Last week Laughing Place was invited to participate in two behind-the-scenes lights-on tours of the haunted houses at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights 2024 with the event’s creative director John Murdy. Below you can see first-look images of the "A Quiet Place" house (based on the first and second installments of the popular horror-movie franchise of the same name) and read Murdy’s thoughts on its design elements.
“When we first started talking to Paramount about this particular property, we knew that it was gonna be very different from a typical Halloween or Nights House in three major ways,” began John Murdy. “The first is in the title of the film itself: A Quiet Place. The sound design of that film was pretty revolutionary. A lot of people who saw the movie talked about it being a silent film. It's never silent. You think it's silent, but it's just a very clever way to design the audio– a lot of the sounds in the film are what you hear in nature, so we knew we needed to change the way we do audio. Typically in our haunted houses, there's multichannel audio in every room, but it tends to be [coming from] big speakers up towards the top of the walls, and we needed to do the opposite. What we actually needed to do was what you call ‘near field audio design,’ which means instead of a bunch of big speakers up high, it's lots of little speakers down low and very close– as close to the guest as we could possibly get them. So we knew that that meant that there had to be a unique integration between scenic props and dressing and audio.”
“The second is the use of American Sign Language in the film. It's such a big part of A Quiet Place, not only in the character of Regan– which John Krasinski, you know, sought out and specifically cast a deaf actress to play that role– but [in] the way that ASL is used throughout the movie, because not only does Regan use it, but other members of the family use it because they can't make noise; they have to find other ways to communicate. So we wanted to fold in American sign language into this house, and we do that in two ways. Out in the queue line where there [are] video displays, we do a whole pre-show video, but it's the only pre-show video I've ever shot in my career that has no audio– it's literally all done through ASL. We cast a deaf actress who works here at Universal Studios Hollywood [and] we worked with our DEI team and experts on the Universal side to tell the story of A Quiet Place entirely through ASL with open captions so everybody else can read it. And then as part of that pre-show video, the person who's talking to you– who's just a survivor in the world of A Quiet Place– is telling you there [are] certain things you need to know if you want to survive in this world, and she's teaching you basic ASL.”
“And that's gonna be reiterated by our performers, so we rehearsed this house a couple of nights ago as part of our performer training or scare actor training. We brought in experts to teach not only the character playing Reagan but other characters in the house simple ASL phrases that I wrote and then we translated into ASL, so that's what they're gonna be doing in the house. This is the first time we've ever done anything like that; it's just to be true to the film. And then lastly, it's the creatures. You know, A Quiet Place kind of violates one of my key rules with Horror Nights when I'm looking for any property. I'm always looking for three things: awareness. Do people know it? Do they want to come see it? Second, does it have characters that could be translated to live performers and A Quiet Place is pretty much a ‘no,’ because the threat in the film are the creatures and none of them are human-shaped– they're huge and they move around on all fours, so we knew that that was gonna involve special effects. Last year we did a house with Chucky and that was kind of the test case to see if we could actually do fully animated figures… I think we built 17 of them for ‘Chucky.’”
“But here in ‘A Quiet Place’ now we have to upscale that. So again, we worked with our internal mechanical engineering department here in the park that works on all the rides and attractions, and there's ten creatures in this house. Six of them were puppet effects [and] four of them are fully animated figures, and so I'll show you those as we're going through. The third thing is environments– we're looking for environments that we can replicate in a live experience, but particularly a variety of environments. This house is based on A Quiet Place 1 and 2, so there was a wealth of different environments to choose from. Where we start the house is as you're in the woods, and this is just a detail we went to that is very much a part of the movie. Lee, the dad, pours down these trails of sand in the woods for his family members to walk on so they don't make noise. So under your feet all the way through this forest section [are] floor graphics to convey that the character of Regan is the first character you meet in the house. She'd be standing roughly where I am.”
“The youngest son picks up that space shuttle prop, and it starts going off in the woods and the creatures come and he gets killed right in the beginning of the film– it's a shocking beginning to the first film. So we're at his grave, Reagan is at his grave; there's the little space shuttle prop that's a special effect. When we were looking at how to deliver what the film delivers, we looked at all sorts of different things, but the one thing we knew for sure is our guests aren't gonna be quiet. We're gonna keep reiterating that all through the queue line and our characters are reiterating that with ASL, but we know our guests– they're gonna make noise. So we're gonna punish them for that. All throughout the house, there [are] little cause-and-effect triggers– if a guest passes through what we would call a banner sensor or a beam, it triggers something to happen, which in turn triggers the creatures to come. In this scene, [when] you get to a certain point, you trigger that space shuttle prop, it starts making noise, the lights start flashing, and then immediately you start hearing the creatures coming, which is the next scene.”
