At Halloween Horror Nights at the Universal Studios theme parks, anywhere with a cashier is a safe zone. If you are in a shop or a restaurant, it’s an unspoken place where you can get a respite from the scarezones filled with performers in gory makeup and wielding prop chainsaws.
But in the opening days of the Hollywood and Orlando parks’ annual fright fest this year, viral clips on YouTube and TikTok showed something different in the shops: a mime-lie clown with a rictus grin holding a broken-off table leg with forks, knives and nails sticking out of it, and a shirt with his face on it. The message is clear: Buy it or die.
This is Art the Clown, the infamous villain of this decade’s boundary-pushing slasher series “Terrifier.” From its humble origins as a 2016 indie film that cost $55,000 to make, “Terrifier” has built a reputation as the new standard for how gory and violent a movie can get and is now being included as part of one of the key events for a Universal theme parks division that generated $8.6 billion in revenue last year.
In doing so, Art has continued a proud tradition of horror films going from indie underdogs to zeitgeist definers, a tradition largely fueled by slasher villains who have pushed the boundaries of entertainment.
After all, New Line Cinema was called “The House That Freddy Built” because of how “Nightmare on Elm Street” catapulted the studio from distributor to mini-major in 1984. “Friday the 13th” was the first independently produced slasher film to get a major studio distribution deal via Paramount Pictures, and it made Jason Voorhees into a Halloween icon. But after the turn of the century, the fantastical killers of that era gave way to more grounded foes like John Kramer in “Saw” and occult figures like Annabelle in “The Conjuring.”
At the same time, Halloween Horror Nights — where guests weave through themed “houses” and are continually spooked by performers in costumes who aim to make them scream in terror — was steadily growing in popularity, so much so that John Murdy, executive producer of HHN at Universal Studios Hollywood, got his pick of the litter when it came to what IP would be turned into mazes for the event.
Since Murdy arrived in 2005, he has helped create mazes based on Universal-owned characters like Dracula and Frankenstein, Jordan Peele’s “Us,” and Blumhouse films like “The Black Phone.” But he’s also been able to work with horror hits from outside the studio like Freddy and Jason, AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and even music stars like The Weeknd and Black Sabbath.
But while Murdy has fond memories of those mazes, he’s never had an opportunity to work with a brand new slasher villain — until the indie studio Cineverse released “Terrifier 3” last year. Even before Damien Leone’s gorefest became the highest grossing unrated film ever with $54 million at the U.S. box office, Murdy began seeing Horror Nights attendees wearing shirts with Art’s face around the Universal parks.
“The fans would come up to us and tell us, ‘You’ve gotta do ‘Terrifier’ next year,’ and I had no idea what that was,” he told TheWrap.
Murdy began having preliminary talks with Leone and producer Phil Falcone prior to the release of “Terrifier 3,” but its place in this year’s Horror Nights lineup was sealed after he attended a Tuesday night screening at a theater near his home in Letterkenny, Ireland, where he stays with his family for most of the year when not prepping for HHN. To his shock, the ticket he bought was the last available seat in the auditorium.
“It was beating ‘Joker 2’ at the box office. That’s when we knew Art had gone mainstream,” Murdy said. “Fortunately, we were already working with Damien at that point, so everything was lining up at just the right time.”
From the beginning, Leone and Murdy agreed that to satisfy the “Terrifier” faithful, Art’s theme park debut would need to capture the same expectation-defying, boundary-pushing spirit of the films. This is where Murdy got the idea of breaking Universal’s long-established rule of shops and restaurants being off-limits areas for Horror Nights’ “scareactors.” As HHN has grown in popularity, so has the number of Los Angeles and Orlando locals who attend every year and know every detail of the event.
It’s those people who Murdy wanted Art to really mess with.
“I wanted Art to feel like ‘Where’s Waldo?’. I wanted it to feel like he could show up anywhere in the park at any given moment, especially in the places where our most loyal fans know they aren’t going to encounter any scareactors.”
