In a first for the event, Universal Orlando Resort kickstarted spooky season on August 11 this year with Behind the Screams: Unmasking the Horror tours, giving us a chance to look inside three original houses for Halloween Horror Nights 33.
Behind the Screams: Unmasking the Horror
In the past, these lights-on guided tours have only been available after the start of the event. This year, Universal is experimenting with early access. The other Unmasking tour, which sees behind the scenes of six houses, is not available until September. For our tour, we had the opportunity to go inside The Museum: Deadly Exhibits, Slaughter Sinema 2, and Triplets of Terror.
Warning: This article will contain photo and trivia spoilers for Halloween Horror Nights. The images will also contain gory/graphic content typical for Halloween Horror Nights. Viewer discretion is advised.
On Behind the Screams tours, guests are taken through select houses by an RIP (the spooky version of VIP) tour guide. Audio and video recording are strictly prohibited, but photos are allowed in certain areas as instructed by the guide. Below is a sampling of the horrors that await guests this season. We won’t give everything away as we highly recommend these tours and don’t want to spoil all their secrets.
The tours begin at $99 for the 3-house version and $180 for the 6-house version. The lineups are different, so there are no repeats between the two tours. This means that one house is excluded each year — for 2024, A Quiet Place will not be offered on either tour. (The excluded house is often a big-name Intellectual Property for a variety of reasons. These IPs also often severely restrict the available areas for photos. For example, The Last of Us was included on last year’s 3-house tour, but only allowed photos in three small areas.)
Bookings for Behind the Screams tours can be made online.
Inside Three Original Houses
The Museum: Deadly Exhibits
The first of the original houses on the tour is The Museum: Deadly Exhibits. The house takes us inside the Museum of International Folklore, where the latest exhibit has opened: The Rotting Stone. The Stone is said to be cursed, but so are a lot of ancient artifacts. What could possibly go wrong?
The house is set up like a museum and the sets are not inherently scary (though there are some dead bodies already inside). We’re entering after hours, so the victims are all museum employees. Some Scareactors are portraying artifacts and objects inside that have been affected by the Rotting Stone, like a possessed desk.
The Rotting Stone is part of the museum’s exhibit on “Humanity’s Stories of Death.” (That’s not ominous at all).
We enter the museum’s lobby to a juxtaposition of Kids Culture flyers versus the dead body across the room.
Behind the Screams tours allow guests to see details like these fully-fledged brochures discussing the exhibit.
The rot is already present in the lobby, having spread all the way from the Rotting Stone’s home at the end of the exhibit. The building is decaying badly enough that displays from the floor above are falling through.
Here’s that body. This poor museum employee was an unfortunate victim of the collapsing ceiling. The rot is magical in origin, which is why it presents in glowing blues and reds instead of organic tones.
Instead of leaving this clearly dangerous environment, we proceed to tour the Humanity’s Stories of Death exhibit, starting with Ancient Mesopotamia. The folklore included in the house is all fictional — no historical mythology has been represented, though influences were drawn from stories around the world.
There’s another body, more graphically mangled, but we keep going anyway.
We were lucky enough to visit while lighting effects were turned on, giving us a look at the rot.
Some of it manifests in decay and destruction, as above, and some as the rot corrupting artifacts, as with the mask pictured here.
We also ran into an old friend — HHN Bear.
Another gallery in the exhibit features goblins. The buildings have false fronts, made using scrim, that will showcase humans being cooked for a goblin feast when lit from behind.
Each part of the exhibit has a placard detailing the contents and showing where in the world the folklore “originates.” A narration will play throughout the house as if we are partaking in an audio tour of the museum, and the placards feature the indicators you’d find in a real museum to select the appropriate audio.
At last, we come upon the Rotting Stone. The signage was clearly one of the first things to be consumed. In a recurring theme this year (at least from the houses we already toured), there is no clear resolution to this house. Nobody stops the Rotting Stone. In fact, we witness an escalation at the end, and the implication is that it will continue to curse and rot in the future.
Slaughter Sinema 2
Slaughter Sinema 2 is a sequel to one of the previous original houses in Halloween Horror Nights history (Slaughter Sinema from HHN 28). Like its predecessor, it features a series of horror B-movies playing out before our eyes. The facade is the same — a rundown drive-in movie theater in Carey, Ohio. At night, projections will play on the dilapidated screen.
We were fairly limited on photographable scenes in Slaughter Sinema 2, but a first look was given to USA Today along with some exclusive details from Laura Sauls, one of the masterminds behind the event.
