Take a look inside the Five Nights at Freddy’s house at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights. It looks like a real Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza location right out of the mind of game creator Scott Cawthon and Emma Tammi’s cinematic adaptation.
io9 was invited to a behind-the-scenes walkthrough of the Hollywood attraction based on the video game and Blumhouse film franchise, opening at HHN ahead of December’s Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. Creative director John Murdy took us through to highlight the incredible work done between Horror Nights, Cawthon, and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
The latter provided incredible puppets to bring the iconic FNAF characters to haunting life, powered by Universal’s own team of animatronic engineers. “Going back to our Chucky house, we have a group that works for our tech services department that are young mechanical engineers—they just happen to all love Horror Nights and a few years ago they were coming to us and saying, ‘Hey, we’d love to work with you guys and try to do actual animatronics, which we’ve never done.’” Murdy shared. The Chucky animatronics in the HHN attraction inspired by the Syfy series featured pint-sized and giant versions of the terror titan killer doll.
Murdy continued, “We’ve gotten a lot more technologically advanced with the skillset of this particular group, so they built like 17 animated Chuckys that year we did Chucky, and then last year they built a lot of stuff for A Quiet Place. This year they’re doing the T-60 [from Fallout] for us and they’re also doing the hero Freddy Fazbear [as a] fully electronic character.”
He shared about getting to combine tech with the practical elements of their haunted houses, in particular FNAF, which has been a top-requested property for the event. “A lot of this is simply fan wish fulfillment. It’s like, OK, let’s go for it; let’s give them the houses they’ve been dying to get. And that kind of rolled through the whole development process. This house was developed a little differently than all our other houses up to this point. We always collaborate with our sister park in Orlando, but usually that collaboration is more along the lines of, ‘OK, what’s the main story we want to tell?’ [And] when we made our list of what we wanted from the movie based on the first movie to be in this house, there was nothing we didn’t do. We got every single thing on our list.”
The traditional haunt is, of course primarily scareactors in costumes, but for Five Nights at Freddy’s, the challenges posed really needed safer solutions for performers first and foremost. Reaching out to Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which worked on the puppets used in the Blumhouse FNAF film and on Universal Fan Fest Nights, was the obvious course of action.
“The other big thing we knew early on was that in order to pull this off, we really needed to work with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. [They] had to build so many creatures and they had to learn how to do it for us,” Murdy explained. “It’s really different when you’re making a movie. You know, with Five Nights at Freddy’s, [there are] puppeted figures, and there are guys in suits [on a movie set]. Guys in suits are out of the question for us because you can do that in a movie for—typically when the cameras are rolling—it’s like a minute or two until they cut and then [the costume] comes off. The performer can go to their trailer and chill out. That’s not how it works in Halloween Horror Nights. Our performers need to be on set for roughly about 45 minutes and then they’re taking a 45-minute break, and then they’re back on set. So we needed to figure out the ergonomics behind all of this as well as the aesthetics, and so it was a big collaboration with Henson. We’ve been in meetings with them every week for well over a year.”
The set immersing park guests into the environment of a Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza was also very important to the HHN teams and Murdy confirmed Hollywood and Orlando’s houses are virtually alike save for some small differences. Both teams worked hard to include as many Easter eggs from the film, such as kid’s art alluding to the yellow rabbit and the training video, which will play as guests enter a night of security guard watch.
Right off the bat you enter the restaurant parlor area with the stage, where the animatronics come to life with puppeteers supplemented by scareactors. “There’s a lot of puppets, but we wanted that human factor as well, like the classic jump scare that are kind of the bread and butter of haunted houses. So that’s where we’re using the ghost kids and we’re also using all of those guys who broke in and trashed the place,” Murdy said. Foxy is teased with eerie music as you venture throughout as if you’re Mike Schmidt (played by Josh Hutcherson in the movies) on a security shift.
As you go along, you’ll encounter not only Freddy but also come face to face with Chica with Carl the Cupcake, Bonnie, Foxy, and of course Yellow Bonnie. In order to really capture how these set-piece fights will be effective, Murdy described the mechanics of the scare with Freddy Fazbear.
“In the Chucky house, we created this character we called Mega Chucky. How that worked is there’s a track above the performer’s head and what’s called a traveler. The performer is kind of like strapped into this thing. The monitor for the performer to see is inside the figure itself, and then they’ve got shoes that connect to the feet of the character, so they’re actually able to kind of take a few steps.”
“So we did that for [Freddy] he’s right over here on a big traveler track, so he has the ability [to] come out from there [and] take steps [toward guests].”
You don’t have to be a FNAF diehard to enjoy the work that went into this house, but of course there’s plenty for the fandom, including a certain striped cup and foil ball on the security desk (IYKYK). The nostalgia was so real and Murdy revealed that scents will harken to the ’90s era of pizza arcade casinos so many of us grew up with.
“Like there’s something still lingering in this environment because it was a family entertainment center,” is how he described the aromatics of the house. “[A place] where they served a lot of pizza and a lot of popcorn and a lot of that kind of stuff. I think in the showroom, it’s more of a popcorn thing. The pizza’s [scent] in the kitchen, I believe.”
And of course the mood will be set throughout with the music from the franchise, with the iconic theme greeting you when you enter: “It’s particularly in the facade, and then the rest of it is all score music from the film.” As a Henson puppet fan, I’m stoked to see the characters in action and having attended HHN for decades, I can attest that the Five Nights at Freddy’s house takes things to a new level for theme park haunts.
The Five Nights at Freddy’s house will open the doors to Freddy Fazbear’s come September 4 at Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights. For ticket info visit here.
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