That decision has made Art the most talked about part of this year’s Horror Nights among devotees that have shown up over the past month, providing plenty of TikTok-ready moments. On one mid-September night in Hollywood, he was spotted hiding among the t-shirt racks in his “Terrifier 3” Santa suit to scare unsuspecting shoppers, plucking fries off the plates of park-goers at the Jurassic Cafe and chewing them with his mouth open, and making a beeline for anyone who looked like a theme park influencer livestreaming their visit.
And while the restrooms still remain a boundary, Art has been spotted standing impatiently right outside, waiting for the doors to open to give folks who just finished washing their hands a shock.
“We put all the scareactors playing Art through what was basically mime school,” Murdy explained, noting that they even got input from Art’s onscreen actor, David Howard Thornton, on how the Horror Nights crew could best emulate the character. Some of the gruesome gags that have unfolded at the park came from Murdy, but others have been completely improvised.
“He sat down next to these people eating food. They had no idea what was going on, and he’s pulling things out of his sack until he starts pulling out this long string of intestines like it’s a magician’s scarf gag. And once he’s pulled it all out, he started doing jump rope with the intestines!” Murdy recalled. “I just thought that was brilliant, and it’s a testament to the veteran actors that we’ve brought back year after year.”
But if Art’s spontaneous appearances are meant to be darkly fun, the “Terrifier” maze is designed to unnerve, disturb and make one want to reach for the brain bleach. Inspired primarily by the grisly funhouse in “Terrifier 2,” Halloween Horror Nights’ take on Leone’s films eschews an approach commonly taken by Murdy and his team where the whole house reenacts the plot.
Instead, the maze is designed as if it were a shrine built by Art to honor his most infamous kills, with plenty of gore and viscera throughout. In one gag reflex-inducing room, bodies are strewn across a feces-filled bathroon, with the smell of excrement pumped in. Murdy admitted that as the effect was added during the final weeks leading up to Horror Nights’ launch, he and other crew members would come home with their clothes soaked in the putrid scent, earning complaints from his wife.
But even that pales in comparison to the maze’s final room, which in keeping with the “Terrifier” spirit features something HHN has never done before: water effects. As guests get herded towards the exit, water sprays over them to create the effect that Art is literally raining blood upon them. The room needs to be blasted with high speed carpet dryers at the end of every night of operation to make sure that it can get through two months of Horror Nights without mold and mildew building up.
“In the Orlando version, we had the space to offer a dry path for people who didn’t want to get wet. But we didn’t have that for Hollywood so we just decided, ‘Nope, you have no choice, you’re getting wet,’” Murdy said with a grin.
He reassured fans that as evening temperatures drop over the course of October, the intensity of the “blood rain” can be dialed back so that attendees won’t spend the rest of the night wet and shivering. But during the first few nights of operation in Hollywood as an early September heatwave gripped Southern California, season passholders have reported coming out of “Terrifier” drenched.
“I was parking my golf cart [on opening night] and we had cleared the park and it was dark,” recounted Murdy. “I was walking past the maze and I just saw a trail of water coming out the exit from people carrying it out with them.”
Horror has become a cornerstone of Universal’s appeal with theme park lovers, and its recent history reflects how they’ve leaned into that. Its freshly opened Orlando theme park, Epic Universe, has an entire section dedicated to the studio’s classic monsters with rides inspired by Frankenstein and the Wolfman. This past August, a year-round Universal horror attraction was opened in Las Vegas with attractions based on “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and “The Exorcist” – both with extensive history at Halloween Horror Nights – among the offerings.
Because of that willingness to bring back popular IP for multiple years, Murdy doesn’t rule out the possibility of “Terrifier” returning to HHN in future years, especially since filmmaker Leone has promised at least two more films in the series.
Meanwhile, the movies that are already out continue to draw in viewers. According to Cineverse, “Terrifier 3” has stayed as the most-watched film on its boutique streaming service Screambox since its release back in February. This month, to help promote its inclusion at Horror Nights, Universal added the film to Peacock where in its opening week it cracked the top 10 most-watched titles alongside mainstream fare like “Law & Order: SVU” and “The Traitors.”
Murdy expressed his gratitude to Leone for being such a great collaborator and for giving him the sort of character he’s dreamed of working with for so long.
“Damien got his start as a makeup artist, and I think that’s what gave him the experience to know what makes a great horror character. All it took was time, and the audience has embraced Art,” he said.
