A Quiet Place is Causing Halloween Horror Nights to Take Some Cool New Approaches
Creative Director John Murdy previews how they're tackling the franchise at HHN Hollywood this year.
The most wonderful time of the year is nearly upon us! No, not Christmastime (though that’s neat too), but Halloween season - and more specifically, the return of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights.
I’ve been a Horror Nights regular for ages now, attending both the Orlando and Hollywood incarnations of the event each year. And I’ve also been fortunate to attend early media preview walkthroughs of houses at Universal Studios Hollywood with HHN Creative Director John Murdy going back to 2012. That was the case again this year, where John gave a group of us a look at one of this year’s big IP adaptations - the house based off of A Quiet Place, which is making its HHN debut on both coasts.
As John explained, this house actually had a lot of new elements and differences that set it apart from anything they’d done in the past, some of which was hinted at in the name of the property itself...
INCORPORATING ASL
In A Quiet Place, the central family, the Abbotts, speak ASL (American Sign Language), thanks to having a deaf family member, daughter Regan (played by Millicent Simmonds). This proves invaluable when vicious alien creatures arrive on Earth boasting hyper sensitive hearing they use to target their victims, since the Abbotts can already communicate without speaking out loud to one another.
As Murdy noted, “We knew that was a really big part of the film so we wanted to try to incorporate it into our house, and we do that in two ways.”
First off is the pre-show video, which plays for guests as they wait in the queue to enter the house. These kinds of videos usually are used to begin to tell the story of their respective house and bring you into its world and here, Murdy explained, “When you're waiting in line, there's video displays where we tell the backstory of A Quiet Place, and the world that that film series takes place in, completely with ASL. We cast a deaf actress who works here at Universal Studios Hollywood. We worked with our DEI team and experts within the company. When we filmed this, three or four weeks ago, there was a translator on set. It was a film shoot unlike any film shoot I've ever done in my career before.”
As Murdy elaborated, “There's no audio. There's literally no audio to the pre-show other than some static blips and bleeps, because it's as if this survivor from the world of A Quiet Place is telling you what you're going to need to know to survive. And what she keeps reiterating are some basic signs that you need to know if you want to survive in this world.”
The second way ASL is incorporated into the house is through the live performers – AKA “scareactors” – who this year are mainly playing the heroes of the first two Quiet Place films, as you journey through the story of both movies. Murdy explained those basic signs “are going to be reiterated by our [live] performers. So when we had rehearsal for this house, we brought the same experts down. We did a whole training session with our cast since our performers are going to be using ASL. It’s short phrases — because it's Horror Nights, and you're going through a haunted house — to help bring that element of the film to life.”
THE CREATURES
Murdy said a major challenge with A Quiet Place was how to incorporate the creatures from the series, given, “They're massive! If you've seen the film, they're all created with CGI. There's nothing practical, really, in the film. They don't move like humans; they're on all fours. We knew that we couldn't translate that to a live performer so we knew we had to approach that with special effects.”
The HHN team is always learning new techniques and Murdy said one house in 2023 was very much setting the stage for what they did for Quiet Place. “Last year, we did a house with Chucky. Chucky was really the test case for doing things like this in the future. Chucky was the first time we ever used animatronic figures. I think we built 17 animatronic Chuckys last year. They're very small. They're like, two and a half feet tall. These [Quiet Place] guys are very, very big. So what we're doing is a combination of puppetry and full blown animatronic characters. There's 10 creatures in this house that you're going to encounter. Six of them are puppets, four of them are animatronics. And to do that, we partner with our own internal mechanical engineering department that works on all the rides and attractions and works on dinosaurs in Jurassic World, and works on all the characters in Nintendo. They've been working with us the last few years and we've been kind of ramping up to get to this moment.”
As Murdy took us through the house, we were able to see most of the creatures, both the ones that will be puppeted and those that are fully animatronic. In the case of the animatronic ones, a few were opened up at the time for crew to work on, exposing the impressive array of complex and elaborate machinery inside. Showing off one of the puppets, Murdy said “Our makeup artist, Patrick Magee, Magee FX, had to create this guy. They're all designed so that their mouths can be opened by the performers when they're puppets.”
Murdy added that for the Quiet Place house at HHN, “Really, this is the first time these creatures have ever been built practical. We had to kind of figure out the scale and everything. We have all of these behind the scenes and technical drawings of the creatures from the film, so we blew them up on huge sheets of paper, and then tacked them to the wall of the office, and then put people – like team members of different heights – next to it, and kind of tried to settle on the height for the creature.”
While HHN Hollywood and HHN Orlando are in constant close contact about the houses they’re working on – particularly for the shared concepts and storylines like Quiet Place – the actual specifics of the houses and how certain gags are pulled off are often quite different, because of the different layouts and sizes of the spaces they occupy, and both teams use their own makeup departments. However, in the case of A Quiet Place, the Hollywood-based team ended up making the creatures for both coasts this year.
Remarked Murdy, “It doesn't happen that much, because when you're shipping things, especially big things, cross-country like that, it's not very cost efficient. But in the case of this, because the creatures were so critical and we've been doing a lot of stuff in that [arena], and starting to get into animation, and we had the benefit of the mechanical engineers that work here to design everything for us, we just decided to collaborate in that way on this particular film.”
