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Inside Universal Studios Orlando Resort’s Hellraiser house, past the shirtless mannequin of a kneeling Frank Cotton and the narrow hallway where blue light seeps through crumbling clapboard, is a sight to show you: Halloween Horror Nights 35’s towering recreation of the Lament Configuration. Along with it, five to seven minutes of legendary suffering only possible in the world of Clive Barker’s cinematic and literary nightmare.
“When you talk to Clive, he says the puzzle box itself has to matter. It’s an invitation. It’s a threshold. It’s not a prop. So how it’s positioned in the house is very direct,” says Mike Aiello, Senior Director, Entertainment Creative Development, Universal Orlando Resort. “The puzzle box gives the guest the choice to open it, to go through the queue line and enter the box, just like the main characters in the film.”
Outside, art director Cam Carbia’s design sees the cursed, mechanical plot device flayed open, its “doorway” to hell speckled with embedded programmable LED lights, restrained by chains and ripped flesh. Inside, scenic designer Dylan Kollath constructed a disorienting labyrinth of pleasure and pain out of a big-screen world based on Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart. “When we pitched to Clive, he was very adamant that this haunted house would feature both,” says Lora Sauls, Assistant Director, Entertainment, UOR. “He made sure that our teams didn’t take out the sexual layer of those films.”
“Within the box, there’s this juxtaposition of horror and beauty. That aesthetically separates it from a lot of the other haunted houses we produced this year,” adds Aiello. “There’s sensuality to how you’re maneuvering through the spaces. There’s a ritualistic, sophisticated quality. All of those things are incredibly important in the experience.”
Through its winding, vine-choked and blood-splattered walls, guests encountered 10 versions of Pinhead, including several able to trigger pre-recorded lines from the film, all voiced by the character’s actor Doug Bradley. Joining Pinhead are The Chatterer, Butterball, Deep Throat, The Doctor, and more. Known as the Cenobites, these denizens of hell are no conventional slashers, notes Aiello, but people who’ve morphed into leather-clad, intelligent, torturous priest-like figures.
“There were so many assets, talkbacks, and books on how the Cenobites, with the really intense piercings and pulling of their skin, were created,” says Sauls while discussing the sculpt and makeup teams’ work. “When Clive’s partners visited, we put all the masks on mannequins with full costume, and they were blown away by Pinhead’s. They thought the eyes were following them.”
These alluring terrors lie in wait, tucked between spinning pillars of flesh, shadows of entangled bodies, bloody candle-lit tombs, automated floating chains, and new projection technology from UOR’s Epic Universe hotels, which Sauls says they “wanted to test out in one of our houses.”
Set to sounds of pleasure and pain, the house offers a mix of the team’s own spin on Barker’s universe, alongside memorable film sequences featuring Frank, Julia, Dr. Channard, J.P. Monroe and Pinhead himself. “We did include some movie moments we didn’t think were the scariest, but that we could make scary, and Clive agreed these were elements that actually tied in pleasure and pain really well,” says Sauls. “That scene when Frank goes back into his hell, and there’s the writhing bodies on those elevated tomb slabs? It was a moment we could put in, and have Frank deliver that ‘Who’s Your Daddy’ line for a bit of pleasure and a big creep factor.”
With the Hellraiser house, HHN 35 delivered the event’s clearest embrace of the full R-rated potential of book-to-screen adaptations. It’s also evidence of how the after-hours experience not only continues to honor the genre’s literary roots, but may already be converging with a BookTok-driven future.
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“We all grew up with Hellraiser, with Pinhead being one of the most iconic horror characters,” says Sauls about the property’s 10-year journey to HHN. “And working on Halloween at Universal for 28 years, a large portion of that was wanting Hellraiser once we started to work more with intellectual properties. But we didn’t know who held the license.”
That tide shifted a couple of years ago, after certain rights reverted to Barker. Using merchandising as a way in, the team finally identified the overall rights holder, who put them in touch with Clive, and three others tied to the various films. “In addition to being able to collaborate with Clive in person, we had all the source material to work with, and we really examined it. Not only the films themselves, but the stories, trying to understand even Clive with interviews of that time,” explains Aiello.
It was a dream partnership, and one that may not have been possible before modern IP franchising. “Back in the ’80s, no one was thinking about theme park rights when it came to Hellraiser,” notes Aiello. Unlike more current titles (think Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House), which are easier because it’s “very clear who owns the rights as contracts are now set up to address the different tendrils IP wants to attach to,” adapting older horror classics like The Shining and The Exorcist has often resulted in similarly lengthy or convoluted journeys.
For 2016’s Exorcist house, opportunities to collaborate with frequent partner Warner Bros. Studios likely existed, but the book and film writer William Peter Blatty’s use of a single location went “against some of the creeds we have for haunted houses,” says Aiello. Creating the maze became an exercise in translating themes over environments and atmosphere over spectacle, using Blatty’s claustrophobic setting, audio, and smells to emulate Regan’s “intimate, invasive and potentially real” possession experience.
With The Shining, the team had to lean on Stanley Kubrick’s vision, with author Stephen King and the director famously not seeing eye to eye. In line with Kubrick’s cinematic vision, HHN moved guests through the Overlook Hotel’s malevolent architecture through the lens of Jack Torrance’s fractured experience, rather than the movie’s linear story. “If nothing else, that directly speaks towards what every haunted house core value needs to be: that you never know where you’re going next,” says Aiello.
