The all-horror-film themed Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Florida, which is called Ripped from the Silver Screen for 2009, offers eight haunted houses featuring characters from movies such as Saw and Chucky and scare zones such as Lights, Camera, Hacktion!!! (You gotta love the names.)
I had the chance to chat with Universal's T.J. Mannarino, director of art and design, and Susan Moore, design manager, about the creative process for Halloween Horror Nights. They focused mostly on the haunted houses themed to Universal's classic horror films, Dracula and Frankenstein.
Halloween Horror Nights is a Second Childhood
Playing with Universal's legendary characters, says Mannarino, was like living a second childhood. As with many of the park's guests, the designer's first introduction to horror was watching the black and white monster films as a wide-eyed child on the television in his parent's den. Rather than giving the iconic characters a contemporary spin (re-imagining Dracula as a Twilight hottie, for example), the Universal crew opted to stick with the original films for inspiration."Anybody could create a vampire," Mannarino says. "But only Universal could give you Count Dracula, the most famous bloodthirsty vampire." Not that the Halloween Horror Nights version of Drac is all retro Bela Lugosi. Called Dracula: Legacy of Blood, the haunted house is set in the Count's gothic castle. Among the dozen scenes in the attraction, guests encounter Dracula in human form, as a flying bat, and as a hideous beast. In setting the period tone, Universal's HHN team looked back even farther than the classic films and explored the book by Bram Stoker and the real-life Vlad the Impaler upon whom the author based his character.
"We're trying to invoke the legends of these monsters," says Moore. "Not the pop culture versions." Indeed with Frankenstein's monster and Dracula showing up in cartoons and on cereal boxes, it must be a challenge to make the characters horrifying again.
Mannarino says it's great that guests are familiar with the characters and their stories. It gives them a common reference point and precludes the need for introductory exposition. "But, you don't know how these famous characters will act in our houses," he says, a bit ominously. That's where Mannarino and his team are able to build tension, add mystery, and create a fear of the unknown.
In the Frankenstein: Creation of the Damned haunted house, for example, the designers focused on the raw, emotional essence of the monster, instead of the green skin and the undersized clothes. According to Mannarino, the monster is out for revenge against the doctor for creating him. In addition to an unhappy monster on the loose, the HHN house ups the fear-of-the-unknown factor by introducing a batch of new monsters from the lab and demented mind of Dr. Frankenstein.
The Horror of Seeing Your Attraction Closed
As Mannarino and Moore talked about reliving their childhoods, developing the ideas for HHN, and carefully crafting the attractions, it got me thinking: What is it like to invest so much time, energy, and passion into something only to see it shut down after a limited one-month run? Sure, Mannarino admits, we get attached to the houses and scare zones we create. And it is sad to see them go.He says planning for HHN begins years in advance with the creative team mapping out rough ideas and themes. About a year before, work begins in earnest for the following year's event. "We fall in love with the characters and the environments as we see them come to life," Mannarino says. "And we get excited when we move to the construction, casting, and costuming phases." After years of living with characters, they have their moments in the full moon, and they are gone.
But, Mannarino says, the goodbyes could be short. With the 20th anniversary of the Florida HHN scheduled for 2010, the plan is to bring back many of the memorable characters from past events--a weird HHN class reunion, if you will.