“In the film, Lee and Marcus– the son– were off on an expedition and they come across this old man in the middle of the woods and his wife has just been killed by one of these creatures. And the old man looks like he's about to unleash this horrible scream and they're like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ And then he just goes, ‘Aaaaah!’ and then instantly the creatures come, so that's what we're doing with this scene. Where I'm standing is where the old man performer would be, and then when I was talking about near field audio design, this is what I'm talking about. All of these trees were custom-built for this attraction purely to house speakers. Under show lighting, you don't see grills like you're seeing them [now, and] the two bushes back there are [also] hiding speakers. So we're finding all these different ways of bringing the audio really close to you, because as soon as this performer hits his trigger, we kick in a surround sound effect of the creatures coming from all directions and converging on you.”
“As soon as we get to this point, once the creatures start making noise, we pass through this curtain and we immediately run into the first [one]. This is a puppet. The performer can make the mouth open. There's ten of these in the house, [and] these are all built by Patrick Magee and Magee FX, which is our long time makeup artist that works with us. We started with all these behind-the-scenes elements we get from the film, so we have all these technical drawings of this guy. We blew it up really big and put them up on the office wall, and then took different people from our team and stood [them] next to it just to try to figure out what size was gonna work. While Horror Nights was going on last year, we did a whole audio mockup while the event was running in our facility to test out the near field audio design and see if that was gonna be the way to approach it. I started in March working with my counterparts in Orlando and some folks on our marketing team to curate the slate for the following year.”
“At this point we're locking down stuff for next year, and then towards middle-to-late September, I'll start writing and I'll transition into design. It takes a long time to do this. This is like doing nine or eight or nine movies at the same time. It's equivalent; it's just a massive amount of [work]. So this is what I would call a transitional scene, because there are no performers– there are no scares. All of this, including the whole house, is here purely to convey one thing from the movie, which is the lights. The dad in the film sets up all these Christmas-style lights around, and he has a switch so he could turn them from clear to red, and red means the creatures are coming: danger, time to hide. So as you come into the scene, that's what's happening above you– the lights are changing from clear to red. Sometimes we'll build a facade. You know, our fans are funny because they're always like, ‘How come you don't have a facade?’ And as soon as you come in, [you realize] it's because there's a balcony right above [where] all the dressing rooms [were] for ‘Walking Dead.’”
“All of the offices are above, so the ceiling's a lot lower in that first section. Now we can start taking use of that space. We have all these hidden hallways for our performers to get around. There's literally no scares in this scene at all. The lights are changing from clear to red and to, and we also wanna take you inside the house. There's another thing Lee does for his family, which is he paints the floorboards to tell them where to walk so that [they] don't creak, so we painted the floorboards. Nobody's gonna do that; nobody's gonna do what I say, so we're gonna punish them again. As soon as you come in here, again, you activate all of the creature sounds. All of the exposed plasters are hiding speakers– [there are] speakers everywhere. Now you hear the creatures are in the house, and then as soon as you walk through that curtain you run into the next one. Because it has the plates on the head, we decided to kind of alter the look of the creature so you see them different ways. This one's got the plates all splayed open on the head and [it’s] a puppet. The first two are puppets.”
“The next scene we're gonna go to is the basement where Lee has his surveillance station, and that [has] the first animated figure. This is the scene where Evelyn comes down the stairs [and] steps on the nail, which we'll be adding. The last thing we do is blood, so we gotta add the nail and all the bloody footprints. She'll be standing in the corner over there, [and] she's pregnant in the film at this point– she's about to go into labor, and a creature gets into the basement. So again, we're gonna do one of those cause-and-effect triggers. I think in this case you can see it– that's what's called a banner sensor. So when you get to this point, Evelyn's using ASL [and] she's telling you to be quiet. Once you pass here, it makes that egg timer on the desk go off, and then the creature comes to life. The creature in what we would call its hold position while it's waiting for that beam to be broken. It’s craning its neck and all the plates on the head are opening up to reveal its inner cochlear. This year two of working in animatronic sort of things. ‘Chucky’ was the first.”
