With Halloween just around the corner, horror fans’ thoughts are turning to experiencing that ultimate scare.
The genre continues to enjoy a critical and financial resurgence in theaters thanks to the likes of The Nun ($228.68 million worldwide), A Quiet Place($332.58 million worldwide), the continuing popularity of franchises such as Insidious and The Purge and acclaimed indie-shockers like Hereditary.
As they celebrated the launch of this year's Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood, I caught up with the faces of, and creative minds behind, some of the industry’s hottest hellish movies and TV shows from Poltergeist and Halloween to Stranger Things. We cover off a range of topics including being part of the event and what other hellish visions they’d love to see brought to life at the annual scarefest.
Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween
"It's hard to put it into words what it feels like to be back in the world of Halloween and Michael Myers, to be right back at the beginning. If I close my eyes, I'm back on the street, North Orange Grove Avenue in West Hollywood in 1978 with a young new crew of guys making this movie. Now 40 years later, I'm standing here at Universal Studios, I've driven up Tony Curtis Drive and Janet Leigh Drive to get here to talk to you, it is surreal. It's a family affair, and it's very exciting for me. Making the new Halloween has been an amazing experience and response has been great. There will be people who don't like it, but the overwhelming support from people who have seen it has been very gratifying. You want to know if I've spoken to anyone about a sequel? I got nothing for you. A movie I would love see turned into a maze here at Halloween Horror Nights would be The Bad Seed, it's a classic. I would love to see Rhoda Penmark running around the maze and attacking people. I love Halloween, I don't trick or treat, but I leave candy out every year, but nobody comes by my house to take it."
Jason Blum, CEO, Blumhouse Productions
"2018 is a vintage year for Blumhouse here. We have The First Purge maze, and we have another Horrors of Blumhouse, and it's our 10th year of working with the guys at Halloween Horror Nights, so I'm very excited. That said, we only have two of six mazes, there are four more, I'd love for us to do all six so I'm waiting for that. We have a few years to get there. I'm looking forward to seeing what they've done with Universal Monsters. You're right in saying we're interested in the Dark Universe and if we made that happen then John Murdy would absolutely be our first stop, but there are a lot of miles between here and there. Halloween is the first preexisting IP that we've taken on at Blumhouse but Spawn and Five Nights at Freddy’sare two others that we're taking on, and I'm interested in doing more of it. And I had no idea that Nicolas Cage wants to work with Blumhouse, I'm a huge fan of his, and I love that he's a huge fan of ours. Seriously, I'd love to have him in a Blumhouse movie; he'd be great. I see him as perhaps a very concerned father of a teenage boy who has had something terrible happen to them. It would be amazing. I'm going to have to figure that out."
John Murdy, Creative Director, Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights
"One that I've had up on the board in my office every single year that I've ever done Halloween Horror Nights, this is going back to 2006, was the Universal Monsters. Every year I had it on there, and every year I took it off because I'm a huge fan of these films. That's the whole reason I do what I do it and, frankly, I was afraid to try to take that property and translate it to a modern audience. This year I decided that after 13 years it was time to face my fears and tackle them. We spent an awful lot of time on research on our own and tried to figure out what our spin on the Universal Monsters was going to be. Luckily I had an ace up my sleeve, my good friend Slash, who I called up right away as soon as I knew we were going to do it and he created this fantastic score for each of the sections of the maze and each of the monsters - he's scored the entire maze. It was such a blessing to get to work with Slash again and get to have him be a part of this.
Jason Blum and Blumhouse have a considerable presence here again this year, more prominent than ever, but we didn't do their version of Halloween. The movie is coming out soon, and it's obviously a big relaunch for the film series, and there are a lot of spoilers we didn't want to give away in a maze but maybe next year. Instead, we're doing a Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. We're just working our way through the Halloween catalog as we've done the original and the sequel and third film has always had cameos in all of the Halloween mazes we've done in the past and this year is no different."
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