1st look inside Universal Horror Unleashed in Las Vegas
For the second time in three minutes we’ve just been threatened by a young lass in a blood-caked nightgown.
“You’re all going to die!” this one spits in demonic agitation, her tone suggesting that it won’t be of old age.
She points menacingly to the onlookers thronged around her as the face of some nightmarish-looking ghoul suddenly appears in the mirror above the fireplace — in a word: Ewww.
Quick, look up: Another girl levitates beneath a pool of regurgitated stomach contents that form an inkblot-like pattern on the ceiling, a Rorschach test of gnarliness.
“Out unclean spirit!” a holy woman commands. “Cease your assault!”
The possessed soul doesn’t listen — a stubborn minion of Satan, this one.
Ah well, we’ll be able to calm any jangled nerves soon enough at the bar with a glass of Green Dread, a potent concoction served in a large beaker whose ingredients range from Bombay Sapphire gin to dashes of human tears (at least that’s what the menu says).
It’s approaching 6 p.m. on a Friday, and we’re making our way through the maze of torments that is Universal Horror Unleashed, a new factory of heebie-jeebies opening Aug. 14 at Area15.
One of our tour guides, show director Nate Stevenson, introduces us to our surroundings as we enter “The Exorcist: Believer” haunted house, one of four here.
“Welcome to hell,” he grins.
Immersed in fright
You can smell the meat.
It hits the nostrils with a barbecue-y tang — kind of sweet, kind of gross, a blend of sugar and rot.
Noses aren’t the only thing being stimulated: Ears ring with the roar of power tools being wielded by a dude in a dead-skin mask who makes dinner out of people — hence the aroma of cooked flesh, piped in from somewhere.
“You’ll get sprayed with blood if you’re standing here on a normal night,” Stevenson notes as we navigate the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” portion of Universal Horror Unleashed, graciously sparing reporters from some gore-soaked notebooks.
As Stevenson explains, the goal here is to be as immersive as humanly possible — or inhumanly, as the case may be — from scents to sounds to the occasional arterial shower.
Each haunted house begins in a holding area with a story attached to it, usually articulated in an ominous voice-over monologue. (“I assure you, monsters do exist,” a disembodied narrator informs us at the start of the “Universal Monsters” experience, which opens in vampire hunter Van Helsing’s tomb.)
From there, visitors explore each house at their own pace, a general admission ticket earning you one trip through all four.
“Each individual experience is really curated,” says Kim Scott, Universal Horror Unleashed’s general manager. “You can spend as much time going through here (as you like) — or if you need to run through, you can do that, too. We don’t judge here.”
Every house features around 10 different show pieces in addition to a performance component of the experiences in which actors stage a violent vignette, of sorts.
“We’re actually going to do something we’ve never done, where we stop people and we immerse them in the story moment,” Stevenson says. “It’ll just enhance that story that we’re trying to tell.”
These stories progress linearly, unfolding as the movie does for those based on films.
To wit, the “Texas Chainsaw” house begins with a video screen displaying the iconic introductory scroll that prefaces the horror classic — “The film which you are about to see is an account of a tragedy that befell a group of five youths …” — before moving to the dusty gas station where the tale of familial cannibalism begins in earnest.
From there, we encounter every victim and every killer in succession — not to mention assorted pig heads and kitchen tables strewn with taxidermied armadillos and dismembered limbs.
“You can have dinner with us!” a maniacal voice exclaims. “You can have dinner with us!”
Oh, dinner will be served soon enough.
‘Everything in here is a set piece’
It begins with flickering lights and a burst of heavy metal riffage as the evil clown cabaret show gets underway.
“Welcome to the circus,” Vegas rockers Five Finger Death Punch growl on the song of the same name, which blares over the sound system as dancers in sinister face paint gyrate to a song about as subtle as the Bowie knives hanging from the ceiling nearby.
We’re at Jack’s Alley Bar, named after the titular clown, who soon appears with his female companion Chance. The two make their way to the Slay Stage, where performers engage in Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics, ostensibly with their lives on the line.
The 15-minute show takes place in the sprawling center area of the Universal Horror Unleashed complex, which spans a pair of bars and as many eateries.
It’s populated by various roving nasties portrayed by cast members — a buglike creature eyes us uncomfortably; a vampire queen sits on an ornate throne, while a witch-type character soars above us on a zip line that looks like a noose.
Visitors are encouraged to chat ’em up, learn their stories. (A creepy young woman flanked by her massive “twin” brother informs us that she doesn’t really like people that much. Imagine that.)
“We gave the entire building a story; the entire building is one big through-line,” Stevenson says. “That’s very unique to anything that we’ve ever done before. The idea is that every single one of these people that you can interact with in the warehouse give you different pieces of that story.”
And so even when you leave one of the haunted houses, the experience continues.
“We learned over the years that people come out (of a haunted house) laughing and screaming and then they want to sit and talk about it. Have drinks and stuff,” Stevenson says. “That’s why we put this piece right in the middle. Everything in here is a set piece.”
This extends to the cuisine.
At the Blumhouse Productions-themed restaurant Premiere House — where a young actor does a spot-on version of killer robot doll Megan’s signature dance moves and the child kidnapper’s van from “Black Hat” sits in the back of the room — even the menu stays cheekily in character, from the chainsaw-blade-shaped pizza bread to The Antidote Salad, whose dressing comes served in a syringe.
For dessert, maybe try the Death by Chocolate, topped by cracked vanilla doll heads.
12 months of terror
The cold gusts of wind hit you in the face hard, so much so, it really does feel like you’re confronting a farmland dust storm as red eyes glow amid a dense field of cornstalks.
We’re experiencing the climax of the last house we visit, “Scarecrow: The Reaping,” which dates back to Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights in 2017 before they branched out to Universal Studios Hollywood.
Unlike previous incarnations, the Vegas “Scarecrow” was constructed from the ground up instead of being installed amid the infrastructure of a pre-existing theme park.
“That was kind of the gift that we were given when we built this thing,” Stevenson says. “Usually we do an overlay on a park, so you walk out and there’s a roller coaster. Well, now as soon as you walk in that door, you are immersed from the time you walk in till the time you leave. You’re 100 percent in the story.”
And for the first time, the story isn’t seasonal, isn’t confined to the months immediately before and after Halloween. This is perhaps Universal Horror Unleashed’s most significant innovation: 12 months of terror.
“Horror has expanded through film, TV, these types of events, where people now have a place with it year-round,” says TJ Mannarino, vice president of entertainment, art and design. “In February and January, it’s commonplace now to see horror movies show up every month.
“Before, you’d watch how those things would slide,” he continues. “If it was moving into November, December, it would move to the following year, because they really wanted to capture that audience they thought was only viewing it in the fall. Now, they know they have the whole year.”
So, you’re telling us even April can be evil?
“You can make every month horrific — I promise, there’s a way,” Stevenson vows. “And that’s our job.”
Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.
