Sneak peeks at Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood ‘Chucky’ and ‘Universal Monsters’ houses – Spoilers Ahead
The opening of Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood is coming up quickly and we are lucky enough to have gotten a behind the scenes tour of two of this year’s houses. Here’s your sneak peek at “Chucky: Ultimate Kill Count” and “Universal Monsters: Unmasked.”
In the past, Chucky from the “Child’s Play” movie franchise, and now television series, has been featured at Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood as part of the Terror Tram and other elements throughout the years. But he’d never had a haunted house of his own. Chucky’s not too happy about that fact. So, he’s taking it out on Universal Studios Hollywood and Halloween Horror Nights guests by hijacking a house and creating an army of Good Guy dolls to help.
In what will perhaps be the most meta of any haunted house ever created for Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood, this one brings the audience into the story. Chucky wants the ultimate kill count, so that includes you. But there’s a pecking order. Chucky might want us all dead, but he really wants to torture the folks with Universal Express passes. And there’s another group of guests that Chucky wants to kill even more. That would be influencers and content creators.
Halloween Horror Nights Creative Director, John Murdy, explains, “It’s kind of fun to bring our fans into it. Now you’re in on the joke. You guys make all these speculation videos and are always trying to leak stuff. So, now we’re going to punish you.”
Part of the reason it took so long for Chucky to get his own house is because it’s an extremely tech-heavy experience. Halloween Horror Nights is a pop-up event. Therefore, it’s a lot harder to pull off a temporary experience filled with animatronic figures than it is to create them for an ongoing theme park attraction. But the year-round engineering team at Universal Studios Hollywood wanted in on the challenge and boy did they deliver. The teams who work on Jurassic World – The Ride, Super Nintendo World, and every other ride in the park are the same folks who built the mechanics for Chucky.
The killer doll’s voiceover you’ll hear throughout the house is performed by the official voice of Chucky, Brad Dourif. Some clips are being reused from movie and television recording sessions, while other lines written specifically for Halloween Horror Nights were later recorded by Dourif.
Just like in the television series where each episode ends with Chucky proudly tallying his kill count, he’ll be doing the same in the Halloween Horror Nights house. Every victim of Chucky’s you see in the house will be accounted for, and he has big plans before guests can escape to make his largest kill count yet.
Another new house for 2023 is “Universal Monsters: Unmasked,” continuing the tradition of having a house themed around the classic Universal Studios movie monsters. This year is featuring some of the earliest of those films.
Guests will enter the underground catacombs of Paris where they’ll encounter The Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But also found there will be The Invisible Man as well as Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, all of whom have escaped London and are hiding in the catacombs with the hopes of not being found by an angry public.
The house is broken into sections with each one featuring a different character. Here you can see where The Phantom of the Opera works on his music. In this house you’ll see the Phantom both masked, and as the house title suggests, unmasked.
In Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory, we’ll find him working on his experiment and will see the transformation into Mr. Hyde taking over his body. We’ll see Mr. Hyde in various iterations as the experiment progresses.
One iconic moment in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” is when Quasimodo spills a cauldron of molten metal onto Parisians. Here you’ll find Quasimodo on a platform above guests as the “molten” spills onto them through a special effect.
The Invisible Man will be created with blacklight techniques not too dissimilar to how the effect was created for the original movie. This fifth installment of a Universal Monsters house at Halloween Horror Nights keeps what will hopefully be a long tradition alive.
Both of these houses are located backstage in a parking lot area. They’ve been using this space for several years now as a Halloween Horror Nights location. As each year passes, it becomes more of an event space with added food and merchandise carts. It’s important to the team for this to not feel like a backstage area and instead like a major part of the event. For that reason, you will notice coverings over some of the garage structure openings in the background above. For the first time, these surfaces will be used to display projections all over the side of the structure in order to enhance the event space.
Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood opens on September 7, 2023 and runs on select nights through October 31, 2023. Learn more about everything else the event has to offer including more haunted houses and new shows, plus get your tickets on the official Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood website.
