Universal is bringing another popular video game franchise to its Halloween Horror Nights. This year, it is Fallout, with a new haunted house inspired by the Amazon Prime Video series based on the video game series.
"When we were looking at Fallout and going through the series, it was almost overwhelming, because there was just so many places and so much opportunity and so many things you could do," Universal Studios Hollywood Halloween Horror Nights Creative Director John Murdy said during an invitation-only media walk-through of the house today. "But when you're designing a haunted house, you have to kind of pick the things that you're going to bring to life, and then, what is the journey? What are we doing from a narrative standpoint? Where we kind of settled out is that we are more or less following Lucy's journey on this show."
Warning: spoilers ahead.
"So we're going to start in the vaults, just like she did. We're going to start with the wedding - the arranged wedding that goes horribly wrong when the Raiders break in. We're going to follow in her footsteps as she leaves the vault and goes out into the wasteland. We're going to meet the same person she met - The Ghoul - and then we're going to try to focus on the Super Duper Mart as our finale."
"The biggest challenge was going to be right out of the gate. We have to bring the vaults to life, and that is no easy task from a scenic standpoint."
Fallout, for those not familiar, is a retro-futuristic, post-apocalyptic world where people who could afford to retreat to corporate-owned underground vaults survived a nuclear holocaust unscathed, while those who could not devolved into ghouls on the surface.
Unlike the Terrifier house that we toured earlier in the day, there's much work yet to be finished on the Fallout house. Housed in the same location as the Star Trek experience from spring's Universal Fan Fest Nights, this was one of the last houses that Murdy and his team were able to start work on. For our tour today, we saw completed scenic work, with much set dressing yet to be completed.
Nevertheless, the scenic work provided evidence that Universal has been able to bring the visuals of the Fallout world to life for this year's Halloween Horror Nights.
The action starts with Lucy's red wedding, with Lucy and Monty slashing at one another... while we stand in their way. Moving through the body-strewn vaults, we end up in the wasteland, which Universal has created in a scene that offers a very different look for Halloween Horror Nights.
"We're doing that with a huge Cyclorama - big, huge, dimensional set pieces, a printed floor graphic, and then the final layer is actually sand and dirt that gets piled up in the corners," Murdy said. "And then all of the bodies that have been completely obliterated by the nuclear bombs. As you're coming in here, you're hearing Geiger counter clicks to tell you it's highly radioactive. But you're also hearing weird sounds coming from that window. It's a ghoul that is in the process of going feral, trying desperately to hang on to his humanity."
Practical and animated radroaches will complete the set decoration, with scareactors portraying ghouls to push guests through the scene. Beyond that? Well, Hollywood HHN's traditional forest trees are back.
Long ago, these were trees recycled from Universal Studios Hollywood's old E.T. ride, which was removed for Revenge of the Mummy back in 2003. By this point, it's unclear if any of the E.T. trees remain, but Universal has made forest scenes a tradition at HHN. In this one, our big bad - The Ghoul - appears for the first time. The former Hollywood star is resurrected, emerging from his coffin.
That brings us into a scene we were not allowed to photograph, featuring an animatronic Maximus ordering Titus to attack a massive Yao guai bear.
"This thing is massive. When we were sculpting, it, just the clay alone weighed 500 pounds. It's one of the biggest creatures we've ever built for Horror Nights," Murdy said.
After that battle, we make our way into the finale, in the Super Duper Mart. Here we get The Ghoul trying to see Lucy for parts, the robot Snip Snip trying to cut Lucy into those parts, and Lucy fighting back... by at first coming for us.
She's quite apologetic, of course, but that does not mean we are in the clear. A gauntlet of ghouls awaits us before we can escape, in classic Horror Nights fashion.
Fallout will be one of the houses at both Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Studios Florida this year. Halloween Horror Nights starts this Friday, August 29, at Universal Studios Florida and on Thursday, September 4, at Universal Studios Hollywood. Click here for tickets to the Universal Studios Hollywood event, from our ticket partner.
This is a bad location for this house. It deserved a soundstage. Also, I know they are still working on it, but simple details are missing. Like pics from the Super Duper Mart show empty shelves with trick-or-treat buckets. Where is the BlamCo Mac & Cheese or the Irradiated Sugar Bombs? I don't think the designers have played the games at all.
I imagine Orlando is going to be way better.
It's way too early to judge set decoration for this house. I as wrote, most of it has not been installed yet.
That said, Orlando typically does have more and better space in which to build its HHN houses, so, yeah... Orlando's often are better. But not always.
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It looks good so far, but I had truly hoped the scare house would be more than just a watered-down rehash of scenes from the show's plot. The reason the show was so popular was because of the games, not vice versa. There's so much more they could have done, but I guess they're going for the lowest common denominator.