August 26, 2025 • 15 mins
Halloween Horror Nights is back and has some surprising changes for fans. KFI's Heather Brooker sits down with John Murdy, the creator and mastermind of Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights, to go behind the screams of this year’s event.
Murdy reveals how the Jim Henson Creature Shop brought life-size animatronics to the brand-new Five Nights at Freddy’s maze, how the Terrifier house will test every sense with blood, stench, and pure chaos, and why fans of Friday the 13th should brace themselves for more Jasons than ever before. He also teases surprises inside the Fallout maze, including a cameo from a Season 2 character, and details on the chilling WWE collaboration, The Horrors of the Wyatt Sicks.
Plus, Guns N’ Roses legend Slash returns, composing an original score for Scarecrow: Music by Slash and inspiring a Slash-themed bar complete with cocktails, tacos, and even a top-hat-topped cake. Whether you’re a die-hard HHN fan or just love a good scare, this episode pulls back the curtain on the artistry, special effects, easter eggs, and pure terror waiting for you this Halloween.
Murdy reveals how the Jim Henson Creature Shop brought life-size animatronics to the brand-new Five Nights at Freddy’s maze, how the Terrifier house will test every sense with blood, stench, and pure chaos, and why fans of Friday the 13th should brace themselves for more Jasons than ever before. He also teases surprises inside the Fallout maze, including a cameo from a Season 2 character, and details on the chilling WWE collaboration, The Horrors of the Wyatt Sicks.
Plus, Guns N’ Roses legend Slash returns, composing an original score for Scarecrow: Music by Slash and inspiring a Slash-themed bar complete with cocktails, tacos, and even a top-hat-topped cake. Whether you’re a die-hard HHN fan or just love a good scare, this episode pulls back the curtain on the artistry, special effects, easter eggs, and pure terror waiting for you this Halloween.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to entertain Me. I'm Heatherbrooker. This is a show
where we talk about all things entertainment from Sokal to
the silver screen. As you can probably tell, fall is
just around the corner.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
We're not quite done with summer yet, still hot outside
and some people are still going to the beach. There's
still lots of beach weather yet. But before we know it,
it's going to be fall. That means Halloween. And nobody
does Halloween better in southern California than Universal Studios Hollywood.
And I am so thrilled this week because I had
(00:35):
the opportunity to sit down with the creator and executive
director of Halloween Hornits John Murdy, and we talked about
what fans can expect to see this year. He even
gives hints about Easter eggs, some of the new mazes,
and some surprises that you aren't going to want to
miss at this year's event. It all kicks off September fourth,
(00:57):
and joining me now to give us a little bit
of a hint of what we can expect is John Murdy. Hey, John,
thanks for joining me. I know you're really busy these days,
my pleasure. We're just a few days away from the
kickoff of Halloween Horror Nights. So how are you feeling
right now? What's kind of going through your head?
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Well, the thing I always say about Horror Nights is
that you can't ever stop and think about how much
is involved in creating it, because you'd go insane. It's
like producing eight movies at the same time from a
production standpoint. So what I've always said to my team
over the years is when you start this project, it's
(01:33):
like a massive boulder and way in the distance, you
know there's a there's a hill that you have to
push this massive boulder up to, and if you thought
about it, you would think it's impossible. So the only
way to do it is to is to just push
it one inch every day and to realize that it's
not just your hands pushing in the boulder, but you
(01:54):
have all of these other hands, which is all of
the talented men and women who work on Halloween Horrorites.
So every day, like with my longtime production designer our
director Chris Williams, like, if we're walking out at the
end of the night, I just go did we win today?
