An article from Collider.com about the The Last of Us (Hollywood), Stranger Things 4 (Hollywood) and Chucky: Ultimate Kill Count (Hollywood) haunted houses featured at Halloween Horror Nights 2023 (Hollywood). Written by. Christina Radish
Transcription[]
Horror Nights 2023: Explore the Thrills and Chills of 'The Last of Us,' 'Stranger Things,' & 'Chucky'[]
By. Christina Radish Published Sep 1, 2023 Whether dangerous Clickers, a vengeful Vecna, a serial killing doll or Universal Monsters, there is something to terrify everyone at the annual event.
[Editor's note: The following contains some spoilers for the houses and the properties/movies they feature.]The theme park Halloween season is officially upon us, and Horror Nights 2023 is set for endless scares at Universal Studios Hollywood on select nights from September 7th through October 31st. With eight haunted houses, both inspired by well-known horror properties and created from original twisted ideas, scare zones, and a Terror Tram taken over by bug-headed exterminators, there’s something around every dark corner to terrify everyone, which is why they suggest that you should “never go alone.”
Collider, along with a handful of other press outlets, was invited to take behind the scenes tours of the houses for The Last of Us video game, Stranger Things Season 4, Chucky: Ultimate Kill Count and Universal Monsters: Unmasked, featuring Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, the Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Invisible Man. After getting the scoop from Horror Nights creative director John Murdy and learning about what went into bringing the stories to life, we’ve compiled the highlights and some cool details that you should know, and included some photos to give you an idea of what to expect and look out for.
The Last of Us House[]
• Based exclusively on the Naughty Dog video game and designed in collaboration with game creator Neil Druckmann, this house will send guests through an abandoned Pittsburgh. Out of all the different franchises at Horror Nights, over the years, they’ve never truly done a video game house. The closest they came was Silent Hill, but that was heavily based on the films with only a little bit of the game in it. This time, it’s all the video game. While experiencing the house, guests will cross paths with the game’s stars, Joel and Ellie, and have to survive a variety of Clickers and Hunters.
• The entire house is set within the Pittsburgh quarantine zone, as evidenced by the front entrance. That way, it establishes the location and the protagonists of the game from the very beginning, and will also make things clear for guests who are not familiar with and have never played the game. You’ll also hear the iconic theme music while you’re waiting out front.
• Murdy admitted to not being a gamer, but he did have endless files and references to comb through while designing the house, did endless research, and studied a 12-hour play through video, over and over again.
• Because the heart of the game really is the characters and the emotional journey that they go on together, Joel and Ellie are featured as live performers throughout the house, with Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson returning to do custom voice work that the performers will lip-synch with. At the start of the house, Joel and Ellie will set up the story that guests will experience once they enter. You’ll also see Ellie pull out her joke book and hear some of the jokes she uses to lighten the mood with the always gruff Joel. In every single detail of Joel and Ellie – what they’re wearing, their backpacks, every single button on their backpacks, etc. – they tried to nail it, so that it’s exactly like the video game.
• Once you get into the world of The Last of Us, there are some big scenes, but they really wanted to compress guests, by the end of the house, with a feeling of claustrophobia. As a result, the house seems longer than usual, but physically it’s not. It just has less big rooms, and more cavernous twisting and turning, which gives the feeling, by design, that it’s longer.
• All the signage that you’ll see throughout the house come right out of the files that were used to create the game, along with the four stages of an infected flyer and the look of the graffiti. And even though the Fireflies won’t be represented by characters in the house, they are a big part of the game, so Druckmann wanted to have them represented in the many Easter eggs for the fans.
• The house builds on the infected, featuring all four stages and starting with the first stage, bringing guests into contact with a Runner. All the sounds of the infected are so specific that they sourced it directly from the game. Even though certain stages of infected don’t actually exist in the Pittsburgh portion of the game, Druckmann gave them the freedom to bring characters into that portion of the story to enhance the experience.