“What's nice about this desk is that you actually could put a speaker right on it– the speaker just kind of belongs in a desk. Most of the time we're hiding them, but this one is the point source speaker for it. All the monitors are on when you're going through, but this one is really about showing off the hero creature, because once you [trip] the sensor, it raises up, it lunges forward– it’s in your face. The performer over there has the ability to stop it if need be, but it's being triggered off that banner sensor, which is kind of like how we did the humvee in ‘Last of Us’ last year; that's how we did that. Certain ones, we give it to the performer to control like in ‘Ghostbusters,’ the performer's actually deciding when to make the ECTO-1 do its thing. But in certain cases, we'll do a banner sensor like that. It's a combination of these things. That's the thing with Horror Nights– we try to get things as close to you as possible. Our performers like to get close, which is kind of amazing. [Our team locks] every single thing down– every single part has to be locked down. In a room like this, that's just hundreds, [and there are] a lot of rooms like this in ‘Quiet Place’ that are just super prop-happy– lots of props in dressing.”
“From here we're gonna go back outside. In this scene, there's two other performers besides the one operating this puppet– Regan's and Lee. We're trying to visually tell the story of Regan because she's really the hero of the story– she uses what's perceived to be her handicap as her superpower to help defeat the creatures, which is her cochlear implant. The way her dad tried to fix it, it feeds back, [and] that ends up being the thing that really is the weakness of these creatures. They can't stand that high-pitched sound– that's when their plates open up on their head, and that's when they're vulnerable and they could be killed. So as you're coming towards Reagan, she's using sign language again to tell you, ‘Go inside. Hide,’ because in the barn they're at the root cellar, which is their hiding spot. But then her implant starts feeding back and we're going back and forth like the film did between our P.O.V. for what it sounds like and her P.O.V. for how she perceives it. And then Lee grabs an axe in the movie and tries to come after the creature, so that's what he's gonna be doing in this scene as well.”
“And then we go inside the barn [where there] is another animated figure. When you walk in here, you hear the baby start to cry and this guy is gonna rise up above the baby, and then there's a compressed air and water blast. Then [this is] a good example of props and dressing– not only all of the canned goods [but] all of the labels, [and] we have to create all of the newspapers that they're using for insulation in the scene. So everything you see [is] stuff that we generated that then [the props department] has to change and apply. And this is the dividing line between the first film and the second film– we're gonna switch to the second film when we go outside. This is a big deep set again [with] a fully animated figure. The character in the scene is Emmett– you hear his shotgun go off and then he comes around the corner. He's gonna use ASL telling you to get to the foundry, which is his hideout. And then we're heading to the foundry. This is where Marcus steps in a bear trap, so [there’s] an effect to make it look like the performer's leg is stuck in a bear trap.”
“He's screaming, the cans [in] the booby traps are animated– they're going off, Evelyn's using sign language to tell him to stop screaming– stop making noise. And then Regan is weaponizing her cochlear implant around the corner to affect the big creature that's coming through the wall. For the basement [scene], that's more of what I would call a presentational scene– it's not necessarily that somebody's popping out and scaring you; it's just a big cool thing moving and trying to show off the plates opening because it's a very big part of the film. Whereas this is more of something that could be done by a puppeteer. And then for the finale of the house, we're gonna end up inside the foundry in the room with the big furnaces. In the second movie, the reason they go in [and] they end up in the train tracks and all that is that Regan keeps hearing this same song, Bobby Darin's ‘Beyond the Sea,’ playing. And she thinks that it's a signal that these people at this radio station are playing this song because they're trying to get other survivors to join them there.”
And she gets the idea of, ‘Wow, if I can amplify and broadcast the sound from my cochlear implant, maybe I can take care of these creatures.’ So she leaves and goes to do that, but she leaves Marcus in the foundry and there's a scene where Marcus confronts the creature. Once Reagan starts broadcasting a signal with the boom box– that's what we're recreating. What he does is he kind of comes out of that pipe and then holds up the boom box and the plates start going crazy and he retracts back inside the pipe. This is kind of a presentational scene too. This is our final scene in the house, but as soon as you step through the curtain, there's one more scare– one more deaf angel and one more creature to get you.
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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