The second haunted house tour we experienced at Universal Studios Hollywood last week with Halloween Horror Nights creative director John Murdy was “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire”, based on the hit 2024 movie of the same name. Below you can find my photos of the house along with Murdy’s comments.
“Obviously this house is based on Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” John Murdy began, “but it has callbacks to a lot of the other films in the franchise as we're going [along], so you kind of get the best of both worlds. Last time we did [a ‘Ghostbusters’ haunted house, the firehouse was the facade. This time we decided to do Ray’s Occult bookstore, so that's what we're standing out in front of. There's a whole pre-show that happens while you're waiting in line. The Taxi Driver Ghost animated figure is going to be inside the taxi cab and then you can Slimer inside [the hot dog cart]– every once in a while he pops up and he's got the hot dogs in his mouth. You're hearing Ray, Dan Aykroyd's character, talk about the Death Chill and set up the story, and then we go inside Ray's. And what's crazy is there's stuff in here that's from Mummy movies. There's stuff in here from all kinds of different movies– stuff we've acquired over the years. The Mini-Pufts are all animated; it was just a little science project because they were really small, so we got the 3D model for them.”
“And then we designed them so that there's five tiny little servo motors inside there– the kind of stuff you'd use for high-end model train stuff. The guy with the parasol pops up out of that cup, the one inside the book– his legs are kicking, there's the guy there sticking his hand inside the pencil sharpener, and that's all animated. So [there are] lots of lots [of them], and then the ones on the lamp, too, turning it on and off. Lots of animated figures. In this scene we have Ray Stantz, and he's behind the counter. He's on the phone talking to the New York librarian about the Death Chill, and Podcast’s his partner in the new movies– [he] comes around the corner with the Hammer of Truth. He's gonna smash the Mini-Pufts, but you're in his path… so he's the scare. And then we're making this whole wall disappear and you see Nadeem’s secret room from the new movie, which has all that armor there. And then from there, we have to take you back 100 years. There's a line in the movie where the librarian says this happened 100 years ago.”
“People froze to death in the middle of July– I think it's in the trailer. And so we thought, ‘Oh, that would be cool.’ And there's that prologue in the movie where they go to the Manhattan Adventurers Club and all those people are frozen, so we wanted to do that in the house. So if you turn the corner, [there] is just gonna be a giant 100-year-old newspaper telling you about how New York froze over 100 years ago. And then Garraka, who's the bad guy in the new film, comes bursting through the poster and sends you on into the Manhattan Adventures Club, which we just flocked [with fake snow]. [There] are the two performers in this scene: there's a guy in the room with makeup on that looks like he's one of these frozen guys, but he comes to life, and then there's a New York fireman who comes through that door over there just watching. And then from here we're gonna [see] a little bit of a throwback to Ghostbusters 2. We're gonna go into the sewer with the pink slime.”
“We didn’t do that last time, so we thought, ‘Oh, that's good.’ It's a little dark, hard to see, but there's pink slime everywhere. There's another Mini-Puft that got lost and he's riding a rat like a bucking bronco. Then as you're going through the sewer, as soon as you step through this curtain, you get attacked by the Miner Ghost, which is actually from the movie [Ghostbusters:] Afterlife. And then you run into the Sewer Dragon. I think that's the only thing that's not physically here right now because my makeup artist is busy painting it– it's massive. So the whole thing tracks forward, and then we take you into the Ghostbusters’ new lab which is overrun by many [Mini-]Pufts. These are fun– we have the coffee cup that spilled and melted one of them. The hand and the head are animated. Then we have a cannibal one toasting his friend on the Bunsen burner like it's a S’more, and then we have the other ones with a laser. That's actually all lights up. They're shooting a hole through their friend with a laser, and then this is actually a turntable where there's one guy trying to run away from two other ones that are trying to kill him.”
“There's lots of things going on in this room behind you. [There’s] gonna be [a] big portrait of Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2– that's gonna be a scrim, so we light through it on the trigger and you see Vigo on the other side as a bang window. And then Lars, who works in the lab in the new movie, comes running out of this door and he's covered in Mini-Pufts. Then Lucky, who's one of the characters from the last two films, [is] over here freaking out because her friend Phoebe is inside the ionic separator, and she's had her spirit taken out of her. [There are] A bunch of special effects, lighting effects and smoke. The new lab that the Ghostbusters built for Frozen Empire is inside an old aquarium, so there's all these aquarium tanks which gave us a great excuse to do a hallway with just tons of different scares and characters from different films. The library goes from the original film [appears again in] the new film, and then the Terror Dog. Then we come to the firehouse [facade], which is as small as possible. Garraka now comes around the corner, and he's a stilt-walker, so he's the scare– he's got horns out to here. And then he drives you inside.”
“What we did is we got the 3D file of the ECTO-1 and then the body is actually really lightweight. It's all cut out with robots, basically, and then it's on a big rig. Then we sourced all the original Cadillac parts, so the grill, all of the hardware, the mirrors, all of that are actually 1959 Cadillac parts. But the body itself is carved out of foam and then hard-coated and given an automotive finish. In this scene, Janine [Melnitz and] Winston [Zeddemore] are here, the ECTO-1 gets possessed, and the whole thing tracks up so it comes out sirens blaring and then reverses and goes back behind the wall. Janine's in front of that column when you come in and Winston's over here and they're [both] in their Ghostbusters uniforms. They're all ready for battle, and then Trevor [Spengler] is here– he blasts the proton pack. You see it chase across the wall [and] Slimer comes up from that [pile of trash]. We have to finish it with the candy wrappers and all that stuff and this is all. It's funny– up until yesterday, there was a sign here and it was like, ‘Please do not throw away the trash and please do not add to the prop trash. It's supposed to be here.’”
“But he comes up out of that junk pile and he blasts you– he slimes you [with] compressed air and water and then we get to the final scene. Baraka is a stilt-walker. [He] comes out, [and] Phoebe blasts him with the Proton Pack. Nadeem uses the orb [in] his role as the Firemaster, and a combination of fiber optics, LEDs, [and] projection make that flame effect. You get to see the finale moment [from] the film, but there's one last Slimer on the way out. That's kind of a hidden bonus to slime you one final time before you get to the exit. The new film I think leaned in a little bit more on the scare factor with Garraka and some of the other characters, so it did part of that work for us. But I think we've pretty much accepted that these types of houses are comedy-horror, and it's just a different flavor. And I think that when you look at how we curate the whole lineup, we try to do that every year. We try to put a lot of variety into it. As we put it together, we try to create it so that there's a variety for everybody.”
Halloween Horror Nights 2024 runs on select nights from September 5th through November 3rd at Universal Studios Hollywood in Southern California. For additional details and to purchase advance tickets for the event, be sure to visit Universal’s official website.
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