Disney can keep its princesses. Universal adds a thirteenth month of revenue each October by terrifying the hell out of its theme park visitors around the world. Coming soon—a spooktacular year-round attraction in Las Vegas.
For some people, Halloween means Pumpkin Spice Lattes, adorable trick-or-treaters and home-decorating tips from Martha Stewart. But for millions of horror fans, the season is all about jump scares, blood-thirsty ghouls and chainsaw-wielding clowns.
This burgeoning crowd of fright seekers is the target audience for Universal theme parks, where the art of scaring the bejeezus out of guests has become a massive profit driver during what was once a down time of year.
Industry watchers estimate that Universal spends more than $100 million every year to stage, market and staff its Halloween Horror Nights (HHN) events at its theme parks in Florida, California, Japan and Singapore. The event has grown substantially in popularity and scope since debuting in 1991 as “Fright Nights” at Universal Orlando Resort. Back then, it was a three-day event with a single haunted house. This year, the Florida resort is presenting 10 haunted houses and street party-style “scare zones” across a record-breaking 48 nights—five more than last year.
SCREAM QUEENS: ‘The Exorcist: Believer’ haunted house has horror fans screaming bloody murder.
Universal
Next year’s event will be even bigger. “You never see Universal shrinking the event,” says Robert Niles, creator of Theme Park Insider. “They would never, for example, peel back a week or trim three days off.” Analysts estimate that 30,000 to 35,000 visitors attend HHN each night, which translates to some 1.5 million visitors over the duration of the event—and that’s just in Florida.
While parent company Comcast does not break out Halloween-specific financials, industry experts say the extra revenue generated by HHN adds a significant boost to Universal Parks’ bottom line in the final months of the year. Niles points to a line that Tom Williams, the recently retired chairman and CEO of Universal Destinations & Experiences, shared about HHN. “He said that Halloween Horror Nights was Universal Orlando’s thirteenth month.” If that metric holds true across the rest of Universal’s theme parks, which together generated $7.5 billion in revenue last year, then HHN revenues accounted for roughly $575 million of sales in 2022.
Universal’s success with HHN dovetails with two notable cultural trends. The first is America’s obsession with Halloween, which shows no sign of dying down. The National Retail Federation estimates that total Halloween spending in the United States this year will total $12.2 billion, up 36% from $9 billion just five years ago.
Add to that a resurgence in the popularity of horror films, especially among younger audiences. A 2022 Deloitte Insights study found that while horror is the fifth most popular genre among U.S. audiences overall, it ranks third for Gen Z audiences, behind only comedy and action. “Horror films can be very lucrative, costing little to produce and earning big numbers,” the study’s authors pointed out, adding that streaming services should “look to cheaper genres that can support audience engagement at significantly lower costs.”
For Universal, this is a key competitive advantage over other theme park operators. Through Universal Studios, the company still owns many of the classic horror characters from the early 1930s—Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Wolfman, The Invisible Man. And Universal’s film arm continues to produce scary movies like Jordan Peele’s Nope, The Black Phone and Halloween Ends, which earned a combined $439 million at the box office last year. HHN itself amounts to really smart brand reinforcement, says Niles. “Universal wants people thinking Universal and horror, just like you think Disney and princesses.”
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Universal
Once a dead season in the theme park industry, autumn has been resurrected by Halloween events, which boost the industry’s seasonal performance by as much as 30%, estimates Dennis Speigel, founder and CEO of International Theme Park Services, an industry consulting firm. These days, every self-respecting amusement park stages some form of after-hours Halloween programming—Disney’s sweet Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party and Busch Gardens’ Howl-O-Scream are but two examples—but Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights is the biggest and most bloodcurdling in the business. “If you think about Disney as the top of the theme park industry, Universal is the top of the theme park Halloween industry,” says Niles.
As a separately ticketed nighttime event, HHN essentially lets Universal more than double its attendance. “It’s actually more crowded in the parks at night than during the day,” says Len Testa, a statistician and the founder of Touring Plans, a popular app and website that helps theme park-goers slash wait times. During Halloween Horror Nights, he says, “you’re typically as close to a sellout as you can get.”
