “Silent Hill” film, “Silent Hill: Revelation 3D,” hitting theaters on Oct. 26, Murdy says that even though recreating an attraction based on a video game was difficult, he’s excited for this debut and that his crew was certainly up to the challenge.
Tobe Hooper, director of the 1974 classic “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which spawned the iconic chainsaw-wielding madman known as Leatherface, worked with the HHN crew to accurately capture the life of Leatherface and his demented, cannibalistic family in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Saw is the Law.”
The Mexican legend of La Llorona returns in “La Llorona: Cazadora de Ninos” (Weeping Woman: The Child Hunter) and a re-imagined for the 21st century cast of legendary Universal horror monsters including Frankenstein and his Bride, Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, the Wolf Man and more will be hanging out and frightening guests in “Universal Monsters Remix.” The event runs for 19 select nights through Halloween and Murdy and his crew will be supervising and ensuring scares around every corner.
HORROR: BEYOND THE MOVIES
Over the years and especially in the last decade, the horror genre has evolved and HHN has evolved with it. The brand began with movies, but has since gotten into television and even video games.
“It’s incredibly challenging to bring a video game to life,” he explains. “We worked very closely with Konami (the creator of the ‘Silent Hill’ video games) and Davis Films to bring the very best of the video game series and the movies to life.”
Recreating Pyramid Head, a character from the franchise that is over eight-feet tall, has a gigantic triangular shaped head and carries a powerful, heavy and extremely deadly great knife, was Murdy’s biggest hurdle.
“We’ve used stilt walkers and we have a couple of them in that maze so I knew what to do with the height, but you have to think of every aspect of it,” Murdy says. “It’s not just the aesthetic part, you have to think ‘I’m a stilt walker working this event and I’m on stilts wearing a giant helmet.’ You have to think of the ergonomics of it. Chris and I are the total guinea pigs. I walked around ‘Silent Hill’ the other night with the prototype for Pyramid Head for 40 minutes straight just to make sure that they’ll be able to see and it’s comfortable. It’s been a challenge, but we have some really talented people working on this.”
Director James Gunn, who wrote and directed the 2006 horror flick “Slither,” also wrote and collaborated with game designer Goichi Suda on the action-slasher video game “Lollipop Chainsaw” which was released in June. When asked if Juliet Starling, the scantly clad chainsaw slinging, zombie-killing cheerleader from the game, would end up in a HHN attraction, Murdy laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know, horror just keeps expanding,” he says. “Video games are bigger than movies, bigger than music and all of that combined these days.”
As with the other mazes, a painstaking amount of detail went into recreating “The Walking Dead.” The attraction begins where Sheriff Rick Grimes wakes up to the zombie apocalypse – alone in a hospital, surrounded by semi-sheet covered bodies.
“Working with Greg Nicotero was fabulous,” Murdy says. “He was out here earlier this week and we worked directly with him to bring some of the most iconic characters from the show to life.”
Larry Bones, HHN’s extreme Hollywood horror make-up artist, and his team were tasked with recreating 35 different “walker” looks from the show and making over 2,000 prosthetics specifically for “The Walking Dead” attraction. Aside from just zombies, the make-up staff, which is about 40 people strong on any given night, will do-up more than 500 actors who are sent out to all the mazes and scare zones throughout the park in assembly line fashion.
“I have a make-up department, I have hair, masks, blood dressing,” Bones says. “It takes about three-and-a-half hours to get through it with everyone, with the most elaborately dressed person taking maybe 45 minutes. We normally try to get one through in 20 minutes on average. After we get everyone into make-up, my crew disperses out to satellite stations near all of the mazes and they maintain their make-up all night long.”
Though as a kid he loved dressing up like a vampire, Bones (yes, that’s his real name) is excited to work with zombies this year, however he does believe vampires can make a comeback.
“No vampire should sparkle,” he says with a laugh and referring to the “Twilight” franchise. “I think we need an old school vampire to decapitate some of these new ones.”
WELCOME TO HELL
Last year, Murdy ventured into the realm of music, heading into unchartered territory with Alice Cooper by reimagining his 1975 concept album “Welcome to My Nightmare.” After receiving such a positive response from hardcore HHN fans, Murdy says he began working with Cooper right away, moving in the next logical direction with the sequel to the “Nightmare” album, “Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.”
“We were taking all of our inspiration from his music and the stage show,” Murdy says. “We also wanted to combine Dante’s vision of hell from the Inferno and when we sat down to talk to Alice he said ‘That was the inspiration for my album.’ I was like, ‘Great, we think alike’.”
Taking what he learned from experimenting with Rob Zombie’s “House of 1,000 Copses” maze in 3D Zombievision last year and in 2010, the crew came up with a few different ways to make Cooper’s maze pop.
“We invented our own (3D) process using LED lights and now we’re adding black light and UV light because it gives you a different type of 3D,” he explains. “(We) can make walls animate, make words appear and disappear and you can make things look like they’re floating in space. It’s really disorienting and really messes with your mind and for us, as designers, it’s a great distraction to really get some good scares.”
Through the maze guests will enter rooms decked out to represent, purgatory, limbo, each of the seven deadly sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) and the final frozen level of hell. Each room also features Cooper’s music and Murdy’s own subtle visual nods to the lyrics. Murdy mashed-up “Wind-up Toy” and “Dada” for one section of the attraction and dug up the instrumental “Titanic Overture,” from Cooper’s 1969 debut album “Pretties for You,” to greet fans in the Hallway of Sins.
“We always put little inside touches in for the uber-fans,” he says. “We design everything so it appeals to everybody, but for people who are really into Alice Cooper, like myself, we wanted to put in references to the lyrics from ‘Go to Hell’.”
In one corner of purgatory, which in Murdy’s head is the waiting room of the DMV where guests will hear the track “You and Me,” there’s a body of a man in a chair with his dead dog at his feet. “That’s from the line ‘You’d poison a blind man’s dog and steal his cane’,” he notes. While walking through the greed portion, which has been interpreted as extreme hoarding, Murdy points out a body in a bag with a tag that reads: Aunt Jane. “That’s from the line ‘You’d gift-wrap a leper and mail him to your Aunt Jane’,” he says with a laugh.
In wrath, it’s all about Alice killing Alice, which is something the 2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is famous for on stage.
“We’ve go the electric chair, hanging in gallows, the guillotine (equipped with a life-like Cooper head in a basket),” Murdy says. “And we’ve added a few things that he hasn’t done yet.”