Halloween Horror Nights III (Orlando)

Halloween Horror Nights Orlando event
Halloween Horror Nights III
Slogan	Dying For A Great Party? Don't Get Caught Dead Anywhere Else The Third Annual It's Halloween! And The Night Belongs to Universal Studios Florida!
Year	1993
Icon/'s	N/A
Icon attraction	N/A
Number of haunted houses	3
Number of scarezones	0
Preceded by	Halloween Horror Nights II
Followed by	Halloween Horror Nights IV

Halloween Horror Nights III (marketed as Third Annual Universal Studios Florida Halloween Horror Nights) was the third annual Halloween Horror Nights event held in Orlando. Located in Universal Studios Florida, advertisements featured a chainsaw destroying a pumpkin. The event, which featured three haunted houses and seven shows, was held for seven days in October 1993.

Dates & Times

Event Nights

October 15-16, 22-23, & 29-31 1993

Event Times

All nights ran from 6:30 PM to 12:00 AM or 6:30 PM to 12:30 AM

Ticket Prices

Daytime Ticket Upgrade: $16.95 + price of Daytime Admission

School Groups: $19.95 + tax (In advance)

Florida Resident Single Admission (Advanced Purchase): $24.95 + tax

Kids (3-9): $28.00 + tax

Florida Resident Single Admission: $29.95 + tax

Single Admission: $35.00 + tax

Attractions

Haunted Houses

• The Slaughterhouse (Nazarman's): A blood-filled house.
• The Psycho Path Maze (Bates Motel): Enter into the Bates Motel and relive the horror.
• The People Under the Stairs (Soundstage 23): A haunted house where the walls are alive.

  

Shows

• Bill and Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure II (Wild West Stage): Bodacious stunts and awesome surprises take you on a trick or treat through time.
• Burn and Bury (World Expo): Traveling burial show.
• Crossbows of Death (Animal Actor's Stage): Split second timing. Each shot could be your last.
• Hex Maniacs (New York): A magical show featuring illusions, including a cremation.
• Human Blockhead (San Francisco): Gut of iron. Head of pine.
• Robosaurus (New York): Man versus machine...To the death!
• Rock Inferno Featuring Herb Williams and Gibraltar (Mel's Drive-In Stage): Ghouls dancing and rocking out the night.

Unofficial Shows

• Prince Dragon (Unknown)
• Bone Bender (Unknown)

Show Collections

• Midway of the Bizarre (Park-Wide)

Other Attractions

• Kongfrontation (New York):  Presented by Texaco. Blood thirsty terror lurks in the streets as you attempt to escape from New York.
• Ghostbusters (New York): Gozer's fury is unleashed on franchise headquarters as she takes her revenge.
• The Funtastic World of Hanna Barbera (Production Central): Do-gooders Beware! Chase the ghoulish Dick Dastardly through a reckless rocket maze.
• Hitchcock's 3-D Theater (Production Central):  Presented by Kodak. The most incredible 3-D movie ever screamed!
• The Gory, Gruesome, and Grotesque Horror Makeup Show (Hollywood): See what goes into and oozes out of the most mangled monsters in movie history.
• Beetlejuice's Graveyard Revue (San Francisco): A rock 'n' roll show of monstrous proportions! S
• Earthquake: The Big One (San Francisco): None shall escape this deadly journey underground.
• JAWS (Amity):  Presented by Ocean Spray. Come face to face with our flesh craving shark in the dark.
• Back to the Future: The Ride (World Expo): Become a specimen in a chilling time travel experience - look out for the diabolically disguised.
• E.T. (World Expo):  Presented by AT&T. Evil spirits are everywhere on an eerie escape to another universe.

Explore Those Old Haunts

St. Petersburg Times - Saturday, October 23, 1993
Author: JIM BULLARD

Haunted houses. Wandering zombies. Things that go bump in the night.

Yep, it's Halloween time again, and Universal Studios-Florida is all geared up for the holiday. The 444-acre backlot of the studio has been transformed for its annual " Halloween Horror Nights " event continuing today and next Friday, Oct. 29 through Sunday, Oct. 31. Hours are 6:30 p.m.-midnight each night and you get access to all the park's normal rides.

