This Year, Halloween Horror Nights Has A Groundbreaking New Attraction

A defining characteristic of Halloween Horror Nights, the annual after-dark frightfest at Universal Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood, is its immersive, high concept haunted houses. But this year, one of the houses is doing something that’s never been done before: it’s a nearly silent experience, which incorporates American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate with guests.

“A Quiet Place,” a haunted house which will be at both Universal Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood, is based on the 2018 film A Quiet Place and its 2020 sequel A Quiet Place 2. In the movies, extraterrestrials have invaded earth and decimated most human life. The only way to stay safe from the creatures, who can’t see but have highly sensitive hearing, is to be completely silent all the time.

The twelve-time winner of Amusement Today’s “Best Halloween Event” Golden Ticket award opens for the season on Aug. 30 in Orlando, and Sept. 5 in Los Angeles. Ahead of the start of the event, John Murdy, creative director of Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood, gave Forbes a preview of “A Quiet Place.”

In “A Quiet Place,” Murdy said, there are “things that are very unique about this house in terms of comparing it to other things we’ve done in the other 113 houses we’ve created over the years.” The biggest departure from other houses is the use of silence as an atmospheric effect — or what seems like silence. In the absence of perceptible sound, there are high and low end frequencies not fully perceptible to the human ear to create a sense of tension. The Halloween Horror Nights houses are typically loud experiences filled with screams, slamming doors, the growling of monsters and sometimes music (this year’s Universal Monsters soundtracks were composed by Slash of Guns n’ Roses in Los Angeles, and Emmy-nominated composer Sara Barone in Orlando).

In this experience, like in the movies, quiet is the only thing that will keep people safe from the monsters. But, Murdy said, “the one thing we know is our guests aren’t going to be quiet.”

“We’re going to tell them to be quiet,” he continued. “Everything is reiterating ‘you’ve got to be quiet, you can’t make a noise.’ We know they’re not going to adhere to that — so we’re going to punish them for that.” Throughout the houses, there are silent scenes which feature “cause and effect triggers,” banner sensors that guests will trigger simply by walking past them. “If you get too close to them, they go off and start making noise, which alerts the creatures,” Murdy explained. So even if people are trying to be silent, they’ll never be fully safe. The murderous aliens are, quite literally, around every corner, waiting to attack.

Both films center on the Abbott family, a mother and father (played by Emily Blunt and John Krasinski) and their three children. Regan, the eldest sibling (Millicent Simmonds) is deaf, so the family all uses ASL to communicate. Their ability to speak to each other silently is one of the things that allows the family to evade the monsters.

Throughout “A Quiet Place,” scareactors also use ASL to communicate with guests. “We knew that it was an important element in the film and we wanted it in the house as well,” Murdy said. It’s the first time American Sign Language has been featured prominently in a haunted house (definitely at Universal, but likely ever). Scareactors use ASL, and a pre-show video before guests enter teaches them some basic signs they need to know inside the house. The audio in the houses also switches back and forth between what guests are hearing in a given scene, and what Regan is hearing through her cochlear implant.

The Halloween Horror Nights team worked with Universal’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion group, and with members of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, to ensure the ASL used in the houses was as accurate as possible. “If you’re going to introduce this,” Murdy said, “you want to make sure that you’re doing it as authentically as possible and that the representation is correct.”

The houses also feature the largest, most ambitious animatronics Universal has used at Halloween Horror Nights, to create the creatures which are only CGI in the films. “I think visually this house is really impressive,” Murdy said. “This feels like the movie to me. It’s amazing when you take a production still from the movie and you come in here and you go, ‘Yep, that’s it.’ And that’s really our job, to try to get as close to recreating these environments as possible.”