And usually you like, yeah, we want today, meaning we
got something accomplished, so you don't ever try to think
(02:16):
about the vastness of it. You just try to wherever
you are at any given time, you just try to
get that done and then move on to the next thing.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
The one thing fans want to know every year is
what's new and where should we go first.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I think this year was specifically curated with the fan
in mind, because for years they've been telling us they
want five nights at Freddy's. So I imagine a large proportion
of our fans are really going to want to see
that attraction, which is located on the lower lot of
the theme park in Stage fifteen, so they might want
to head there first. There's another, you know, section of
(02:53):
our fans who have been asking for years for Terrifier,
Damian Leoni's film series, and that's in what we call
h Lot, which is kind of on the upper lot
of the theme park, so they might want to go
there first. But today horror fans are so diverse, you know,
and we try to cater to all of that. So
for gamers, you know, people that are into video games,
(03:14):
there's Fallout and that's located on the upper lot of
our theme park, kind of right adjacent to the Universal
Plaza in our former Walking Debt Attraction building, so that
might be top of their agenda. So it's it's kind
of hard to say. And of course we're bringing new
things into Halloween Horror Nites like WWE with the Horrors
of the Wyat six, So there's you know, all these
(03:37):
WWE fans that for the first time are going to
get to see that world translated into a living horror movie,
So that might be top of their agenda. So it's
kind of hard to predict what where the fans will
head first.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Fans love hearing about the creative process. So what's one
surprising or maybe unusual inspiration that shaped a house or
scare zone this year?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
For me, the WYAT six is one because you know,
my dad used to take me to watch wrestling in
the Olympic Auditorium back in the early seventies when I
was a little kid, but I hadn't stayed in touch
with it down through the years and seen, you know
what it became with the WWE. So we work in
collaboration with our sister park in Orlando, Florida, and a
(04:20):
lot of the team members over there are huge WWE
fans and they brought this opportunity to us. Sometimes we
bring it to them. It works both ways, but in
this case, they brought it to us, so that for
myself that meant I needed to do an awful lot
of research before we ever, you know, sat in a
room with the creatives from WWE. So it's similar to
(04:42):
if I'm researching our Latin American content for monstros You know,
we always go real deep to try to understand the
brand from the inside out. And that meant for Wyat
six pretty much watching the entire trajectory of Bray Wyatt,
who was a wrestler who created the y family initially
and then passed away during when COVID was going on,
(05:05):
and his brother Bo Dallas is carried on the torch
with the Wyatt six. But in researching all of that,
all of those matches and all of the promos, and
all of the intricate storyline that they create for these characters,
what I came away with is, Wow, this guy was
a creative genius, and I think if he was alive today,
he probably would have naturally evolved into making horror movies
(05:28):
because it was a huge interest of his. So for
myself and our team, I saw our job as really
creating a tribute to his work and his legacy and
how it carries on today with his brother with the
Wyat six, but to also come at it from the
perspective of maybe not having been a fan all these years,
(05:51):
so that what we were creating was inclusive of everybody.
You know, so whether you're a huge uber fan of
WWE or whether you're a casual fan, the experience would
speak to everybody. So I just looked at it like
if I was Bray Wyatt and I was making a
horror movie based on all of these things he created
over the years and that his brother is carrying on,
(06:13):
what would that look like. So that was the approach.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Oh that sounds so cool.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah, it's really cool.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
One of the things Horror Nights is known for is
pushing the envelope with special effects. Can you tease any
new technology or design tricks that guests will experience this year?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, well, let's start with five nights of Ready's because
I think if you would have asked us, even like
maybe five six years ago, as our fans were asking
us at the time, you know, to do a house
based on that franchise, I probably would have said, it's impossible.
And the reason is a few years back, we were
(06:48):
lucky enough to get the original characters from the film
and they were in a behind the scenes or behind
the screams exhibit for Blumbhouse that we did in our
DreamWorks facility, and I remember walking in when we were
loading in those those costumes and looking at them and going,
that's eight foot tall. You know, there's no way that
(07:09):
can be done by a live actor wearing a costume.