• When they come to Pittsburgh, Ellie comes across a pile of burned human remains and says, “I don’t think these are infected,” foreshadowing that there’s another entity that they have to worry about, the Hunters. The Hunters are gangs of lawless individuals that have taken over large portions of the Pittsburgh quarantine zone, and in some ways, they’re even more dangerous than the infected because they’re just ruthless. Anyone who comes into their turf, they call them Tourists and will most likely kill them.
• For the hotel elevator scene, where Joel has fallen down the elevator shaft, leaving Ellie on her own, you’ll see Ellie with her switchblade, pacing around. While in that scene, guests will find themselves caught between a Hunter and Ellie. When it came to the design, they came as close as they could to matching the wallpaper from the game.
• After leaving the hotel elevator scene, guests will go through a blackout transition to end up in the basement, since it’s not possible to walk downstairs or actually take an elevator within the house. In the basement, you’ll discover corpses submerged in water from being flooded, similar to the effect that was in the La Llorona house.
• As you keep moving throughout the house, there are trash barrels on fire because there’s no power or electricity and everything runs off of generators. Special effects will make the barrels look like they’re on fire. There will also be some really offensive scents, added to the sights and sounds of the house, especially once you get into the sewer with the water.
• Upon exiting the basement, guests will be introduced to the idea of the spores. When the infected die, they implode or explode from the inside, and they emit these spores that can infect you, which will be a combination of theatrical smoke and lighting effects.
• From there, you’ll head into the bathroom, which will be very dark. Joel uses a flashlight a lot in the game, so the house will incorporate that. Joel’s flashlight will click on in the bathroom, and you’ll see a dead body, and then it will go off and click on again, and you’ll see another dead body. It’s there that a Runner will attack. The performers have the ability to activate their own point source audio and their own lighting effects, to amplify their scare, and they also have a video monitor to see guests coming and time everything accordingly.
• This is the point in the house where guests will cross paths with the next stage of the infected, the Stalkers, or the corpses that look like they’ve exploded. The Hunters are driving around in a Humvee with a military tank turret and a 50K machine gun on top, and it will look like they’re shooting up a wall of the house. The vehicle itself is actually only a third of a Humvee, sliced right down the middle and crafted from a 3D model. You’ll hear the vehicle driving around, you’ll hear the Hunters, and you’ll hear Joel and Ellie reunite.
• Once you’re in the sewer, the twists and turns are meant to replicate that first-person experience of playing a video game, and you immediately start hearing the sound of the Clickers. You pick up details in the sewer that suggest somebody was living down there, but they don’t seem to be alive anymore. It’s here where you’ll find hints about Ish, from the game. When you see the Clickers, you won’t know which of them are performers and which are static figures, to make it easier for them to scare you.
• Now, you’re in a chase sequence, where Joel and Ellie are trying to get out of the sewer, but it’s filled with the infected. There’s one part of the game where Joel and Ellie are about to get out, and Joel goes back and starts throwing Molotov cocktails at the Clickers, so they’ve included the burned Clickers in the house, brought to life using invisible blacklight paint with hot spots on their costume and their mask that you won’t see until they’re hit with a blacklight, giving it that smoldering, crispy Clicker look.
• In the final moments, you’ll come across a Bloater, which is a head to toe creature suit that’s custom sculpted by their makeup artist. They actually have an airline hooked up to their costume to keep the performer cool because it’s a really elaborate costume. There’s a scene with the Bloater having his fingers in someone’s mouth, where he pulls his whole face apart, showering guests with his blood. That’s just to sell the Bloater and how awful and hard to kill they are. As soon as that happens, as you leave, you turn a corner and get attacked by another big full-size Bloater.
• Once you exit back outside, Druckmann wanted to ensure that guests experiencing the house would know that Joel and Ellie survived. And while Horror Nights doesn’t exactly do happy endings, they worked together to do a scene to convey that they made it through triumphant, before attacking guests with another Clicker.
Stranger Things 4 House[]
• While the houses at Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Orlando Resort can sometimes be quite different, even when they’re the same property, largely to do with the locations they have to physically occupy, they do collaborate on what story they want to tell and try to keep that consistent across both parks. The story they wanted to tell for the Stranger Things Season 4 house was that of Vecna’s curse.
