How Does HHN 30’s IP Lineup Compare with HHN 25’s?
Let's stack up the two most recent anniversary years and see what we find.
This September’s Halloween Horror Nights is much anticipated, and not only because last year’s proceedings were skipped thanks to covid-19 – 2021’s festivities will mark the 30th showing of Universal Orlando Resort’s most hallowed annual event. And even though not much has been officially revealed by Universal yet (something of an oddity, given how close we’re getting to that long-delayed kick-off date), what has been unveiled is enough to clearly establish that the company will well and truly mark the occasion.
Such an observance is, simply put, rather momentous. Anniversary celebrations are relatively rare for Horror Nights; in fact, 2021 will mark only the fourth such occurrence, after HHNs 16, 20, and 25 (those would be the years 2006, ’10, and ’15, for all those playing along at home). And this, in turn, makes this fall’s showing particularly ripe for expectations – and for comparisons, especially to the last big shindig, five event years ago.
Which is precisely why we’re going to formally stack the Halloween Horror Nights from ’15 up next to ‘21’s, to compare and contrast them and see if we can’t get a clear idea of what to expect when Friday, September 3 comes around. Oh, yeah – we just might be able to answer the question of whether event number 30 will do an adequate job of celebrating its upcoming milestone, as well.
First, though, we have several caveats to quickly get through. Most important is the strict purview of this comparison: it’ll be relegated to just the haunted houses, and, more specifically, that portion of the roster that has been given over to the intellectual properties that Universal licenses (as opposed to the original haunts that its designers come up with themselves). And in order to have an idea of what that maze lineup will consist of, we’ll be relying upon the speculation map that fan site HNNightmares regularly puts out – except for that fifth and final IP house slot, that is, which even they aren’t sure will ultimately be. (We can revisit this analysis once this last entry becomes a known quantity, of course.)
Round I: The Modern Tie-In
With at least four licensed haunted houses for this year (which equates to at least 40% of the total portfolio) and five for 2015 (56%), there’s a lot to sink our teeth into. This is why we’re going to break everything down into categories, to assist in the comparative analysis and to try and obtain a better overall picture of the anniversary haunt scene.
First up is that berth that Universal has consistently attempted to curate throughout Horror Nights’s run, especially over the past decade, when the presence of IPs has reached its current zenith: the modern tie-in. This allows, on the one hand, Universal’s Art and Design team to cash in on the current conversations (and – let’s be frank – advertising campaigns) populating the cultural zeitgeist, and it grants, on the other hand, the partnering movie studio or television network the ability to help corral even more eyeballs to its ongoing projects.
For Halloween Horror Nights 30, that relevant property is The Haunting of Hill House, a Netflix original series that might be almost exactly three-years-old by the time the event kicks off this fall but which very much was in the pop-cultural ether last October, when its follow-up show, The Haunting of Bly Manor, premiered. While Universal certainly missed the rush of free publicity that occasion would have generated, the company nonetheless has on its hands a still-recent (and still-beloved) offering that in and of itself has had a long shelf life, beginning with the originating novel in 1959 and extending through the decades to films, stage plays, and, even, an audiodrama all before finding its most recent – and, arguably, most creatively successful – perch at Netflix.
Six years ago, HHN’s modern tie-in was a little less clearly defined, with two possible contenders (for our classification purposes, at least): The Purge, a film franchise that began in ’13 and which has since branched out to include a short-lived TV show, and Insidious, a series of movies that started in ’10. In 2015, Purge didn’t have a corresponding release to synchronize with, but it did see a new installment both in the year before and after its haunted-house debut, in the form of Anarchy and Election Year, respectively. (Incidentally, the property will see its conclusion next week, when The Forever Purge hits theaters.) Beyond the source material, however, it was a known commodity to faithful Halloween Horror Nights attendees, having shown up as a scare zone just the year before.
Insidious, meanwhile, was in almost the exact opposite situation: it had a much longer lifespan in movie theaters, but it was only starting up its Universal run (though, even on this point, it wouldn’t prove to be anywhere near as long-lived as its counterpart, for better or worse). The franchise did, however, have a notch in its horror belt in the form of a recent release – Insidious: Chapter 3 had just landed some three-and-a-half months before Horror Nights commenced, truly making this a current tie-in.
(Here are two fun facts to chew on regarding Insidious: it was the only maze, IP or original, at HHN 25 to not have any type of antecedent from previous years. Furthermore, the films’ last appearance at the event would actually correspond with The Purge – both helped constitute the mash-up Horrors of Blumhouse haunt in 2017.)
Round II: The Mini-Throwback
The second of our categories can be easily summed up as those intellectual properties that may be too recent to be called classics but too old to be considered tie-ins – the mini-throwback, in our unique nomenclature (please keep in mind that these parameters are very much contextual, based upon the contours of the event year and, well, the vagaries of the beholder).
This definition works perfectly for Halloween Horror Nights 2015, which offered up Freddy vs. Jason, a haunted house that took the name of but otherwise little actual content from the 2003 movie (an approach that was also extended to all 16 previous installments of the two icons’ respective franchises, similarly looking for inspiration to mine – moments to recreate or Easter eggs to squirrel away). The mostly new experience, then, could be viewed as something of a continuation of the theatrical Freddy vs. Jason, and it landed almost as a hybrid between the IP and original ends of the house spectrum.