It's different when you're making a movie. You know, you
only necessarily have to be in the costume for maybe,
you know, two minutes at a time director calls cut,
head comes off back to the trailer. But in our world,
you know, our performers are probably doing that for like
forty five minutes at a time. So we knew to
(07:31):
do this. There was really only one way, and that
was to engage Jim Henson's Creature Shop. They're the people
that build the characters for the film. They have an
expertise in puppetry, obviously, so it was really combining their
skill set with our skill set. So they educated us
on how they do things. We had to educate them
on a live experience, like Halloween Ornites, and then we
(07:54):
brought our mechanical engineering team to the table and we've
been working with them, probably back to our house a
few years ago and we had seventeen animatronic checkies. You know,
that was our real first dipping the toe in the
water of trying to do animatronics for Halloween Hornites. So
they built us what I believe is the most complicated
animatronic we've ever featured at Horrnites for Freddy Fosbear has
(08:19):
all kinds of functions and articulations from the eyebrows to
the ears to you name it. So that was a
big leap forward because now we're doing animatronics that are
you know, what you would see in a ride at
Universal Studios, Hollywood. That takes years to build, so that's
a big leap. We've also applied that to Fallout, so
(08:40):
we were building in animatronic T sixty in the power
Armor and again that's like over seven feet tall. So
these are big complicated special effects that we're doing live
in front of people, so it's pretty wild. We love
to work with other individuals, talented individuals or companies that
we can creatively collaborate with to bring what we're trying
(09:02):
to create to life, and it was we had this
partnership with Henson. They were part of FanFest earlier this
year working on dungeons and dragons, so that was maybe
like the test case. That was one character. Now we
have a whole bunch that we got to bring to life.
So it's great to get to work and that's something
we get to uniquely do here in Hollywood. We're smack
(09:24):
dab in the center of the movie and television industry,
so we're able to use all these movie and TV
resources to help us with our event.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
All Right, we have to talk about Easter eggs. Are
there any Easter Eggs in the park this year?
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, Okay, let's take a couple of examples. So Jason Universe,
you know, that's obviously based on Jason and the Friday
the Thirteenth film franchise. I wanted to approach that creatively,
like how I approached Texas Chainsaw Massacre last year, which
was to create an original story that where we tie
(10:02):
in all these iconic elements from the franchise, and that's
what we did with Texas last year. This year, with Jason,
I decided that the setting would be present day, and
that there would be a group of what I've now
learned are called urban explorers. So these are folks who
make YouTube videos, but they go out on like these
(10:25):
destinations to Okay, we're going to go to an abandoned
you know, slaughterhouse, or we're going to go to an
abandoned mental hospital, and they'll you know, break in and
document all these things. And I was watching all I
was trying to come up with an angle for Friday
or for Jason Universe. So I was watching all of
these things and looking at videos of that and thinking, God,
(10:49):
this would be the people Jason would kill today, you know,
if it's all these years later. And there's a thing
called dark tourism that exists in our society where people
take vacation to go to places associated with tragedy and horror,
whether that's Chernobyl in Europe or Lizzy you know, sleeping
in Lizzie Borden's house here in America. So those those
(11:09):
two kind of things, dark tourism, urban exploration, and we
put them together in our storyline. So there's a group
called Death Tours that is doing a destination twenty twenty
five to Camp Crystal Lake to see if they can
document where all these horrible tragedies and murders took place.
In a horror movie, that's a terrible idea because you're
gonna awaken Jason and the killings are going to start.
(11:33):
But what's fun about that is we wanted to reference
all these iconic kills that fans have been making videos
about for years in that franchise, but in a new way.
So it's happening to these you know, these death tourists.