A single-night ticket to Universal Orlando’s HHN in 2023 starts at $85, though there are multi-night tickets that can drastically bring down the per-night price. Of course, there are always plenty of ways to upgrade an HHN experience at an additional cost. An express pass that lets guests to skip lines goes for $139 on top of the base ticket. There are also VIP tours and hotel-and-ticket packages.
“It’s about increasing revenues per capita,” says Speigel. “They evacuate the park and anybody coming in at night has to buy a new ticket. Then there are upcharges and surcharges. That’s the wave of the future for sure.”
Indeed, ticket sales are just one piece of the Halloween Horror Nights pie. “Think about how much Universal is doing on merchandise and food sales, and particularly alcohol sales, which tend to be fairly highly profitable,” says Niles.
With Halloween Horror Nights now in its 32nd year, Universal understands it has to keep raising the bar on its attractions for the diehard, repeat visitors. The stakes are particularly high now because it’s been a lackluster year for theme parks industry-wide, due to a rising price sensitivity among consumers as well as a lot of bad weather. Both Disney and Comcast (which owns Universal) have reported lower attendance at their Orlando parks this year.
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Universal
“I can’t think of a season in the last 15 years where Halloween will be more important to the year-end numbers,” says Speigel, whose company predicted in January that the industry would have a flat-to-down year. “Luckily, Halloween is inflation-proof. Even if people are dealing with economic issues, it doesn’t affect Halloween. We’ve seen that people will still come out.”
Mike Aiello, senior director of creative development at Universal Orlando’s entertainment division, and his creative team start prepping for Halloween 18 months in advance of each year’s Horror Nights, meaning that they are already six months deep into plans for Halloween 2024. The process begins with throwing ideas on a whiteboard, and eventually Aiello’s team winnows the field to 10 ideas, some of which use Universal’s own intellectual property.
That results in an interesting mix of terrifying possibilities. This year, for example, there are houses based on Universal’s The Exorcist: Believer and Netflix’s Stranger Things. One of this year’s most talked-about collaborations began with a tweet from Neil Druckmann, the co-president of the video game developer Naughty Dog. “Neil was here at the park back in December of 2021 and tweeted out that he would love to talk to someone about how to make The Last of Us video game into a haunted attraction for Horror Nights,” says Aiello. “I saw it and I DMed him and that’s literally how we started two years ago.”
Aiello says the variety of houses and the attention to detail are hallmarks of Halloween Horror Nights. “For example, part of the journey of playing The Last of Us video game is collecting items and finding keycards to open doors. So throughout that house, we’ve planted items that gamers will recognize.” It’s done in a low-key way by design, says Aiello. “If out of the corner of your eye, you notice something, then as a gamer, it further authenticates the experience for you. That is exactly why we did it.”
In the end, Niles believes that Universal’s success boils down to a deep mutual respect with the horror audience. “They are fiercely loyal to their fans, because they understand that that loyalty is returned if you work really hard at giving them something outstanding,” he says. “The Halloween fan base is perhaps the most loyal of any themed fan bases out there. They’re more loyal, I believe, than regular theme park fans. They’re more loyal than Disney or Marvel or Star Wars or Jurassic Park fans. And for these people, it is truly a lifestyle.”
“Everybody is scared of something, and that’s what is so cool,” adds Aiello, who has clearly thought a lot about why so many people find fun in fear. “For anyone going through our attractions, it is about adrenaline, it’s about tension. There’s a rite of passage with being brave enough to go through the door and then the elation of making it to the other side.” And Aiello counts himself and his team among that fan base. “If we weren’t creating the event, we’d be out there buying tickets to come to it.”
Perhaps the biggest testament to the success of HHN is that Universal is building a permanent 110,000-square-foot Halloween Horror Nights venue to open year-round in Las Vegas, with an eye to expanding to other domestic and international locations. “We are excited to give our global fan base yet another way to get scared and have fun with fear in the heart of Las Vegas, the perfect place for this type of unique concept,” said Page Thompson, president of new Ventures at Universal Parks & Resorts, in the January announcement. No opening date has been given.
“Ultimately,” says Aiello, “what we want is for people to have one of the best Halloween parties they’ve ever had in their life.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/09/29/universal-scares-halloween-horror-nights/