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Halloween Horror Nights 2024 Texas Chainsaw Massacre House's Film Tie-In Explained
Halloween Horror Nights 2024 creative director, John Murdy, gives a spoiler-free walkthrough of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Haunted House.
If you're a long-time attendee of Universal Studios annual Halloween Horror Nights events in Orlando or Hollywood, then you're well aware that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise (currently streaming on Peacock) is a favorite of both the event creators and the guests. Both parks have celebrated the premise and characters multiple times inside haunted houses, as a part of the Terror Tram, with merchandise and food pop-ups.
2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the original Tobe Hooper-directed movie. As such, Halloween Horror Nights creative director John Murdy told NBC Insider in a recent press preview at Universal Studios Hollywood that they wanted to do something different with the property that would really surprise their guests and add to the mythology too.
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"The people who I work with on [the franchise] had an idea they threw out which was: What if you take a multiverse approach to Texas?" Murdy said.
And so was born this year's Hollywood exclusive haunted house: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Legacy of Leatherface.
HHN 2024's Texas Chainsaw Massacre House relates to the films
Despite the many iterations and reboots within The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, Murdy explained that all of them are owned by and controlled by one license, and that meant he could reference all nine films to build this 50th anniversary haunted house.
To start, Murdy said he watched the first film again and from that honed in on a specific line that the hitchhiker said to the teenagers after they pick him up.
"They ask him if he worked in the slaughterhouse because there was a slaughterhouse in this town," Murdy explained. "And [the hitchhiker] says, 'I worked at the slaughterhouse. My brothers did too. Grandpa did too. He was the best killer there ever was.' He goes on this whole spiel about the slaughterhouse, but we know the slaughterhouse isn't operating. It's closed down and you never see it."
From that, a concept came to life.
What to expect from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Haunted House
The infamous slaughterhouse then became the focal point of Murdy's concept for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Legacy of Leatherface.
"I wanted to create a parallel timeline, if you will, that runs concurrent to the events of the '74 film," Murdy said. "I basically researched the heck out of slaughterhouses in the turn of the century, especially when they became industrialized with the Chicago stockyards. That was really the first assembly line before Henry Ford got his idea. But this was the disassembly line. It was a factory designed to take an animal and go through all of these stages until every single byproduct had a purpose and was being sold for something. I took all of the roles that you would find in the slaughterhouse and I assigned them to iterations of Leatherface and his family."
When guests walk through The Legacy of Leatherface, Murdy said they'll come meet in the flesh (gulp!) the family members all wearing their hyper specific leather masks as they work in their family's human slaughterhouse.
"Leatherface, as defined by Gunnar Hansen who played him in the film, he always wore these skin masks because he has no personality of his own," Murdy said of the signature prop of the franchise. "He puts them on depending on what he's doing. If he's hunting, he puts on the killing mask. If he's going to the dinner table scene, he's wearing the pretty woman mask. If he's in the kitchen cleaning up after stuff, he's wearing the old woman mask that is more domestic."
In the various rooms of the haunted house, guests will experience all of the faces of death and try to come out alive on the other side.
"At the very end, that story dovetails back to the original film in our house, and you come back to the farmhouse," Murdy said of the concept. "You come back to the steel door, into where the first murder takes place. So we took something totally original that we came up with as a way to do something new and exciting."
Halloween Horror Nights begins in Hollywood begins September 5 and runs through to November 3. You can purchase your Universal Studios Hollywood Halloween Horror Nights tickets now!