So as you're going through, you know, particularly the wood
scenes of Friday the thirteenth, just you'll notice there's a
(11:53):
lot of references to very famous kills in the Jason universe,
So keep your eyes open for that. In the world
of Wyatt six, we're using specific iconic elements with Bray
Wyatt to kind of be the thread that takes you
through the house. So he was known for his rocking
chair in his lantern. So when he would go out
(12:13):
in the Wyatt family days and watch one of the
guys in his faction wrestle, he would park himself in
a rocking chair. And his compound was in the Louisiana
Bayou and he'd always come out for his matches holding
a lantern, and his fans adopted that and they called
themselves the Fireflies. So there's fireflies. There are lanterns all
(12:36):
the way through the house. It's like a thread. You
have to kind of keep finding Bray's lantern as you
go along. You'll see the rocking chair. You'll also see
references to people who Bray Wyatt, the Wyatt Family, the
Wyatt Six fought. So all of the victims or dead
bodies in this house are wearing T shirts, officially licensed
(12:58):
WWE T shirts for people the Wyatt family or Bray
Wyatt or the Wyatt Six thought of as enemies. So
that's a fun Easter egg to look for. So those
are just a couple.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
I know this is your twentieth year creating Halloween Horror
Knights here at Universal Studios, Hollywood, so I have to
ask you, you know, does it get old? What are
you looking forward to the fans enjoying, and what do
you want them to get out of it this year?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah. I think what we're doubling down on this year
is kind of like it sounds like something we do
every year, which we do, which is focus on the scariness.
But what we're really after doing this for twenty years,
which is this is my twentieth year of doing this
with the team that's brought Horrn Knights back to Hollywood.
(13:47):
We have very loyal fans that come every single year,
but in doing that, they've kind of learned all our tricks.
They've learned the geography of the park where they should
be concerned about being scared and where they shouldn't be
concerned about being scared, and we wanted to use that
against them this year. We wanted to kind of go, Okay,
(14:09):
you think you know what Halloween hornits is, Now we're
going to throw in a twist. So in the case
of Terrifier, which is of course art the clown, I
am deploying art the clowns in places you would not
expect to see art the clowns throughout the theme park.
So it's kind of like our demented version of where's Waldo?
(14:30):
You know, so could be having a meal and look
up and he's sitting right across from you, just staring
at you. You know, you could go into a store
to buy some Terrifier merch and he might follow you in,
you know. So there's we've carefully choreographed who put all
these performers through our version of mime school, and we're
(14:50):
going to experiment. We're going to do things we've never
done before. So and it's all in an effort to
just be destructive. You know. It's like you think you
know our event, Well maybe you don't, so that I'm
really excited to see how that's going to play in
real time with our guests.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Well, it sounds like it's going to be another really
fun event this year. And John Murdy, thank you as
always for your.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Time, my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Halloween Horror Night's kicks off on September for There are
some tickets available and you can find out more details
on our website k if i am six forty dot
com under the entertain Me tab, or you can visit
Universal Studios Hollywood dot com for more information there. Thank
you so much for listening to the show. Feel free
to subscribe and share it with friends. It would mean
(15:36):
a lot to me if you did, and we'll see
you next time. Here. We've got another episode coming up
this week. It's going to be all about the weekend
box office entertainment report with Gary and Shannon. You can
listen to entertain Me anywhere, anytime on the iHeartRadio app,
Welcome to entertain Me. I'm Heatherbrooker. This is a show
where we talk about all things entertainment from Sokal to
the silver screen. As you can probably tell, fall is
just around the corner.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
We're not quite done with summer yet, still hot outside
and some people are still going to the beach. There's
still lots of beach weather yet. But before we know it,
it's going to be fall. That means Halloween. And nobody
does Halloween better in southern California than Universal Studios Hollywood.
And I am so thrilled this week because I had
(00:35):
the opportunity to sit down with the creator and executive
director of Halloween Hornits John Murdy, and we talked about
what fans can expect to see this year. He even
gives hints about Easter eggs, some of the new mazes,
and some surprises that you aren't going to want to
miss at this year's event. It all kicks off September fourth,
(00:57):
and joining me now to give us a little bit
of a hint of what we can expect is John Murdy. Hey, John,
thanks for joining me. I know you're really busy these days,
my pleasure. We're just a few days away from the
kickoff of Halloween Horror Nights. So how are you feeling
right now? What's kind of going through your head?
