Halloween Horror Nights
Want to play a game? This October, Universal Studios Hollywood wants to take you on a hellish ride with Jigsaw, Michael Myers, Chucky and more as part of its Halloween Horror Nights. This year’s event, entitled “You’ll Wish it Were Just a Movie,” is the biggest in park history, and there will be some very familiar faces lurking in the dark corners of four new mazes.
“Our big vision was to take the most popular horror movies in the world and turn them into living horror movies that people get to experience,” said Universal’s John Murdy, the longtime horror aficionado who directed, designed and wrote everything the audience experiences in those mazes.
The mazes are based on three major horror franchises — “Saw,” “Halloween” and “Child’s Play” — and “My Bloody Valentine,“ which hit theaters with a splatter in January.
As you might expect, Universal officials say this is the biggest and baddest edition of the fright franchise, which launched at the Universal City park in 1986 with sequel years in 1992 and 1997 through 2000. The event was revived as an annual tradition in 2006 and has been a potent draw in Southern California, explaining the calendar expansion this year to 16 horror-dedicated days, the most ever.
For Lionsgate, which will release “Saw VI” on Oct. 23, the event is a fairly potent marketing opportunity, although the franchise is a killer all on its own; the worldwide box office for the films to date is $669 million, an impressive total considering the production budget for the first was $1.2 million and, reportedly, none of the sequels have cost more than $11 million to film.
In the ”Saw: Game Over” maze, park-goers venture into the lair of Jigsaw, the demented and ingenious killer, and they dare to inspect some of his intricate death machines from the films, among them the razor-wire trap and the needle pit.
That may be the centerpiece attraction, but the other three mazes offer frights of different flavors.