Warning: This story contains spoilers for Halloween Horror Nights.
This Halloween is going to be a real ring-a-ding-ding.
Ryan Coogler‘s Oscar-winning Sinners has been transformed into one of the most ambitious haunted houses ever erected at Universal Studios Hollywood. The immersive attraction, one of eight showcase installations for the seasonal Halloween Horror Nights, encompasses key characters, scenes, and scares from the bluesy vampire blockbuster, employing new technology and techniques and presented at a scale the Los Angeles theme park has never before attempted, the event’s creative director, John Murdy, tells Gold Derby.
Murdy came up with the scenario — which roughly tracks the climax of the film at the besieged juke joint, beginning with Preacher Boy’s veil-piercing rendition of “I Lied to You” and culminating with Smoke and Remmick’s final showdown at sunrise — with approval from Coogler and his team at Proximity Media.
“I’ve been on the phone a lot with the producers. I pitched them the concept, and they’ve been engaged through the whole process,” says Murdy, adding that he expects the Sinners brain trust to pay a visit in the coming days. A similar Sinners haunted house will be opened at Universal’s Orlando resort.
Read on for all the behind-the-secrets Gold Derby gleaned from our sneak-peek tour of the fully realized Club Juke ahead of opening night on Sept. 3. Plus, Murdy reveals how a phone call with Obsession director Curry Barker led to the last-minute addition of a character based on Inde Navarrette‘s Nikki, who will be wandering the park and spooking guests.
Burning down the house
Murdy wanted to bring Sinners to life from the moment he saw the film last year. He also knew that he wanted to get the experience started with a bang by recreating the film’s signature set piece — what Coogler called the “surreal montage” — where Preacher Boy’s transcendent performance of “I Lied to You” beckons spirits of the past and future.
“Watching it at first, I was like, ‘What just happened?’ It kind of threw you,” Murdy recounts. “But it ultimately became one of the most iconic sequences of the film. So we knew we wanted to pay that off in some way, shape, or form.”
The challenge was adapting a five-minute scene for a haunted house “where our mantra is: it’s a new show every 10 seconds.” The solution? “We wanted to create a pre-show,” says Murdy. “This is an extension of the line. As guests are waiting in line, when they come around the corner, they enter the juke joint. Preacher Boy will be up on stage here as a live performer with the guitar, lip-syncing to ‘I Lied to You’ by Miles Caton.”
As the song progresses, the walls burn away using cinema-quality practical effects, revealing the Parliament-Funkadelic-channeling guitarist, a hip-hop DJ, and the Smokestack twins (a Michael B. Jordan look-alike doubled using techniques similar to the film). “All of this is going on as you’re moving through the queue, and it’s all just to set up the plot of Sinners,” says Murdy. “The last beat is: this entire thing” — he gestures at the room — “disappears.” As the juke turns to ash, the thirsty trio of Remmick, Bert, and Joan are revealed lurking outside.
The eyes have it
Guests make their way to the exterior the club, navigating the wooded spaces where Cornbread and Mary have ill-fated encounters with the bloodsucking brood. At first the vampires are silhouettes with glowing eyes. Then they appear in the flesh… which, as Murdy reveals, required some problem-solving. “We learned the makeup artists created a special metallic contact lens specifically for this film,” says Murdy. But those lenses could only be worn for a few minutes, which isn’t practical for the Halloween Horror Nights performers, who work 45-minute stretches over a seven-hour shift.
“What our makeup artist did is basically create a new technology. He created artificial eyebrows that are applied over their real eyebrows, and that conceals a tiny wire running along here, into their wig, and down into a battery pack. Hanging in front of their eye is an LED about the size of a grain of rice, and it looks like their eyes are glowing. We went through all the testing — optometrists, health and safety — and did all these mock-ups,” Murdy explains. “It’s a new piece of technology that we invented for this house.”