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Well, the thing I always say about Horror Nights is
that you can't ever stop and think about how much
is involved in creating it, because you'd go insane. It's
like producing eight movies at the same time from a
production standpoint. So what I've always said to my team
over the years is when you start this project, it's
(01:33):
like a massive boulder and way in the distance, you
know there's a there's a hill that you have to
push this massive boulder up to, and if you thought
about it, you would think it's impossible. So the only
way to do it is to is to just push
it one inch every day and to realize that it's
not just your hands pushing in the boulder, but you
(01:54):
have all of these other hands, which is all of
the talented men and women who work on Halloween Horrorites.
So every day, like with my longtime production designer our
director Chris Williams, like, if we're walking out at the
end of the night, I just go did we win today?
And usually you like, yeah, we want today, meaning we
got something accomplished, so you don't ever try to think
(02:16):
about the vastness of it. You just try to wherever
you are at any given time, you just try to
get that done and then move on to the next thing.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
The one thing fans want to know every year is
what's new and where should we go first.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I think this year was specifically curated with the fan
in mind, because for years they've been telling us they
want five nights at Freddy's. So I imagine a large proportion
of our fans are really going to want to see
that attraction, which is located on the lower lot of
the theme park in Stage fifteen, so they might want
to head there first. There's another, you know, section of
(02:53):
our fans who have been asking for years for Terrifier,
Damian Leoni's film series, and that's in what we call
h Lot, which is kind of on the upper lot
of the theme park, so they might want to go
there first. But today horror fans are so diverse, you know,
and we try to cater to all of that. So
for gamers, you know, people that are into video games,
(03:14):
there's Fallout and that's located on the upper lot of
our theme park, kind of right adjacent to the Universal
Plaza in our former Walking Debt Attraction building, so that
might be top of their agenda. So it's it's kind
of hard to say. And of course we're bringing new
things into Halloween Horror Nites like WWE with the Horrors
of the Wyat six, So there's you know, all these
(03:37):
WWE fans that for the first time are going to
get to see that world translated into a living horror movie,
So that might be top of their agenda. So it's
kind of hard to predict what where the fans will
head first.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Fans love hearing about the creative process. So what's one
surprising or maybe unusual inspiration that shaped a house or
scare zone this year?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
For me, the WYAT six is one because you know,
my dad used to take me to watch wrestling in
the Olympic Auditorium back in the early seventies when I
was a little kid, but I hadn't stayed in touch
with it down through the years and seen, you know
what it became with the WWE. So we work in
collaboration with our sister park in Orlando, Florida, and a
(04:20):
lot of the team members over there are huge WWE
fans and they brought this opportunity to us. Sometimes we
bring it to them. It works both ways, but in
this case, they brought it to us, so that for
myself that meant I needed to do an awful lot
of research before we ever, you know, sat in a
room with the creatives from WWE. So it's similar to
(04:42):
if I'm researching our Latin American content for monstros You know,
we always go real deep to try to understand the
brand from the inside out. And that meant for Wyat
six pretty much watching the entire trajectory of Bray Wyatt,
who was a wrestler who created the y family initially
and then passed away during when COVID was going on,
(05:05):
and his brother Bo Dallas is carried on the torch
with the Wyatt six. But in researching all of that,
all of those matches and all of the promos, and
all of the intricate storyline that they create for these characters,
what I came away with is, Wow, this guy was
a creative genius, and I think if he was alive today,
he probably would have naturally evolved into making horror movies
(05:28):
because it was a huge interest of his. So for
myself and our team, I saw our job as really
creating a tribute to his work and his legacy and
how it carries on today with his brother with the
Wyat six, but to also come at it from the
perspective of maybe not having been a fan all these years,
(05:51):
so that what we were creating was inclusive of everybody.
