Last week, Inside Universal was kindly invited to take a behind-the-scenes tour of two of the houses featured at this year’s Halloween Horror Nights in Hollywood: A Quiet Place and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. In the first of our two-part behind-the-scenes preview, we take a look at A Quiet Place. Warning, spoilers follow!
This year’s haunted house based on the horror series “A Quiet Place” – located on the Upper Lot in the former building of The Walking Dead Attraction – follows the Abbott family through the storylines of A quiet place And A quiet place part II as they fight to survive in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind creatures who use their incredibly keen hearing to hunt down anything and anyone that makes even the slightest sound.
“A Quiet Place” is a particularly unusual work for Halloween Horror Nights for three main reasons, according to Creative Director John Murdy: its “silence,” the use of American Sign Language, and the design of the film’s main antagonist – the Angel of Death.
Unlike most other horror films, the movies are known for their eerie silence. “A Quiet Place” at Halloween Horror Nights will use its sound design and special effects to create a similar feeling of silence and ominous dread throughout the house, but with subtle audio cues that leave guests feeling on edge the entire time, despite only being consciously aware of the mostly silent environment.
As Murdy explains, most of the houses at Halloween Horror Nights use a multi-channel audio system, which typically involves placing large speakers on the top of the walls. However, since the A Quiet Place films are known for mostly featuring subtle audio — mainly background sounds from nature — that give most viewers the impression that there is little to no sound, it was decided that a traditional multi-channel audio system would not be sufficient for this house.
Instead, A Quiet Place uses a near-field audio design, meaning that instead of a row of large speakers at the top, many small speakers were placed at the bottom and as close to guests as possible. Unlike most other houses, therefore, A Quiet Place required a unique integration of set design, props and décor, and audio to conceal the locations of the speakers and make them virtually invisible to guests with appropriate show lighting, to adequately convey passive background noise one moment, and quickly switch to surround sound the next to make it sound like the creatures are suddenly addressing guests from all directions.
Another special feature of A Quiet Place is the use of American Sign Language (ASL) in the house, just like in the film. While waiting in line, guests watch a silent preview video in which a deaf actress portrays a survivor in the world of A Quiet Place and uses ASL – with subtitles – to tell the general story of the films and inform guests of what they must do to survive. In addition, the survivor teaches guests basic ASL language, which is later repeated by the live actors throughout the house.
The last major identifying feature of this house is the giant alien creatures that serve as the main antagonists in the films. When selecting properties for Halloween Horror Nights, Murdy generally looks for three important features: the familiarity of the properties to guests, characters that translate to live actors, and a variety of environments that can be recreated in a live experience.
Because the creatures are massive, non-human-shaped, and move on all fours, it was clear that the Halloween Horror Nights creative team would have to think outside the box to make A Quiet Place a true haunted house experience. After successfully testing fully animated figures in the Chucky: Ultimate Kill Count house last season, it was decided that a mix of 4 fully animated figures and 6 puppets would be the best and most terrifying way to effectively bring the creatures of A Quiet Place to life, albeit on a much larger scale than the animated Chucky figures, with the help of the Mechanical Engineering Department that works on all of Universal Studios Hollywood’s rides and attractions.
Unfortunately, the animated figures were not ready for display at the time of our tour so we were unable to photograph them, but we can promise that they will surely blow guests away with their size and appearance. This article highlights some of the creature puppets, all of which were built by Patrick Magee and Magee FX using technical drawings of the creatures previously used in the making of the films. Similar animated figures and puppets of the creatures created for Hollywood’s A Quiet Place were also made by the Hollywood team for the Orlando home of the same name to ensure a consistent design on both coasts.
One thing returning Halloween Horror Nights fans will notice when entering the haunted house is that the layout is completely different from previous years. Gone are the former solid walls of The Walking Dead attraction that previously forced Universal Horror Hotel and Evil Dead Rise haunted houses to follow the same path, just with a different setting each year. After last year’s event, the entire attraction area was converted to a black box, meaning all of the walls were torn down to reveal an open space that no longer severely restricts the creative team when designing the haunted house, which was essential to bringing the story of “A Quiet Place” to life.
Without giving too many details away, A Quiet Place begins with the first film and follows the events of both films in chronological order. Guests pass by the film’s logo and then find themselves in the same forest that the Abbott family often walks through, walking on the same sandy path that Lee puts out for his family members to walk on so as not to make any noise, which is conveyed by floor graphics along the guest path.
Out front lies the grave of the Abbott family’s youngest son, adorned with a variety of toys, including the space shuttle whose sound effects led to his untimely death in the first film. Although on the surface it looks like a static prop, it is actually the first of numerous other hidden special effects found throughout the haunted house.
“When we thought about how to implement what the films deliver, we knew one thing for sure: our guests are not going to be quiet – they are going to make noise. So we are going to punish them for it…”
There are triggers throughout the house that set off cause and effect. When a guest walks through a banner sensor or a beam, it triggers something, which in turn summons the sound-sensitive creatures. To describe just the first effect at the beginning of the house, once a guest passes a certain point that triggers the space shuttle propeller, it starts making noise through a point source speaker, the lights start flashing, and guests immediately hear the creatures approaching. We’ll leave the other cause and effect triggers up to you to discover on your own, so they remain a surprise.
Fans will notice even more movie-accurate and seemingly subtle, yet important details from the films as they move through A Quiet Place. Outside the Abbott family home hang the Christmas lights, which Lee installed so he can switch from clear to red to signal his family when the creatures are coming. Inside the house, guests can walk on the floorboards, also painted by Lee to remind his family where they can walk quietly without the floor creaking, and soon after, they discover the egg timer, which Evelyn cleverly uses on the desk in the basement.
After the last scenes of A quiet placeGuests will continue to traverse many of the distinctive environments of A Quiet Place: Part IIsuch as the iconic train scene and the abandoned steel foundry, and encounters both familiar characters and gruesome creatures as you make your way through the second half of the house.
Although A Quiet Place is a seemingly unconventional offering for Halloween Horror Nights, it’s packed with details from the first two films and is sure to scare guests in more ways than one as they follow the story of the Abbott family, and in particular, as Murdy noted, the true hero at the end of the series, Regan Abbott, as they all fight to survive.
Check out part two of our behind-the-scenes look at this year’s Halloween Horror Nights, where we preview Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
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