• The house starts exactly where the season starts, with Eddie’s trailer and Chrissy encountering Vecna. Guests will hear Chrissy screaming and Eddie going, “Chrissy! Chrissy!” And then, once they go inside the trailer, guests will find Chrissy, elevated in the air with all of her bones twisted and broken and her jaw broken. She’s essentially a distracted from Eddie, who will bust through the door in a state of panic, shouting for her.
• Sometimes the houses can use the actual dialogue from the show, which is the case with Stranger Things. So, when you hear Eddie, it’s the performer from the TV series. Other times, they have to re-record the dialogue, or use in-house talent if it’s an original house.
• Universal has two lead prop artisans year-round, and then they bring in various artists, mostly from film and television, to do set decoration and props, create props, sculpt props, and do all of that work for Horror Nights. The last thing they have to do is attach everything, by gluing and screwing it down, since the guests get close enough to the action that they can touch the props. Because they’re not able to use name brands, from a legal standpoint, the props and dressing crew has to create fake products to place throughout the houses. Whether it’s beer cans or cigarettes, or just anything that’s found in one of the shows or movies that they’re basing a house on, they have to create the Horror Nights version of it.
• After the initial setup, guests will leave Eddie’s trailer and head towards the back of Max’s trailer, where she first encounters Vecna. Among all the trees and foliage and branches overhead, a clothesline will be contain the first tease of Vecna, who will be slitting the sheet, and showing his claw and maybe a little bit of his face. Vecna is a head to toe, custom sculpted creature.
• From there, you’ll run into a creepy little girl in a black dress with her head down. She’ll look up and go, “Murderer!,” and point her hand at you, but it’s Vecna’s claw. As per usual, she’s the distraction and the bigger scare will come from the woman without the nose and the pearl necklace.
• This house jumps locations a lot because of how the show had four different stories going on at once. The house also has a lot of large scale digital graphics because the scope of the show has gotten bigger and bigger, over the years.
• Along with foliage, one of the other last things that gets added is blood because it’s so messy. Universal has their own special formula for the different types of blood they use. There is blood that they use for scenic treatment on walls, blood for the performers’ costumes, and blood that they use to create big blood pools, which goes on bubble gum pink and dries looking like wet blood.
• When you enter the rainbow room, Eleven will have her back turned and her hand raised, and Henry/One is back against the wall. It’s the moment of their first big battle and she’s in the middle of vanquishing him. The performer playing Henry will be wearing prosthetic makeup to give him that creepy burned look like on the show, as if he’s being particlized. And then, there will be embedded LEDs in the walls to form the cracks, all while Eleven is sending him back to the Upside Down.
• Once guests leave the rainbow room, they’ll go into Nancy’s vision, where she finds herself in the lab in the Upside Down and Vecna is stalking her. Dr. Brenner is also in the scene, but he’s got the Vecna eyes, like he does in the show. The observation window will be covered with a black spandex type material that looks like a solid, blacked out window, but Vecna will actually be behind it, with the ability to stretch it back and come after you.
• You’ll get to the Creel house, which was built in a computer, with all the details down to the wood grain and additional dimensional elements and lighting. Everything inside the Creel house was created from scratch. They built the stairway, sourced the wallpaper, aged and ripped the wallpaper, and added the wainscoting, all to look like the abandoned house.
• While there, you’ll find Max, who’s a live performer, and she’s got the blue lantern that reacts to Vecna. There weren’t a lot of the kids in the previous two Stranger Things houses at Horror Nights because they were too young and it’s hard to cast kids. Now that they’ve gotten a little older, they’re being featured much more now and guests will see almost all of them as they walk through the house. And beware, as you head towards the mirror, because it’s actually a window that Vecna will come out of.
• Once you enter the Upside Down, you’ll be surrounded by vines all over the walls and big projectors up above, doing the little particles. While there, you’ll see Steve with his axe and Robin, Steve’s friend from the video store, already caught in the vines and calling for him to rescue her.