An Easter egg for the birds
The Sinners attraction painstakingly reproduced key moments from the film, right down to some avian Easter eggs. “Studying the film, you quickly realize that Coogler had a very intentional thing with buzzards in this movie,” Murdy says. “There are always buzzards circling. It’s usually three. And when they land, it means death is coming.” That led to a trio of strategically placed vultures: two sit on a log where Mary meets her (temporary) doom, and a third is perched on the Club Juke sign.
“Not a good omen,” Murdy says with a smile. “Death is coming. A whole lot of death is coming.”
“We’ve never done anything like this before”
Visitors reenter the juke joint and wind through corridors, passing the storeroom (RIP, Stack) before coming back into the main showroom. Here, an epic battle between the survivors and the monsters unfolds throughout the space, including the walkways overhead. Preacher Boy, Stack, Annie, Pearline, Bert, Joan all appear at various points. “There are more live performers in this scene than in any single scene we’ve ever done in the history of this event,” says Murdy. “You’re just in the middle of all this chaos.”
More live performers makes for a difficult casting call. Traditionally, most of the Halloween Horror Nights “scare actors” are masked or heavily made-up. But because Sinners draws on a hugely popular film with well-known stars, Universal needed to find appropriate “face characters.” “That’s a term we use for anybody not wearing a mask or prosthetic,” explains Murdy. “There are more of those characters than we typically have in the event.” He says that more 2,000 people will show up for an open casting call but “sometimes you’re trying to find a very specific type for a very specific role, so it’s quite a challenge.” Once the actors are cast, Universal’s hair and makeup team style them for maximum screen accuracy.
Universal’s Sinners also features one more first. Late in the maze, “Remmick comes flying out of nowhere,” explains Murdy. So the team developed a flying apparatus in collaboration with a company that specializes in theater (think: Peter Pan) as well as the Universal stunt team.
“We built this huge flying rig, most of which you can’t see because it’s concealed by the set, with a winch system,” says Murdy. “They’re literally hanging above you in midair. They come down in about a second, land, do their business, which puts them on the ground about five seconds, and then they disappear.
“We’ve just never done anything like this before at Horror Nights. We’ve been working on this for a long time — probably six, seven months now. We built a test rig and put the performers through their paces, figured out all of it and how it needed to work. So this will be the first time we have an actual stunt as part of Halloween Horror Nights.”
Where’s Waldo Nikki?
As Murdy repeatedly notes, it takes six months or more to execute a haunted house. So when a film like Obsession blows up the zeitgest in early summer, it’s almost always too late to work it into the show. Almost. “We always want to stay on the edge of horror, and as soon as we saw that movie, we were like, ‘Wow, this is really cool,’ and we’d love to work with it,” says Murdy. During an interview, director Curry Barker was discussing the inevitable popularity of Nikki as a costume this year, and he mentioned in passing that he was a regular at Halloween Horror Nights and would love to see Navarrette’s character incorporated someday. Fans alerted Murdy, who connected with Barker through a friend at Universal’s Focus Features.
“I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to grant your wish,'” Murdy recounts. “And I said, “I have an idea. Let’s talk.” The idea was that Nikki would be roaming the park, “kind of like Where’s Waldo?.” With the Oscar-buzzing Navarrette busy on other projects, Murdy scrambled to find performers who share a similar look and can approximate her now-iconic facial expressions. “That’s another face character. She has a prosthetic wound on her forehead, but her face is all exposed. So we’re casting to type for her as well. Again, it’s a challenge.”
And if fans find her and approach her with the right password, they could receive a special surprise.
“We’ll probably do the password as an Instagram Story,” says Murdy. “And I’m working with Curry to do a little ‘One Wish Willow’ handout — that’s the customer service department, like, ‘If you have a problem, call this number.’ Curry’s going to help me out with that.”
That’s much better than a cat sandwich.
Halloween Horror Nights runs Sept. 3 through Nov. 1 at Universal Studios Hollywood and Aug. 28 through Nov. 1 at Universal Studios Orlando.
