Every Halloween season, not only do I look forward to upcoming horror movies, but ways to immerse myself into the genre through spooky experiences. Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights at its theme parks have been a reliable source of entertainment during this time, but this year I had the opportunity to check out Universal’s Horror Unleashed in Las Vegas, and had a blast venturing in a new playfully haunted space. I’m already looking forward to my next visit to Horror Unleashed, but I had one burning question for its creators.
Will Universal’s Horror Unleashed change up its houses as we’ve come to expect on a year-to-year basis from Universal Studios’ haunted houses? Here’s what show director Nate Stevenson had to say during CinemaBlend’s exclusive interview:
We already announced the one in Chicago, and we're building a brand here. So yeah, it's definitely gonna morph and change and kind of evolve over time.
I caught up with Stevenson and Vice President of Entertainment Art & Design, TJ Mannarino, during a recent press celebration for and at Universal’s Horror Unleashed. Here’s what Mannarino added to the conversation:
It also has changed and evolved in our years of interacting with it. And we strive to try to find that same kind of cutting edge space that we need to be. So people who love horror feel like they're immersed in a world that keeps changing.
Universal’s Horror Unleashed opened in August of this year, and is set to be a year-round attraction for horror fans to get spooked while they are in Sin City’s AREA15, which also includes all sorts of immersive experiences like Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart and the John Wick Experience. While I don’t expect Universal’s Horror Unleashed to turnover its haunted houses and aesthetic as often as Horror Nights given that those are made to be more temporary displays anyways, their answers show they are not only willing, but expect the attraction to undergo changes in order to evolve with horror fans.
The concept of the Las Vegas version of Horror Nights is that you are in a prop house where the “shadow world” breaks through and they can roam around. As you walk through the attraction’s main space, you meet all sorts of characters, most of which are wholly original to Universal’s Horror Unleashed. But the main event of it all is going through the four houses: Universal Monsters, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist: Believer and Scarecrow: The Reaping.
From my standpoint, they have four winners with the houses there already, but a few years down the line, I would imagine they’d want to mix up a house or two to keep original fans coming back. The space in of itself could also feature new stories within it, and new featured characters to interact with outside of it, perhaps.
It just opened two months ago, so surely the creators are enjoying the hard work they’ve put into the existing houses before looking forward to replacements. I’m certainly curious what houses will make up the Chicago version of Horror Unleashed, which was just announced over the summer. You can get tickets for Universal’s Horror Unleashed right now!
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