You know, so whether you're a huge uber fan of
WWE or whether you're a casual fan, the experience would
speak to everybody. So I just looked at it like
if I was Bray Wyatt and I was making a
horror movie based on all of these things he created
over the years and that his brother is carrying on,
(06:13):
what would that look like. So that was the approach.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Oh that sounds so cool.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah, it's really cool.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
One of the things Horror Nights is known for is
pushing the envelope with special effects. Can you tease any
new technology or design tricks that guests will experience this year?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, well, let's start with five nights of Ready's because
I think if you would have asked us, even like
maybe five six years ago, as our fans were asking
us at the time, you know, to do a house
based on that franchise, I probably would have said, it's impossible.
And the reason is a few years back, we were
(06:48):
lucky enough to get the original characters from the film
and they were in a behind the scenes or behind
the screams exhibit for Blumbhouse that we did in our
DreamWorks facility, and I remember walking in when we were
loading in those those costumes and looking at them and going,
that's eight foot tall. You know, there's no way that
(07:09):
can be done by a live actor wearing a costume.
It's different when you're making a movie. You know, you
only necessarily have to be in the costume for maybe,
you know, two minutes at a time director calls cut,
head comes off back to the trailer. But in our world,
you know, our performers are probably doing that for like
forty five minutes at a time. So we knew to
(07:31):
do this. There was really only one way, and that
was to engage Jim Henson's Creature Shop. They're the people
that build the characters for the film. They have an
expertise in puppetry, obviously, so it was really combining their
skill set with our skill set. So they educated us
on how they do things. We had to educate them
on a live experience, like Halloween Ornites, and then we
(07:54):
brought our mechanical engineering team to the table and we've
been working with them, probably back to our house a
few years ago and we had seventeen animatronic checkies. You know,
that was our real first dipping the toe in the
water of trying to do animatronics for Halloween Hornites. So
they built us what I believe is the most complicated
animatronic we've ever featured at Horrnites for Freddy Fosbear has
(08:19):
all kinds of functions and articulations from the eyebrows to
the ears to you name it. So that was a
big leap forward because now we're doing animatronics that are
you know, what you would see in a ride at
Universal Studios, Hollywood. That takes years to build, so that's
a big leap. We've also applied that to Fallout, so
(08:40):
we were building in animatronic T sixty in the power
Armor and again that's like over seven feet tall. So
these are big complicated special effects that we're doing live
in front of people, so it's pretty wild. We love
to work with other individuals, talented individuals or companies that
we can creatively collaborate with to bring what we're trying
(09:02):
to create to life, and it was we had this
partnership with Henson. They were part of FanFest earlier this
year working on dungeons and dragons, so that was maybe
like the test case. That was one character. Now we
have a whole bunch that we got to bring to life.
So it's great to get to work and that's something
we get to uniquely do here in Hollywood. We're smack
(09:24):
dab in the center of the movie and television industry,
so we're able to use all these movie and TV
resources to help us with our event.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
All Right, we have to talk about Easter eggs. Are
there any Easter Eggs in the park this year?
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, Okay, let's take a couple of examples. So Jason Universe,
you know, that's obviously based on Jason and the Friday
the Thirteenth film franchise. I wanted to approach that creatively,
like how I approached Texas Chainsaw Massacre last year, which
was to create an original story that where we tie
(10:02):
in all these iconic elements from the franchise, and that's
what we did with Texas last year. This year, with Jason,
I decided that the setting would be present day, and
that there would be a group of what I've now
learned are called urban explorers. So these are folks who
make YouTube videos, but they go out on like these
(10:25):
destinations to Okay, we're going to go to an abandoned
you know, slaughterhouse, or we're going to go to an
abandoned mental hospital, and they'll you know, break in and
document all these things. And I was watching all I
was trying to come up with an angle for Friday
or for Jason Universe. So I was watching all of
these things and looking at videos of that and thinking, God,
(10:49):
this would be the people Jason would kill today, you know,
if it's all these years later. And there's a thing
called dark tourism that exists in our society where people
take vacation to go to places associated with tragedy and horror,
whether that's Chernobyl in Europe or Lizzy you know, sleeping
in Lizzie Borden's house here in America. So those those
(11:09):
two kind of things, dark tourism, urban exploration, and we
put them together in our storyline. So there's a group
called Death Tours that is doing a destination twenty twenty
five to Camp Crystal Lake to see if they can
document where all these horrible tragedies and murders took place.
