Pitch Black

Halloween Horror Nights Orlando attraction
Image from the Halloween Horror Nights: Sweet 16 website page.
Pitch Black
Attraction type	Haunted House
Event	Halloween Horror Nights XI
Park	Universal Studios Florida
Area	Production Central
Year	2001
Housed in	Soundstage 22
Based on	Original

Please link to a source discussing the layout/scenes/behind-the-scenes facts of this attraction. If you yourself can give info, please post it on somewhere like a forum/Facebook/Twitter wall so we could use it as a source. If anyone can provide never before seen HD photos, videos, especially those behind the scenes, we would greatly appreciate it.

Pitch Black was one of the five haunted houses that was featured during Halloween Horror Nights XI. It was located in Soundstage 22 along with Scary Tales. It had nothing to do with the Vin Diesel film at all.

History and Location

In 2001, Universal decided to have yet another pair of haunted houses in Soundstage 22. Soundstage 22 is one of the smaller soundstage facilities designed to be used as filming locations for movies and television shows. Pitch Black would share this soundstage with Scary Tales.

Pitch Black would be a house designed to be very dark, although there were a few strobe lights thrown in to disorientate guests. A similar house called Fear Factor during 2002 based on the TV show with the same name had similar ideas to this one, with hanging strips of plastic and darkness.

Description

(Info from press release)

A mysterious zone of darkness has appeared over the Uneeda Medical Supply Warehouse, causing bizarre, atmospheric disturbances, throwing the area into complete darkness. A government research team has disappeared into this gloom and subsequent visitors become totally immersed in the dark, moving through a completely tactile experience, being confronted by the fearsome, glowing faces of the warehouse's strange inhabitants.

A mysterious zone of darkness has appeared causing weird disturbances. It's up to you to investigate... if you dare.

Experience

Queue and Facade

Guests entered the queue to the right of Soundstage 22. The queue would eventually end along the right wall of the same soundstage and enter from a door located there. The queue video had flashes of body parts as weird music played.

House

There cannot be a detailed scene by scene description for this house, as by the few accounts of Pitch Black, it appears to be just a trip down rooms painted black with weird noises, sound effects that messed with your mind, and occasionally bright strobe lights at the end.

Excerpt from the now defunct Haunt Freaks.com: "The latest info on Pitch Black is that it will be a very tactile experience: carpeted walls covered in slime, cob webs, inflatable objects and walls, hot rooms, cold rooms, wet rooms, furry objects, hard floors, soft floors, bouncy floors... all in Pitch Black." The same site says that there were rooms filled with hair, walls covered in Vaseline, and hot rooms, though most of the maze was kept cold.

Children's voices can be heard in some of the rooms trying to lure guests into areas. At one point, a voice can be heard saying "a spinning fragment of solar driftwood", a line taken from the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast narrated by Orson Welles. There are also noises that could possibly indicate that air guns were used to scare guests. According to this, there was a pitch black room with the sound of someone retching. According to this, there were also wet strips of plastic, air blasts, and the crushing walls effect. There may have also been an underlying alien theme. There were also soft floors and furry walls, and some of the scareactors had glowing faces.

According to this, the house was very popular that year. The same source also says that there were only about 7 scareactors in the house, with each one using around 3 different boo-holes.

Pictures

A picture of the entrance sign to Pitch Black (on the right). Image from the now defunct HHNVault.

Image from Wolf Boy

Most likely the entrance for Pitch Black.

Videos

• Home Video (24:52-25:45)

Trivia

• This house was frequently "ruined" for many guests due to people bringing in objects that lit up the rooms, such as glow sticks.