A couple weeks ago, we ventured into the hot sun of Southern California at Universal Studios Hollywood to take a behind the scenes tour of two houses at this years Halloween Horror Nights. We were also joined by Creative Director of HHN, John Murdy. He took us through two houses: A Quiet Place and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. During our visit, no video was allowed and we couldn’t take pictures of everything. So the following is EVERYTHING we could show you ahead of the September 4th opening. We also were able to record our tour with John, so you can listen to that while taking a visual tour along with us.

A QUIET PLACE

A Quiet Place’s location is the former home to The Walking Dead attraction. This means there is plenty of room vertically and there is full control over any and all light pollution into the experience. The biggest piece to this house are the various creatures from the film. There are 10 different creatures, 6 are puppetted and 4 are fully animated. The pictures don’t do their size any justice. These creatures are massive!

Another aspect to A Quiet Place that created an interesting challenge for the HHN team is it’s sound design. They had to approach it from a different perspective than other houses. In every room, there’s multichannel audio coming from big speakers above the sets. But they needed to do the opposite for A Quiet Place. In this house, the audio team utilizes “Near Field Audio Design”. This type of audio design uses specialized speakers designed for precise and accurate audio monitoring at close distances. And in this particular case, there needs to be many speakers and they need to get very close to guests. So speakers are hidden in set design within the house.

Throughout the house, there are various trigger effects that are “cause and effect” sensors. When a guest crosses one of those beams, it triggers something to happen in the rooms and causes the creatures to come! It’s a cool way to translate the idea of having to be quiet and the danger of being too loud.

The way many characters in the film stay quiet, is by using ASL or American Sign Language. In the queue for this attraction, there will be videos explaining the story and world of A Quiet Place. But these videos are done completely in ASL with closed captioning. Additionally, as a part of Scare Actor Training, the cast of the house was trained in ASL so it can be utilized during the experience.

GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, much like it’s predecessor, is going to be a great mix of funny and scary. Also, there will be MANY callbacks to prior films as well! There is plenty of fan service for those fans of the franchise.

The first room is Ray’s Occult Bookstore where we’ll find animated Mini-Pufts throughout the scene! These cute little guys were a big part of the recent Ghostbusters films and it’s pretty fun that they can now be a part of the HHN experience. You’ll also have Ray in this scene talking on the phone to the New York Library about the “death chill” and Podcast, his new sidekick, is trying to wrangle the Mini-Pufts.

Garraka, the new villain in Frozen Empire, will make plenty of appearances throughout the experience as performers on stilts! There is also a hallway that will contain, probably the biggest occurrence of fan service in any house at HHN. This event is known for it’s “dueling scare” where guests are flanked on both sides by monsters. This will happen 3 different times in this hallways and it will feature iconic characters from the various Ghostbusters films. It’s a moment we are very excited for.

The facade of the Firehouse within the maze is massive. As you can see in the image below, it reaches the very top of the tent and even has slots cut out of the facade to go even higher. We like how we often get multiple facades within a single Halloween Horror Nights house.

It’s so cool to be able to see these houses in various stages of creation. There are so many smaller details that are easy to miss when you’re too busy trying to avoid scares…or being scared! The team behind Halloween Horror Nights truly goes the distance with the amount of work and detail that goes into every nook and cranny of these haunted houses.

We want to give a massive shoutout to the teams at Universal Studios Hollywood for allowing us the opportunity to bring this cool Behind The Scenes content to our readers and listeners! And we want to thank John Murdy for spending time with us in the hot sun, showing us all the fun details.

If you want to buy yourself tickets to Halloween Horror Nights, CLICK HERE!