We enter the same drive-in lobby, which is not in great shape, though unfortunately typical of the average surviving venue (support your local drive-in!).
There are many reused props from Bugs: Eaten Alive, a house last year featuring, well, bugs. So many bugs. The HHN crew makes good use of props year after year, so expect to see many creepy crawlies all over the event. The drive-in has some well-populated fly traps hanging from the ceiling.
The first movie we enter is “Mardi Gras Murders,” where we step into a grizzly scene at The Jester Motel. Not pictured is the gratuitous amount of fake vomit all over this room. (Even the vomit is carefully themed — our late friends in this motel were enjoying a seafood broil, and the partially digested remains of their feast are visible in the puddles).
Irrelevant to the story but just as a fun cameo — guests can spot Mothman on a bottle of booze.
A tragic story plays out here. On the end table is an empty ring box.
The ring in question sparkles from our leading lady’s finger. She’s drooped over the balcony, where a Mardi Gras parade float can be seen passing by below through the use of forced perspective — an effect that makes objects look larger than life by playing with scale and dimension.
Actual props from Universal Orlando’s annual Mardi Gras event are featured here, and yes, “My Feet Can’t Fail Me Now” by Buckwheat Zydeco will play.
Talk about a nightmare before Christmas… (sorry, bad joke). The stencil designs may look familiar to seasoned HHN fans — they were used in H.R. Bloodengutz Presents: Holidays of Horror in 2011.
“Killer Kringles” is the B-movie featured here and the bloody corpses were plentiful. This room does feature the implied death of children, which some guests may find to be sensitive content.
The last room we were allowed to photograph featured a mainstay of many nightmares — clowns. Not just any clowns, though. In “Night of the Undead Clowns,” we entered a clown graveyard (not to be confused with a Carnival Graveyard — as seen at HHN 28) that has been polluted by the same toxic chemicals responsible for Bugs: Eaten Alive.
Bzzzcon dumped their waste without checking to make sure they weren’t resurrecting something just as terrifying as giant insects. That’s right, we’ve got Zombie Clowns.
Triplets of Terror
The last of the original houses on the tour is Triplets of Terror. We start out at the Barmy household in Toledo, Ohio — street number 3324 (see what they did there?). The Barmys are hoarders, but as always, the HHN propmasters are hiding things in the clutter.
A lot of foreshadowing can be found here in the yard and on the porch, like this dog food dish.
DoesTheDogDie.com doesn’t have a section for Halloween Horror Nights, so I’ll answer the big question for you now: yes. Graphically. If you visited in 2019, you might remember the bisected puppy from Depths of Fear — that prop is back again.
There are also several decapitations, as foreshadowed by these mutilated dolls. It’s almost like the Barmy parents should have seen this coming.
Another Bugs: Eaten Alive Easter egg is here in the form of a bottle of ExterminAir, the chemical culprit for the mutant insects.
Inside, we come upon the birthday party for triplets Melody, Harmony, and Junior. At least their parents won’t have to go on the evening news and pretend they didn’t see the warning signs.
Chicken dinner, anyone?
The triplets are seen at the scene of their crime before we jump forward in time, following them on a murder spree across the country. They can’t seem to move past this birthday, for some reason, and we come upon their preparations for a recreation.
This teen is a little preoccupied and doesn’t seem to realize there’s something amiss in the family kitchen.
Our trio leaves a calling card behind in the flour.
Remember when we said the dog dies? It’s the scene directly after this kitchen, heralded by an ironic “live, love, bark” sign.
To borrow a joke from our tour guide, locals may not recognize this murder weapon. It’s a snowblower! The triplets go from place to place, collecting everything they need for an unforgettable celebration.
We follow their trail through an eerie back alley before coming upon the scene of their final masterpiece.
There’s no way around it: this house is gross.
They’ve even brought their own presents as they strive to recreate the day they murdered their parents.
The entrails of an unfortunate man make up their birthday banner.
The fake cakes are pretty realistic, though our appetites are ruined by the decor.
Halloween Horror Nights 33 kicks off on August 30 and runs on select nights through November 3 at Universal Studios Florida. This year’s lineup includes six original houses (including the three we’ve toured here) and four IP (intellectual property)-based houses, and five scare zones. We’ll be bringing you full coverage of the event, so stay tuned for everything you need to know before you go.
Which of these original houses are you most excited to experience when Halloween Horror Nights 33 begins? Let us know in the comments.
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