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How and When the Halloween Horror Nights Haunted Houses Come Together
For Lora Sauls and her team responsible for brainstorming HHN scares, every season is spooky season!
With its mind-boggling mazes and creepy characters, Halloween Horror Nights has perfected the dark art of haunted houses. The annual event transforms Universal Orlando Resort and Universal Studios Hollywood into a vast and meticulously crafted hellscape inhabited by hungry zombies, moaning monsters and ghouls a-plenty.
How does Universal pull off such incredible mayhem year after year? Surprisingly, it starts the way so many great ideas do: With a brainstorming session and a whiteboard.
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NBC Insider caught up with Universal Orlando’s Lora Sauls, Senior Manager of the Creative Development Group and Show Direction, who unveiled some of the mysteries behind HHN Orlando's creative process. Six of this year’s haunted houses are original concepts that are not connected to existing IPs. They’re based on classic horror monsters and new and exciting characters — complete with frightening twists and turns from Sauls and her team.
When does planning for Halloween Horror Nights begin?
Work on HHN begins 18 months in advance, which means Universal already knows what scares are in store for next year. “We work on Halloween Horror Nights 365,” Sauls explained.
But the first week is perhaps the most critical when all the key creative teams — décor, character creation, scenic design — come together for one big brainstorming session. Sauls, who leads show direction, emphasizes that when it comes to “original content stories,” no idea is off the table, no matter how chilling.
Who writes the Halloween Horror Nights Haunted Houses?
“We’re all in the room together. And we’re just throwing every idea onto a big whiteboard," Sauls told NBC Insider. "Sometimes, the team, the individuals will bring in full concepts... and sometimes, people will bring in just an environment. Or just a character. Or just… an overarching theme. And we write everything on the board. We don’t think anything is a bad idea."
She explained that by day two, the “room starts to light up,” and they begin to hone in on details like who is the victim and the aggressor, and what era or period is the haunted house from.
“We like to say that we can’t really tell you who had the original idea. Because it is such a team effort,” Sauls enthused.
How does HHN Decide Between IP and Original Haunted Houses?
The idea for “Triplets of Terror,” one of the brand-new haunted houses, had been on the whiteboard for three years, Sauls revealed. But Halloween Horror Nights already had IP-related “slashers” in the mix, most recently “Chucky: Ultimate Kill Count,” and Sauls and the team thought too many would be overkill.
“We thought it would just be too much. There are certain people that just love a slasher film, so they wouldn’t mind it. But… once we have one, we don’t want to duplicate it in any way,” she said, adding that when they learned there was an opening this year, “we were like [GASP] we can do it! Our original idea was actually called siblings... but then we were like, well, it’s our 33rd year, so let’s make them triplets.”
How does Universal decide which Haunted Houses make the cut?
Ten original ideas typically emerge from the first week of brainstorming, according to Sauls.
“We’ll get our intellectual property slate, and we’ll then figure out what is the most diverse slate that we can have within our ten Haunted Houses. We really truly want to make sure that we’re giving something to everyone,” she said.
From there, it’s back to the whiteboard to discuss which six have grabbed their imaginations. After brainstorming some more, the ideas are turned over to a team of three: the show director, the scenic designer, and the character developer.
“And those three individuals take that idea and develop the Haunted House. Like all nine scenes… what the characters are, what the rooms are, how the scares work,” she said. Universal Orlando Resort’s cadre of décor specialists, technical designers, lighting artists, and audio engineers then jump in to help bring the horror to life.
“It builds and builds like that,” Sauls said. “It’s a fun process.”
To find out all of the Halloween Horror Nights event dates or to buy tickets, check out the website.
