The Reaping’ At Halloween Horror Nights 2022

While some of the best-known horror IPs have dominated Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood in the past, 2022’s event sees several original ideas scare their way onto center stage.

Of course, familiar fear inducers such as John Carpenter’s Halloween, iconic Universal Monsters, and the films of Jordan Peele and Blumhouse are represented, as well as The Weeknd’s nightmarish musical visions. However, this year, haunted houses based on original concepts and lore are significant parts of the event. Among them is Scarecrow: The Reaping, which I got a behind-the-scenes look at courtesy of John Murdy, Creative Director of Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood. He broke down what it took to create the hellish vision and what guests can expect.

How they came up with the concept

What I really wanted to do with it was ground it in a real place in time, so I picked the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In my mind, this is an ecological horror story because horror as a genre has always tapped into the existential fears of its time. Back in the 1950s, there were all the atomic mutated giant insect movies like Them! and the ones we made, like Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis. That was because the Cold War was happening, and everyone feared nuclear obliteration. These days, climate change is one of the major existential threats of our times, so I thought it’d be interesting to go back to the 1930s and tell an ecological horror story about man’s abuse of the land and nature taking revenge.

This history behind the horror

We created this old farmhouse. Dorothea Lange is a famous photographer who took all those classic black and white photos in the Dust Bowl, and we used a lot of them for research. We announced this house at the Midsummer Scream convention, and then I went, ‘Okay, now I’m going to give you all a history lesson,’ and people laughed. I was like, ‘No, I’m going to give you a history lesson.’ I went all the way back to the Homestead Act, which Lincoln put in place during the Civil War. Essentially what that meant was Manifest Destiny, where they said, ‘We need to overtake the land, go to the West Coast, give away 170 acres of land free to anybody who could pay the registration fee and fill out the paperwork and build a farm on the land.’ The problem was that all those people that did that weren’t farmers and didn’t know anything about crop rotation, which led to the Dust Bowl. We thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting fodder for a horror story.’ So the scarecrows are the Silent Sentinels of the land. They’re quietly watching all of this through the generations and are in league with the crows and nature itself. Anybody who didn’t migrate, because the Dust Bowl was the most significant mass migration in the U.S. up to that point, the scarecrows are taking them and turning them into human scarecrows in awful, nasty ways.

The devil is in the details

We spent a lot of time on the foliage and the greens work, so we have a person who has worked with us since the beginning of Halloween Horror Nights and takes care of this. I came in here last Saturday, and she was way up on the roof working the vines, and it’s just an immense amount of work to do all of this. They’re all over the front, but when you go inside, it continues. The vines are coming into the house, and as we go further in, they’re claiming their first victim, a little girl. You also get to see the farm people, who are starting to be turned into scarecrows by being stuffed. I’ve got a new effects person this year who is gung-ho. We’re trying to step up special effects across the board and doing a lot more with them this year. One day he showed up with something that I didn’t write into the treatment, it’s not in there at all, and he said, ‘I made a crow over the weekend that’s got a human eyeball.’ It’s a little animated figure.

Fresh blood

The guy who did the eyeball crow is a trained opera singer. That’s when he went to school for, and then he got into special effects. He worked with us briefly as a freelancer on our Universal Monsters house a few years back. The pandemic hit, and he was out of the industry. We tracked him down, called them up, and said, ‘Hey, how do you feel about coming back and working for us?’ He was living elsewhere and came back to LA for this, so this was just great timing. He’s constantly making stuff I didn’t write as part of the concept, like the bird. There is an intentional bird motif going on this year because there’s a seagull in Universal Monsters: Legends Collide, there’s one in this one, and I think there’s another in Universal Horror Hotel. It’s like, ‘Oh, maybe we could do The Birds?‘ It’s not a Hitchcock reference, but it’s almost becoming one.

Read all about it

I do a lot of visual research for our art department and our production designer. One thing picked up about these Dust Bowl houses as they were too poor to afford wallpaper or insulation hence the newspaper on the walls. These are all original, and I had to create all of them. I’ve probably written more newspaper copy than a reporter because there’s this and then in Universal Horror Hotel, we do a whole newsreel with 1920s newspapers, and I wrote all the copy for that. It’s kind of a weird year for that.

Scares everywhere! CONT
ONT
AINS SPOILERS!

At the end of the first section, you have your first encounter with the scarecrows, and then we head into the Smokehouse. It takes on a little bit of a different scenic look, and they’re butchering animals and stuff like that, but then it starts to turn into humans, and more farm people are being turned into scarecrows. After that, we head outside, and, of course, in those days you wouldn’t have an indoor bathroom, so you’d have an outhouse. We were like, ‘Oh, that’s an opportunity to do something disgusting.’ Next, we take you into the barn, and you keep seeing these crows everywhere you go, and that pays into something coming at the end. As we go through the barn, we’re getting attacked by scarecrows. Next, you’re in the rookery with all the crows, and you hear them going crazy, and then they poop on you. That’s when you head into the finale.

Kicking the terror up a notch in 2022

If you go down to our Universal Monsters: Legends Collide house, it’s equally as immersive and is, I think, one of the most impressive houses we’ve ever created. La Llorona is the same way. Obviously, in 2020 Halloween Horror Nights was canceled; I think Halloween was canceled across the board for almost everybody; then, in 2021, it was really difficult to plan for it because it could have all been canceled again. To me, that just felt like, ‘Okay, we’re doing a show again,’ and now it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ We’re stepping up our scenic elements across the board and we’re stepping up things we’re doing in the park. Aside from the haunted houses and the scare zones that we’ve always had, we’re experimenting with a bunch of new things this year. Last night we did one, and I was terrified, which is rare. Our makeup artist came to us and said, ‘Hey, I want to try something.’ It’s a stalk-around character, which means it’s a stilt walker, so it’s already up two feet in the air, but the performer is looking out of the chest, and the head is way up high. He’s wearing a special helmet that allows him to control this character’s head, and it’s a big black crow. So it’s this giant crow with a big black top hat and eyes that glow red. This thing was ginormous. It made our stilt walkers look tiny. I would be in a fetal position if I didn’t know what this was. It’s like a little science project, and we’re just experimenting with it. We have the Death Eaters in Harry Potter, which we’ve never had before; we have an area of our park near Animal Actors, which is a haunted forest. It is conveniently right by the bathrooms.

Killer new ideas that slay

We’re doing a little bit more original stuff this year. Initially, I was very focused on all that we were doing was horror movies. Then we did like every horror movie known to man, and then we went, ‘Oh, maybe look at television,’ and we started doing The Walking Dead and American Horror Story then Stranger Things, and we’ve broadened it to music as well over the years. Scarecrow: The Reaping is one of our original ideas, Universal Horror Hotel is an original story, but I don’t want to do an original thing just to do it. Anybody can do that and I want there to be a reason. We want to do is we want to have some unique twist. I tried to tie Horror Hotel into Universal’s history. We’re on a property that is over 100 years old, so I wrote an original story about a guy in the 1920s who meets a woman and marries her for her money and uses that to build a hotel underneath the Hollywoodland sign. It becomes the hotspot for all of Hollywood, but almost immediately after it opens, unexplained accidents happen, and people realize that this guy is behind it all. The hotel shuts, it falls in disrepair, it’s bought and sold a million times, and the current owners try to capitalize on its rich history and horror tourism, but his ghost and the ghosts of everyone he murdered come back. It’s a different vibe, modern day, but it’s got all the 1920s characters. It’s very cool.

Halloween Horror Nights takes place at Universal Studios Hollywood from Thursday, September 8, 2022, through Monday, October 31, 2022.