While some house adaptations have proven challenging in their execution, others have made repeated appearances thanks to their relationship with Universal Pictures. In 1993, HHN Orlando debuted The Psycho Path Maze, based on Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of the 1959 book, which returned for 1994 before two sequel houses and a 2012 lagoon show appearance.
“It was an opportunity to celebrate Hitchcock as a master of horror and suspense, and someone with a tremendous connection to Universal’s history,” says Aiello. “Psycho began with Robert Bloch’s novel, but Hitchcock’s adaptation gave it a visual and musical identity that audiences recognize immediately. That makes it incredibly powerful in an experience like ours.”
The Universal Classic Monsters have also regularly appeared at the event. The Invisible Man and Phantom of the Opera were part of the inaugural 1991 house, Dungeon of Terror, with almost annual appearances of them or other literary icons — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and The Mummy — across shows, scare zones, houses, and the HHN Tribute Store since.
“Universal Monster movies were my entry point into all this as a kid, and I backed into the literary portions. But the one that is my favorite is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Aiello tells THR. “Would I say it’s the easiest read? No, but there are attributes in that book that directly informed James Whale’s adaptation, and Mary Shelley begins Bride of Frankenstein. Those books are the inspiration and interpretation of what the Universal Monster films became, which is present in our event.”
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The Universal Monsters have also opened the door to HHN Orlando celebrating looser literary connections while embracing horror’s social commentary. Inspired by the 1935 film, itself based on a subplot of Shelley’s Frankenstein, 2020’s The Bride of Frankenstein Lives scared as much as it explored themes of autonomy, identity, and love. This year’s Sinners, partly inspired by Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, worked similarly. “Thirty-five years of doing vampiric characters, we know how to scare guests with that kind of monster,” says Aiello. “Sinners challenged us to make those vampires mean something more.”
But perhaps the best evidence of this was Nevermore: The Madness of Poe. With his poems and stories in the public domain by 2011, HHN took guests through the imagination of a fictionalized Poe and interpretative realms for works like The Raven and The Black Cat. “His work deals with fears that are incredibly personal: guilt, grief, obsession, the fear of death, the feeling that you can no longer trust your own mind,” says Aiello. “In The Tell-Tale Heart, guilt becomes something you can hear and almost physically feel. In the house, that offered an incredible opportunity to use sound, space, and a character’s unraveling to make guests share that anxiety.”
Poe remains the only author-centric house done at HHN Orlando. But with icons like Anne Rice and Stephen King regularly on our screens, Aiello and Sauls are open to doing more. “Castle Rock, which in [King’s] mind is the epicenter of all evil, allows you to go to fantastical places like The Dark Tower. That’s a really good example of a fandom that we are ready for,” says the HHN senior director.
Author-based houses can also tap a broader horror fandom while bringing new readers to a writer’s library. “If you knew Poe, there were details and interpretations to appreciate. If you had never read those stories, the environments and characters still communicated the danger,” explains Aiello. “That balance is something we always look for — rewarding familiarity while making the experience accessible to someone discovering the material.”
That approach extends to the event’s scare zones, which have featured dark, original twists on classics like Alice in Wonderland, and studio IP such as Jurassic Park and Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. “If a haunted house is the body of the book, a scare zone has to be the cover,” says Aiello. “In a house, we can evolve over nine to 10 rooms, change environments, give you different story beats as you’re journeying through. The scare zones are much more unpredictable. So the story itself has to be immediately understandable and layered enough to reward those that stay and observe, but not alienate those that quickly pass through.”
HHN Orlando used a similar strategy with its themed food and beverage offerings, as evidenced by this year’s Hellraiser menu, a selection of “horrifyingly beautiful” items, says Christopher Colón, Executive Sous Chef, Research & Development, Universal Orlando Resort. That included the Cenobite’s Kiss, a tequila-based cocktail featuring liquid heat bitters, as well as the Pleasure & Pain Brain, a custard with ripped teeth and skin vanilla cake pieces drizzled in strawberry sauce.
“In the first sip, it should tell you everything that you need to know: it’s seductive, but dangerous with a bit of boldness,” says Colón while discussing the drinks and food. “In the movie, they have a flayed face on the ground, so what could we do where it’s gruesome but at the same time, delicious as you eat? It’s the veins and the textures of the brain.”
HHN’s narrative approach to menus is also spreading to other branches of Universal Destinations & Experiences, including Epic Universe’s Dark Universe. “To go in depth with the storytelling, first with the novels and then the movies, was exactly our process with Darkmoor,” the chef tells THR. “We were creating a vampire restaurant using Dracula, where you can eat in these beautiful chairs alongside these beautiful murals. It was the perfect opportunity to channel everything that we’ve done for Halloween Horror Nights, but turn it into this sophisticated version of the event.”
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It’s not just studio IP like Hellraiser that’s speaking to fans of book-to-screen adaptations. The event’s original show, Nightmare Fuel, is gaining steam among a certain corner of BookTok. This year’s theme, Blood Noir, used acts like fire performers, aerialists, and a sword eater to tell a story about an angel’s descent into darkness, her transformation into a vampire, and her eventual empowerment alongside a supernatural lover.
The storyline expands the role of romance in a show that’s always had “dancers, great music, fire, and wow moments,” says Charles Gray, Senior Show Director, Entertainment Creative Development, Universal Orlando Resort. “Not everybody’s comfortable with that. