Last week, Inside Universal was graciously invited for a behind-the-scenes tour of two of the houses featured at this year’s Halloween Horror Nights in Hollywood: A Quiet Place and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. In the first of our two-part behind-the-scenes preview, we will take a look at A Quiet Place. Beware of spoilers ahead!
This year’s haunted house based on the horror franchise “A Quiet Place” – located on the Upper Lot in the former building of The Walking Dead Attraction – follows the Abbott family through the plots of A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II as they struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by sightless creatures that use their incredibly sharp sense of hearing to prey on anything or anyone that makes even the slightest noise.
A Quiet Place is a particularly unusual property to be featured at Halloween Horror Nights for three major reasons according to Creative Director John Murdy: its ‘silence’, its use of American Sign Language, and the design of the main antagonists of the film – the Death Angels.
Unique from most other horror properties in the sense that the films are known for being eerily silent, A Quiet Place at Halloween Horror Nights will use its sound design and special effects to convey a similar sense of silence and ominous dread throughout the house, but with subtle audio cues that will leave guests feeling on edge at all times despite only consciously perceiving a mostly silent environment.
As explained by Murdy, most houses at Halloween Horror Nights utilize a multichannel audio setup, which tends to involve placing big speakers up towards the top of the walls. However, since the “A Quiet Place” films are known for featuring mostly subtle audio cues – primarily background sounds found in nature – that trick most viewers into thinking that there is little to no sound present at all, it was decided that a traditional multichannel audio setup would not suffice for this house.
Instead, A Quiet Place uses a nearfield audio design, which means that instead of placing a bunch of big speakers up high, many little speakers were placed down low and as close to the guests as possible. Thus, unlike most other houses, A Quiet Place required a unique integration between scenic, props and dressing, and audio to disguise the locations of speakers and make them virtually unnoticeable to guests under proper show lighting to adequately convey passive background noise at one moment, and then quickly switch to using surround sound at the next to make it sound like the creatures are suddenly approaching guests from all directions.
Another distinctive feature of A Quiet Place is the use of American Sign Language (ASL) in the house just like in the film. In the queue, guests will watch a silent preshow video where a deaf actress portrays a survivor in the world of A Quiet Place and uses ASL – with closed captions – to tell the general story of the films and inform guests about what they need to do to survive. Additionally, the survivor will teach guests basic ASL that will later be reiterated by the live performers throughout the house.
The last major defining trait of this house comes in the form of the huge extraterrestrial creatures that serve as the main antagonists of the films. When selecting any property to be featured at Halloween Horror Nights, Murdy noted that he generally looks for three key traits: guest awareness of the property, characters that can be translated to live performers, and a variety of environments that can be replicated in a live experience.
Given that the creatures are massive, not human-shaped, and move around on all fours, it was clear that the Halloween Horror Nights creative team needed to think outside the box to make A Quiet Place work as a live haunted house experience. After the successful test use of fully animated figures in the Chucky: Ultimate Kill Count house last season, it was decided that a mixture of 4 fully animated figures and 6 puppets would be the best and most terrifying way to effectively bring the creatures from “A Quiet Place” to life, albeit far upscaled from the level of the Chucky animated figures with the help of the mechanical engineering department that works on all of Universal Studios Hollywood’s rides and attractions.
Unfortunately, the animated figures were not yet ready for show at the time of our tour so we were unable to photograph them, but we can promise that they will certainly blow guests away in person with their scale and appearance. Featured in this article are a handful of the creature puppets, which were all built by Patrick Magee and Magee FX by referring to technical drawings of the creatures that were previously used in the making of the films. Similar animated figures and puppets of the creatures created for Hollywood’s A Quiet Place were also made by the Hollywood team for Orlando’s house of the same name to remain consistent in their design across both coasts.
One thing that returning Halloween Horror Nights fans will notice upon entering the haunted house is that the layout has entirely changed from previous years. Gone are the former permanent walls from The Walking Dead Attraction that previously forced the Universal Horror Hotel and Evil Dead Rise haunted houses to follow the same path, just with different scenery each respective year. After last year’s event, the entire attraction space was converted into a black box, meaning that all the walls were torn down to leave an open space available that no longer severely constricts the creative team in their haunted house design, which was essential to bring to life the story of “A Quiet Place”.
Without giving away too many details, A Quiet Place begins at the first film and follows the events of both films in chronological order. Guests pass by the film’s logo and then find themselves in the same woods the Abbott family often heads through, walking along the same trail of sand that Lee pours down for his family members to walk on to avoid making noise, conveyed by floor graphics along the guest pathway.
Up ahead lies the grave of the youngest son in the Abbott family, decked with a variety of toys, including the space shuttle whose sound effects led to his untimely demise in the first film. While it may look like a static prop on the surface, it actually is the first of multiple other hidden special effects located throughout the haunted house.
“When we were looking at how to deliver what the films deliver, the one thing we knew for sure is that our guests aren’t going to be quiet – they’re going to make noise. So we’re going to punish them for that…”
All throughout the house are cause-and-effect triggers where if a guest passes through a banner sensor or a beam, it triggers something to happen, which in turn triggers the noise-sensitive creatures to come. To describe just the first effect at the beginning of the house, once a guest passes by a certain point that triggers the space shuttle prop, it starts making noise through a point source speaker, the lights start flashing, and then guests immediately start to hear the creatures arriving. We’ll leave it to you to discover the other cause-and-effect triggers for yourself to keep them a surprise.
Fans will continue to notice other screen-accurate and seemingly subtle yet important details from the films as they tiptoe along through A Quiet Place. Outside of the Abbott family house hangs the Christmas-style lights Lee set up to be able to switch from clear to red to signal to his family when the creatures are coming. Inside the home, guests can step across the floorboards painted also by Lee to remind his family where they can silently walk without causing the ground to creak, and soon after spot the egg timer cleverly used by Evelyn on the desk in the basement.
After passing through the final scenes of A Quiet Place, guests will continue to traverse through many of the prominent environments from A Quiet Place: Part II, such as the iconic train scene and the abandoned steel foundry, encountering both familiar characters and gruesome creatures along the way through the second half of the house.
Though a seemingly unconventional property to be featured at Halloween Horror Nights, A Quiet Place is packed with details from the first two films and is sure to spook guests in more ways than one as they follow the story of the Abbott family and in particular, as Murdy noted, the true hero by the end of the series, Regan Abbott, as they all try to survive.
Check out part two of our behind-the-scenes look at this year’s Halloween Horror Nights, where we will preview Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
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