In a horror movie, that's a terrible idea because you're
gonna awaken Jason and the killings are going to start.
(11:33):
But what's fun about that is we wanted to reference
all these iconic kills that fans have been making videos
about for years in that franchise, but in a new way.
So it's happening to these you know, these death tourists.
So as you're going through, you know, particularly the wood
scenes of Friday the thirteenth, just you'll notice there's a
(11:53):
lot of references to very famous kills in the Jason universe,
So keep your eyes open for that. In the world
of Wyatt six, we're using specific iconic elements with Bray
Wyatt to kind of be the thread that takes you
through the house. So he was known for his rocking
chair in his lantern. So when he would go out
(12:13):
in the Wyatt family days and watch one of the
guys in his faction wrestle, he would park himself in
a rocking chair. And his compound was in the Louisiana
Bayou and he'd always come out for his matches holding
a lantern, and his fans adopted that and they called
themselves the Fireflies. So there's fireflies. There are lanterns all
(12:36):
the way through the house. It's like a thread. You
have to kind of keep finding Bray's lantern as you
go along. You'll see the rocking chair. You'll also see
references to people who Bray Wyatt, the Wyatt Family, the
Wyatt Six fought. So all of the victims or dead
bodies in this house are wearing T shirts, officially licensed
(12:58):
WWE T shirts for people the Wyatt family or Bray
Wyatt or the Wyatt Six thought of as enemies. So
that's a fun Easter egg to look for. So those
are just a couple.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
I know this is your twentieth year creating Halloween Horror
Knights here at Universal Studios, Hollywood, so I have to
ask you, you know, does it get old? What are
you looking forward to the fans enjoying, and what do
you want them to get out of it this year?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah. I think what we're doubling down on this year
is kind of like it sounds like something we do
every year, which we do, which is focus on the scariness.
But what we're really after doing this for twenty years,
which is this is my twentieth year of doing this
with the team that's brought Horrn Knights back to Hollywood.
(13:47):
We have very loyal fans that come every single year,
but in doing that, they've kind of learned all our tricks.
They've learned the geography of the park where they should
be concerned about being scared and where they shouldn't be
concerned about being scared, and we wanted to use that
against them this year. We wanted to kind of go, Okay,
(14:09):
you think you know what Halloween hornits is, Now we're
going to throw in a twist. So in the case
of Terrifier, which is of course art the clown, I
am deploying art the clowns in places you would not
expect to see art the clowns throughout the theme park.
So it's kind of like our demented version of where's Waldo?
(14:30):
You know, so could be having a meal and look
up and he's sitting right across from you, just staring
at you. You know, you could go into a store
to buy some Terrifier merch and he might follow you in,
you know. So there's we've carefully choreographed who put all
these performers through our version of mime school, and we're
(14:50):
going to experiment. We're going to do things we've never
done before. So and it's all in an effort to
just be destructive. You know. It's like you think you
know our event, Well maybe you don't, so that I'm
really excited to see how that's going to play in
real time with our guests.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Well, it sounds like it's going to be another really
fun event this year. And John Murdy, thank you as
always for your.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Time, my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Halloween Horror Night's kicks off on September for There are
some tickets available and you can find out more details
on our website k if i am six forty dot
com under the entertain Me tab, or you can visit
Universal Studios Hollywood dot com for more information there. Thank
you so much for listening to the show. Feel free
to subscribe and share it with friends. It would mean
(15:36):
a lot to me if you did, and we'll see
you next time. Here. We've got another episode coming up
this week. It's going to be all about the weekend
box office entertainment report with Gary and Shannon. You can
listen to entertain Me anywhere, anytime on the iHeartRadio app,
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