• The finale sequence was incredibly challenging to do because they had to create Vecna’s realm in the Upside Down as the deconstructed Creel house. The house starts to break apart and there are vines everywhere. You’ll see Chrissy as a live performer, so that she can reach out at you, as you’re coming through. Vecna will be a head to toe character that can pop out at you. And Eleven will be a live performer who’s using all of her force to send Vecna back to where he came from. There will be a Vecna character that’s a combination of animated figure that moves and jiggles, but that also has LED lights embedded into him, so that it looks like he’s burning and starting to particlize with smoke coming out of him. But while it seems like there is a triumphant ending, there is always another scare, and Vecna might just make one final appearance at the Snow Ball junior high prom.
• Of course, no Stranger Things house would be complete without some of the music from the series. When you’re waiting in the queue line with the video content meant to help refresh your memory of the past season, you’ll hear Metallica and “Running Up the Hill,” and all the songs that were popularized by the show. In the house itself, you’ll primarily hear the score from the show. But then, right at the end, you’ll hear a reprise of “Running Up the Hill.”
Chucky: Ultimate Kill Count House[]
• Although he’s made appearances in the past, Horror Nights has never officially done a Chucky house. So, when it came time to figure out what it would be, they got together with creator Don Mancini to decide how best to deliver the iconic character for fans. It was Mancini’s suggestion to do something focused on Kill Count because it’s a bit part of the current TV series, with the kill count recap that they always do. In making it the Ultimate Kill Count, they were able to have total freedom with what they would include inside, instead of having to focus on a specific movie or season of the TV series.
• As a serial killer, Chucky is pretty pissed off that he’s never gotten a house dedicated to him at Horror Nights, when all of the other famous slashers have had multiple houses, because he feels like he hasn’t gotten the respect that he deserves. So, he’s hijacked his own house this year and he’s raised an army of Good Guy dolls to wreak havoc. Just like in the latter films, when he split his soul to divide into other dolls, he’s done so for this house, with the goal of creating the ultimate kill count by killing all of the guests, thereby being the perfect setup for thousands of unsuspecting victims, waiting in line in the queue to be killed.
• Chucky Prime is the main iteration of Chucky, who will be setting up the story for you while you’re waiting in line outside. The dialogue spoken by Brad Dourif that’s heard inside and outside the house is a combination of new and previously existing recorded material. But because Horror Nights is held at a family theme park, every time Chucky cusses, he’ll be bleeped, which he’ll become aware of and be even more pissed off.
• This house is the most meta that Horror Nights has ever gotten. The first victim Chucky kills will be an Express Pass guest, who will meet his demise with nails in his head. He also hates all of the media that cover and attend, as well as content creators who do videos in the theme park, so they won’t escape the Good Guy Factory either. They created a content creator, named Lord Spookula HHN Updater, was the first person who broke the news that Chucky was coming to Horror Nights this year, and won’t let anyone forget that he was the first person who broke the news. He will also get nails to the head, still holding his cell phone with his video of the house playing.
• The Chucky dolls found throughout the house are fully articulated and will be programmed in each scene. While guests are expected to respect the dolls and not touch them, if they are touched, the dolls will stop moving. Because there are so many Good Guy dolls throughout the house, there are less live performers in the scenes, but there are still a lot of people behind the scenes, animating the dolls and keeping an eye out in case they need to do a show stop.
• There are a series of scenes that take place in a home, as part of the home invasion sequence. There will be one Good Guy slashing the throat of a live performer, another guy will be getting choked by a yo-yo, and a silent disco guy will be meeting his demise on the stairs. There will be two people killed in a kitchen, and the maid that fell on top of the knives in the dishwasher.
• There will also be some hospital hijinks combined into one scene for the biggest impact. The Good Guy dolls will have defibrillator paddles and syringes to use on victims.
• After the home invasion and hospital portions of the house, things get really weird because the Good Chucky that’s been deprogrammed takes over. Everything is Christmas themed with Christmas music and a Christmas tree decorated with Chucky ornaments, so it’s basically Christmas in hell. That’s where and why the chainsaws come in.
• When it came to the dolls, there are 18 animated dolls throughout the house. They bought 30 dolls because they needed some spare parts and pieces.
• Along with Chucky, you will also see a couple of Tiffany cameos. GiGi, Chucky’s gender fluid offspring, will also make an appearance. They’re the first gender fluid character in the history of Horror Nights, and their clothing is custom made with the boots being 3D printed because they couldn’t find the right size.
