Interstellar Terror

Halloween Horror Nights Orlando attraction
Interstellar Terror
Attraction type	Haunted House
Event	Halloween Horror Nights: Reflections of Fear
Park	Universal Studios Florida
Area	Production Central
Year	2008
Housed in	Soundstage 20
Based on	Event Horizon (Unofficially)

Interstellar Terror was one of the eight haunted houses that were featured during Halloween Horror Nights: Reflections of Fear. Based loosely on the film Event Horizon and the video game Dead Space, the house brought guests through the NSO Columbus 1492, a spaceship whose crew went crazy on a mission in deep space. It was located in Soundstage 20 along with Body Collectors: Collections of the Past.

History and Location

In 2008, Universal decided to tie in all eight of their haunted houses to patients of Bloody Mary. This haunted house would tie in to Lt. Von Stebler. He had a fear of mysterious symbols that he had visions of. Bloody Mary showed him pictures of these symbols and he stabbed himself repeatedly with a pen.

The house would be loosely based on the video game Dead Space and the movie Event Horizon. The story is that a spaceship discovered a strange artifact that made the crew go insane. The house would be the first house to actually take place in space. The rooms would be designed to resemble the different rooms of a fictional space ship.

The house would be one of two located in Soundstage 20, the other one being Body Collectors: Collections of the Past. Soundstage 20 is one of the larger soundstage facilities designed to be used as filming locations for movies and television shows.

Description

It can only be attributable to human error.

The first manned spacecraft to ever leave our solar system has returned... but with an alien artifact on-board with devastating effects.

Prided among the scientific community as the greatest achievement in the history of Mankind, the NSO Columbus 1492 is the first manned spacecraft to leave the relative safety of our solar system. When the ship disappears for several years, and then reappears just outside the orbit of our moon, your rescue team is sent to investigate, only to find that an artifact the crew brought on board will exact its destructive nature, and will force you all to witness Interstellar Terror!

Experience

The entrance facade of the house. Guests walked through the red steel gantry toward the ship.

Guests entered the house and immediately were confronted by the gantry of the NSO Columbus 1492. Walking towards the entrance of the ship, its engines were running, pumping smoke to obscure the view. Entering the ship, overhead monitors told the captain's story of the crew's descent into madness. Their mission was in deep space where they had found a strange "Artifact" and had taken it aboard the ship. Since that time the Artifact seemed to be making the crew kill and torture themselves. As the captain talked, alarms blared, ushering guests into the next room of the ship.

That next room was a small hallway with crew members lurking and torturing themselves. Directly in front of guests a man took dangling electrical cables and pushed them against his body. The lights above him strobed and the smell of burnt flesh entered the room as he was electrocuted. Moving on, guests entered the engine room. The engineering crew lurked here on high platforms and blocking the path. Each were burned or maimed and yelled at guests to leave before the Artifact took them over as well.

Guests began walking closer to the bridge. In the access room before the bridge crew members hid behind holes in the wall and movable bookshelves, popping out to scare guests who were occupied by dangling wires, dripping water, and other distractions. In the bridge, monitors showed more of the captain's story and blinked warnings as guests walked around the captain's chair. The captain was, however, tied to the wall by wires and chopped in half. His closest assistants walked around guests with burns and warning them to leave before a similar fate befell them.

Walking off the bridge guests entered into a long shaft. Surrounded by fences, a hundred foot drop was on either side of the path leading to the engines. Near the bottom of the drop was a dead astronaut, spinning in the low gravity. Leaving there, a spinning hallway awaited. With lights coming in from small holes, the hallway looked to spin faster, disorienting guests. Walking out of the hallway, guests were now walking on the ceiling of the ship.

With everything upside down to the guests' perspectives, more things went wrong with the ship with many explosive decompressions. The biggest one dragged a crew member to the hole it created. As he reached for help from guests walking past, he was pulled into space and air rushed out of the ship toward hole. Passing through a narrow hallway, there was a loud crash and a shockwave pulsed along two hallways off to the side until it reached the line, where the floor suddenly jumped. Guests entered the final room of the ship where the Artifact was stored above the path. Crew members walked around looking up at the Artifact and chasing guests from the ship.

Mystery Tie-in

This house is connected to the case of Lt. Von Stebler, the son of German-American Admiral George Von Stebler, one of the children responsible for Mary Worthington's disappearance. The lieutenant was already living in constant fear due to his father's actions during World War II; he especially was afraid of the urban legend of Bloody Mary. Von Stebler wanted to be an astronaut, but due to his irrational fears, he was unable to pass the mental tests that were required for the job. Going against his friend, Dr. Kubsh, Admiral Von Stebler sends his son to Dr. Agana to cure his son of a particular fear of strange alien symbols he believed were to cause the end of the world. Dr. Agana strapped him to a chair, bound his arms and legs to it and used eye clamps to force his eyes open. Then she unbound one hand, gave him a fountain pen and told him he was free to write or draw anything as she shows him a slideshow of the symbols. Von Stebler broke upon seeing the symbols and began to thrash about in an attempt to break free and began carving the symbols into his flesh with the pen. He was sent to be hospitalized while Dr. Agana was amazed by how the sight of a man break down at an image of something he fears. She decides to keep the pen as a memento and discovers something about her sessions: she believes audio feedback is too distracting and merely likes watching them instead. Especially through a one-way mirror.

Pictures

Image from Peter Collebert's Myspace.

Trivia

• Interstellar Terror, like many of the other houses at Halloween Horror Nights: Reflections of Fear, included a brief appearance by Bloody Mary in the static following one of the captain's messages on the bridge.
• The captain was played by Michael Roddy, the long-time manager of show development in Orlando.
• Additionally Roddy's name and other designers appeared on a view screen map of the ship in the bridge.
• The Artifact was a small scale version of the ship from the film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

• For the Bloody Mary mystery story, Interstellar Terror is foretold through the mind of Lt. Von Stebler, who began to go mad from the symbols he began seeing in visions, the same symbols found on the Artifact.

• The first Dead Space game that came out the same year as Reflections of Fear shares similarities with Interstellar Terror. A symbol covered artifact called the Red Marker, a man-made copy of the original alien artifact, the Black Marker drove the crew of the USG Ishimura and the colonists on Aegis VII mad, which is similar to how the haunted house's Artifact drove the Columbus' crew mad. The only difference is that the Artifact didn't cause the bodies of the crew to be reanimated, unlike the Markers. Additionally, another possible influence may be the film Event Horizon,  where a spaceship carrying an experimental interstellar drive disappears, only to mysteriously return several years later without its crew. The aforementioned Dead Space was also heavily inspired by Event Horizon, while the rotating hallway as well as the fact that the crew ended up torturing themselves to death are both elements that seem to be drawn directly from the film itself.
• J. Michael Roddy played the insane captain of the ship on the TV monitors.
• According to this, the Terra Cruentus Rune was in some of the panels of this house.
• The name of the ship, Colombus 1492, is a nod to the name of the ship in Event Horizon, the Lewis and Clark.
• There was a panel that showed all of the scareactor locations in the haunted house in the Engine Room.
• Many sets from the Halloween Horror Nights: Carnival of Carnage house, The Thing: Assimilation, were used in this house. One of these includes the freezing chamber door which was used near the beginning of Interstellar Terror.

External links

• Behind the Scenes Walkthrough of the house