At this year’s upcoming showing, guests will be treated to an entirely different type of cinematic legend: Beetlejuice, the 1988 film that might not fit the traditional “horror” definition but which now has had a three-decade-long association with Universal Orlando Resort, generally, and Horror Nights, specifically. The move by Universal to include such lighter fare, appealing to the “Halloween-adjacent” crowd as opposed to the hardcore die-hards exclusively, represents one of the biggest trends we’ve seen in the event over the past six years, and one that only promises to keep growing over the next several – it’s already seen massive success, starting with Stranger Things in ’17 and ’18 and continuing on with Ghostbusters in ’19. This shift in overall tone may be the most significant change we see from the full-out horror onslaught that HHN 25 represented; it’s also, arguably, the most significant reason why the annual event’s attendance continues to balloon (and why it’s able to attract ever-bigger properties, such as Haunting of Hill House).
Interestingly enough, we should note that both Freddy vs. Jason and Beetlejuice offer repeat appearances for their respective headlining characters, albeit in slightly different ways. Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger had shown up at Halloween Horror Nights in 2007, in separate mazes, making their anniversary presence in 2015 carry that much more Universal weight; Beetlejuice, meanwhile, was available for one quick weekend during the truncated Halloween festivities in 2020, offering a kind of sneak preview of this fall’s production (which may or may not include all the enhanced covid safety protocols, presumably depending upon how the nation handles the pandemic over the course of the next two months).
Round III: The Classic Throwback
Having the classics of horror filmdom be represented at HHN has long been a priority for Art and Design, and the big celebratory years are no different: both 30 and 25 have some heavyhitters present, and both, somewhat ironically, are properties that long-time attendees would be well acquainted with.
For 2021, this retro goodness comes in the form of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and while the HNNightmares spec map doesn’t specify which of the nine movies (including the currently-in-production one) this will specifically be based off of, we’ll simply assume, for the sake of this article, that it’s the 1974 original – this is the picture, after all, that forever altered the cinematic landscape, and it’s undoubtedly the one that would land the most solidly with visitors. The only potential drawback here is that the first Texas Chainsaw has also been adapted in haunted-house form before by Universal, both unofficially (back in 2003, when Horror Nights was just a tiny sliver of the juggernaut it currently is and, thus, could more easily get away with such infractions) and officially (in ’16), which may or may not curb audiences’ appetites for a third helping of the same material. (This would technically be the fourth serving if we were to expand our scope to include the attempted reboot series of films, which the designers tackled for ‘07’s event.)
A problem of diminishing returns is precisely the lens through which 2015’s classic entry, An American Werewolf in London, was received. Originally deployed two years previously, it was among the highest-rated haunts ever in the event’s history, and given just how vociferously the Halloween Horror Nights faithful pines for revisiting past experiences, Universal undoubtedly assumed it would be a slam-dunk to have it return – particularly for an anniversary, and particularly considering this would be the very first time such a move had occurred. Perhaps because two years wasn’t a long enough time, or perhaps because there wasn’t enough modified for this encore performance (the werewolf puppets were upgraded and increased, but just slightly), or perhaps because Horror Nights 25’s other houses were so strong, fans were lukewarm, at best, at the opportunity to walk the 1980s streets of London a second time. (Most telling in this regard is the fact that the Art and Design team hasn’t pulled this trick out of their annual-event hat again.)
Round IV: The Ongoing “Series”
While Halloween Horror Nights has a long history of providing follow-ups to some of its most notable previous haunted houses, thereby transforming them into, essentially, a homegrown series, it hasn’t been until the last decade – and the corresponding reign of intellectual properties – that we’ve seen the advent of ongoing yearly appearances. And, yes, these annual outings have uniformly been licensed materials.
Nowhere is this better witnessed than with The Walking Dead, the television behemoth that immediately attained a cult following when it premiered on Halloween 2010 (and which will soon constitute an unbelievable five shows and a feature film trilogy, not to mention all those webisode spinoff tales). The property is the only HHN participant to garner anything more than a two-year streak – and, in fact, when the Walking Dead: The Living and the Dead maze arrived in ‘15, it marked the zombies’ fourth successive presence. Beyond the very palpable franchise fatigue that greeted the experience, it wasn’t at all helped by its smaller, more constrained haunt layout – or by the nature of its source material, a fifth season that just didn’t feature as much in the way of adaptable sequences or environments.
(What’s amazing is that, despite all this consternation among both audiences and designers alike, Universal still brought Walking Dead back for a fifth showing, in ’16. At least the company had the foresight to advertise the return as the TV show’s final appearance at Horror Nights, a promise that has managed to stick.)
This fall’s ongoing series lands in the form of Universal Monsters: The Bride of Frankenstein Lives, a house that is already being treated far differently than the previous anniversary’s entry. This can probably be explained by several different factors: even though technically an intellectual property, it’s still a Universal one, making it closer to home; the Monsters have been around for a whopping 98 years, permeating nearly every facet of American culture by this point; they’ve had some involvement with Halloween Horror Nights since its very earliest days, all the way back in October ’91; and, finally, Bride of Frankenstein Lives has already been experienced by scores of guests, seeing as how it was open during last year’s partial event, making it very much a known quantity (plus the possibility of maybe going through it without the presence of plastic barriers must have many salivating).