In keeping with the park's "ride the movies" motto, many of the attractions designed to scare the pants off of guests have been inspired by recent or popular films. For instance, there's Bill and Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure, a stunt show filled with special effects, and the Psycho Path Maze, a labyrinth into the world of the Bates Motel from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

"In terms of our haunted houses," said John Paul Guertz, the event's artistic director, "we've created some really dramatic situations that people can find themselves walking intoand our haunted houses are definitely more upscale than your neighborhood haunted house."

"People come to see our haunted house attractions, but we try to make the most out of our streets with roaming characters," said Guertz. "People feel very comfortable out on the streets and then suddenly one of the characters leaps out and scares the heck out of them. There's something lurking for guests around every corner."

Other attractions include:

Robosaurus - a four-story, 30-ton car-crushing and fire-breathing dinosaur with an attitude that terrorizes Metropolis.

The Slaughterhouse - a mutant/monster-filled maze through a vacant warehouse.

People Under The Stairs - a 16,000-square foot haunted soundstage based on the movie of the same name.

The Rat Lady - an occupied coffin with a live resident surrounded by live rats.

The Roach Rangler - much the same as Rat Lady, but with roaches.

Crossbows of Death (Animal Actors Stage) - a daredevil show. Hans and Maureen Pantar challenge streaking razor-sharp arrows.

Midway of the Bizarre - Roaming live acts with a decidedly Halloween bent. They include a sword swallower, a fire-eating contortionist, the Chain Saw Drill Team and the Dead High School Cheerleading Squad.

Rock Inferno - Live musical acts perform, including Jade today.

Fox TV stars Sinbad, Kim Coles (Living Single), Bruce Campbell (The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.), Tichina Arnold and Tisha Campbell (Martin), and Brian Austin Green (Beverly Hills 90210) will be in the park 6-8:30 p.m. today, shooting promos and introducing Jade.

In search of new ideas and unusual acts, Guertz and design partner Julie Zimmerman visited several cities across the country, including Los Angeles and New Orleans. Only half of the Horror Night performers are year-long employees of the park. Their search has netted some unusual talent for the other 50 percent of the performers, said Guertz, including the popular Rat Lady.

"Our Rat Ladies have really taken a liking to their job," said Guertz. "Rat Madames" Stacey L. Virta and Catherine Greenlief, he adds, "have even put together a Rat Lady Manual" to help others play the role. Some of the four-page manual's tips include:

Before the show: "You are encouraged to get to know the rats on a daily basis - (by) arriving early before the show, or stopping by during the week. The only way you can get to know your rats better is to show you care." (For the record, 500 applicants applied for this job.)

In the coffin: "Aussie Scrunch hair spray works best. . .this brand keeps the rats coming back." Also, "it's a good idea to keep rat food or treats handy during performances in case the rats get the munchies."

Punching a clock is never easy for monsters.

universal Says… BOO! – The Theme Park Pulls Out All The Stops for Halloween

THE ORLANDO SENTINEL - Friday, October 15, 1993
Author: Laurie Fuller

Universal Studios Florida's Halloween Horror Nights is a delightfully scary symphony of things that go bump in the night.

The crash of the attic door slamming shut, the clatter of a shutter banging against the house, the scrape of a tree branch against the window - has been orchestrated by a creative and technical team that works year-round preparing to throw a fiendish shroud over the 444-acre theme park.

The doors will creak open at 6:30 tonight and clank shut at midnight - with Horror Nights continuing from 6:30 p.m. to midnight Saturday, next Friday, Oct. 23, 29, 30 and 31.

"It's an incredible, park-wide experience," said Michael Thyne, Universal's technical director for entertainment.

The transformation from warm and fuzzy theme park to Halloweenland means that parking-lot attendants will be costumed, ghoulish characters will stroll the boulevards, vampires will lurk around every corner - even the street lamps will cast an eerie glow with special orange bulbs.