• Lexy, the character from the TV series, chainsaws Chucky because of all the bad things he’s done up to this point. For his death scene, she’ll be ramming the chainsaw into his chest while he’s screaming bloody murder.
• In the last sequence, guests will learn that you can’t keep a Good Guy down because Chucky always comes back. You’ve seen him get killed, but not really. As you go through the woods, you’ll find Good Guy dolls heads on pikes and body parts hanging from trees. And then, you’ll come face to face with mega Chucky, who will be brought to life with a person inside of the giant suit moving the character. They can walk and they can wield the giant knife in Chucky’s hand.
Universal Monsters: Unmasked House[]
• Universal Monsters: Unmasked is the fifth Universal Monster house that’s been at Horror Nights since 2018, when they first started working with the characters, and Slash composed original music again. September 6th, the day before Horror Nights opens, is the 100th anniversary of the very first Universal classic monster film, which was The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923, filmed right on the backlot. That led to the decision to focus on Hunchback and Phantom of the Opera, which both take place in Paris. And then, they decided to go back even further into the classic monster archives with Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, rounding things out with the Invisible Man.
• Since they were already looking to set the house in Paris, they decided to start off in the Paris catacombs, 60 feet below the streets in what’s considered to be the Empire of the Dead with the six million Parisians buried there. Before the catacombs, they over buried people, to the point where bodies started breaking through retaining walls, spilling into streets, and coming out of sinkholes. There are even stories of cafés where the wall busted open and corpses fell out. It was then that they decided to start dumping bodies down mine shafts, and as the years went on, they artfully arranged them into how you see them now in the catacombs. It was around 1870 that they decided to open the catacombs to the public as a tourist attraction.
• The monsters of this story have also already gone underground. The Phantom of the Opera’s lair is located underneath the Paris Opera House, the Hunchback is already down there, and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jack Griffin, aka the Invisible Man, were chased out of London by the authorities and have gone underground in Paris.
• The story starts with the giant oversized English language French newspaper at the front of the house with two large video displays incorporated into it. From there, they created an original character as the narrator for this experience, named Madame Squelette, which is French for Skeleton. She’s one of the six million dead Parisians buried in the catacombs, but inside the house, you’ll be able to see her in her mortal state.
• For the Phantom, you’ll see him with his mask on until the classic scene where he’s unmasked. When designing houses for Horror Nights, they try to combine scenes that are a bit more theatrical and that don’t necessarily have scares. The big reveal has Christine, after she’s just seen the Phantom’s horrible face and fainted while the Phantom is at his organ. Once he has his reveal, then he’ll appear without his mask throughout the rest of the house.
• These characters are not slashers or mindless killers. All of what they do is motivated by how they’re treated by the real monsters, which are the humans. In the Victor Hugo novel about the Hunchback, Esmeralda, the gypsy girl that is the object of the Hunchbacks affection, doesn’t live happily ever after, but is instead hung. She’s wrongly accused of a crime she didn’t commit and she’s taken to a torture chamber and put in a horrible device that they start tightening. They wanted to find a motivation for the Hunchback that was different from how he’s historically been treated in films, so he’s motivated by his protection for Esmeralda.
• When they began to think about what Dr. Jekyll should look like, they wanted to bring some diversity to the character, especially with how much things have changed since any of the original films where made. In period London, it would be very common for doctors to be from India or Pakistan, so they made Dr. Jekyll Asian. You’ll meet Dr. Jekyll in his underground laboratory for another theatrical scene, where you’ll see his transformation into Mr. Hyde.
• The final portion of the house is inspired by a real café in Paris that was pretty much the first themed restaurant. It had a giant devil head that you had to walk through the mouth of, to get to the cabaret, which was deemed to be hell and where all of the wait staff dressed like devils. This Cabaret of Death is a tiny little theater that’s patronized by the rich and famous to watch acts of murder, and there will be a live act taking place on the stage with a performer.
Halloween Horror Nights is being held on select nights at Universal Studios Hollywood from September 7 through October 31.