MAKE NOISE, GET PUNISHED
In the Quiet Place films, if you make noise, you could die. And while nothing quite so dire will occur in the HHN house, the goal is still to scare you, and Murdy revealed, with a chuckle, they had some fun knowing that despite all of the provided warnings, most guests will not be silent while moving through the house.
Said Murdy, “We're doing a lot of what we call cause and effect triggers. We know our guests… I mean, we know they're not gonna be quiet. There's no way they're gonna actually do that, even though that's what they're constantly being told in the pre-show. So we're gonna punish them every time. So there's lots of hidden sensors in this house, so that when you get close to something, it causes a noise to go off.”
That begins almost immediately, as we see a performer playing Regan, mourning by the grave of her little brother, memorably killed in A Quiet Places’s opening scene when his space shuttle toy’s sound effects brought the creatures to him. Murdy explained there were sensors located here, and that approaching them, “In this case, it causes the space shuttle to go off. Lights start flashing, and it starts making all that noise, and that sets the plot in motion. Now the creatures are coming, and we carry on to the next scene to show you how we're going to start delivering that.”
The house recreates all of the different warning systems and protections Lee Abbott (played in the movie by the film’s director, John Krasinski) has put into place, with Murdy reminding us, “One of the things he does in the in the farmhouse is he paints the board's gray that don't squeak.”
Those gray floorboards are recreated in the Quiet Place house, and Murdy noted, “When they come into the house, they're supposed to follow that pattern. Again, we know our guests are never going to do that. So again, we're going to kick in triggered audio to kind of punish them for not following these instructions that they're supposed to follow. So behind all of this exposed plaster, there's speakers hidden everywhere. As soon as you come into the house, you hear the sound of the creatures everywhere.”
THE SOUND APPROACH
To do A Quiet Place, Murdy explained they really took a step back and attempted to change the entire ambience in regards to how they normally approach a house.
“When people saw A Quiet Place in the theater, a lot of people came out talking about it being a silent movie, almost. It's never really silent. It feels like that in the movie, but they're just using clever audio design tricks, high and low frequencies, to create that feeling. Because so much of A Quiet Place is environmental sound effects, it's what you hear in nature, we needed to completely change the way we do audio.”
The HHN team are often already working on the next year’s houses while the current event is running and Murdy told us that was very much the case here. “Even when Halloween Horror Nights was running last year, towards the end in October, we had built this whole mock up in our off-site facility to test out a theory of how to deliver audio for this to our guests. And what we landed on is what we call near-field audio design.”
As Murdy elaborated, “Typically, in a Halloween Horror Nights house, if you're looking at any particular scene, there would be very, very large speakers, typically up towards the top of the roof line, hidden from guests. There'd be multiple of them per scene. We kind of needed to do the opposite. We needed to go to very, very small speakers, and lots of them, and then try to get them as close to the guest as we could possibly do that. So that meant there had to be a really intense collaboration between audio and scenic and how to hide and conceal all these speakers.”
Murdy showed us one example, which recreates a moment in the first film where an old man screams, bringing the creatures to him. “In this scene, there's a performer playing the old man. He's got an audio lighting trigger. When he hits that and he unleashes that scream, we kick in a surround sound system that's all around you, hidden in the trees, in the house lighting. You can see the grills that are hiding the speakers in the trees. There's speakers behind those bushes back there. There's speakers all over the place. So then we hear the [creatures] coming from every direction, coming from all around you.”
BREAK THE WALLS DOWN
A Quiet Place is located in the building that once housed a year-round Walking Dead attraction - but unlike the HHN houses that have been used in that building in the last couple of year’s, including 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, this time out, the space has been completely rebuilt inside, with all of the interior walls that used to be part of Walking Dead now removed.
Said Murdy, “Last year, coming out of Horror Nights, we did a project to basically turn the space into a black box, like a theatrical black box, meaning all the remaining permanent walls and everything that was inside this venue were gutted because we needed that space for A Quiet Place, because we knew we're going to be working with Paramount on that.”
Showing off the large exterior sections, house exteriors, and barn interiors, Murdy noted, “This is why we needed to gut this building, you know, to be able to do all of this. Same thing with the audio. You see speakers hidden in trees, speakers hidden behind bushes. Again, we're trying to bring everything really close to you.”
Murdy noted they were able to make the previous fixed walls work for Evil Dead Rise because the primary setting was a apartment building, with a lot of hallways, but that just wouldn’t work for A Quiet Place - nor would it allow for all of the new physical and audio elements they wanted to include. And now, they are happy to have a much more malleable space as a regular home for Halloween Horror Nights houses going forward.
“We knew with A Quiet Place that we needed a blank slate. So we had planned to come in here as soon as Horror Nights last year ended, and as soon as we struck Evil Dead, we had a big project to just completely make this a black box space, which we've been trying to get to for the last couple years. Which is great, because now it could be used for pretty much anything… and will be!”
Halloween Horror Nights opens September 5 at Universal Studios Hollywood and I’ll have more from both the Orlando and Hollywood versions coming up once I check them both out in their entirety.