Halloween-themed entertainment is scheduled on several stages, including Bill & Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure stunt show. The Midway of the Bizarre will be populated with freakish sideshow acts - sword swallowers, contortionists, fire-eaters.

Expect the unexpected, say the creative forces behind Horror Nights.

"People always walk through the back lots and rattle the doors on the facades to see if they open," said creative director Julie Zimmerman. "Normally, they don't. Well, during Halloween, they do."

But the main draw for most visitors will be the three haunted houses - Psycho Path Maze, Slaughterhouse and People Under the Stairs.

Universal's Halloween creative team has designed dozens of terror-filled vignettes for the houses, each lasting no longer than five seconds, and strung them together so tightly that 2,000 people an hour will view them.

Each frightening scene must be engineered so it propels the guests immediately into the next one, like a pinball machine from hell.

"Designing a haunted house turns into math, eventually," said John Paul Geurtz, Horror Nights' artistic director. "You have to calculate each step people will take and engineer their every move. There's nothing random about this."

Behind all the engineering, though, is the simple desire to scare people. And Universal's Halloween Horror Nights aims to tap into the familiar fears of childhood rather than the violence that is so often associated with horror movies today.

"We're not into the gore factor as much as we're into taking people on a psychological trip," Zimmerman said. "We really talked a lot about our childhood fears."

Psycho Path Maze is based on the classic Alfred Hitchcock movie - with visitors checking into the Bates Motel.

"We take you into a black-and-white movie through the mind of Norman Bates," Thyne said.

Although the gore factor has been toned down this year, some pretty grisly inhabitants call the walk-in coolers of Slaughterhouse home. Unsuspecting guests take a trip through the meatpacking district of New York as mutants grab at them around every corner.

And that ain't just beef on those meat hooks.

"We do have bodies that hang or dunk or drape or spew," Geurtz said, "but we also use a lot of humor and a lot of subtle scares."

People Under the Stairs is truly a haunted house, each room familiar yet spooky - a bare light bulb illuminates the ghostly attic, creatures lurk underneath the stairs and roaches scurry through the kitchen.

"We like to tap into subtle, familiar fears," said Jerry Abercrombie, Universal's props manager. "The attics, the basements, the closets . . . the things you know you shouldn't be afraid of, but you are."

Universal's team recognizes the need for relaxation to balance the adrenaline rush that accompanies a tour through the haunted houses, so the evening is interspersed with healthy doses of comic relief, like the Chain Saw Drill Team, a crew of five chain-saw-toting monsters who twirl their motorized saws like crack Marines. The Dead High School Cheerleading Squad, killed in a car crash on their way to the big game, wander the streets, singed pom-pons in hand. And traveling salesmen Burn and Bu ry will be busy selling cemetery plots and cremation services.

Additionally, Universal's regular attractions, such as Jaws, Back to the Future and Kongfrontation, will be operating.

The third annual Halloween Horror Nights has been expanded in size and scope from last year's two weekends to this year's three, much to the delight of the Halloween mavens at Universal.

"The point between screaming and laughing is like this," Zimmerman said, gesturing a minuscule distance with her thumb and forefinger. "People love to be scared as much as they love to laugh. We all need to get that out, to scream and yell and do all the things we can't normally do."

Pictures

The map for this year.

Image from Jared Clemons on Facebook

Image from Jared Clemons on Facebook

Halloween Horror Nights III (1993) employee event tag Image from hhnmonster

Website Pictures

The Halloween Horror Nights III archive drawer. All images from the Halloween Horror Nights: Sweet 16 website.

The Halloween Horror Nights III archive registry that appeared on the Halloween Horror Nights: Sweet 16 website.

1993 drawer after the icons add their notes.

1993 archive registry with notes from The Director.

Halloween Horror Nights III Merchandise and Collectibles

Halloween Horror Nights 1993 Frankenstein T-Shirt Image from hatbox_ghost83

Halloween Horror Nights III Event Information Image from HHNMonster

Videos

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULJNHe4WjLk- Short history video

Trivia

• According to this, they may have toned down the gore compared to previous years.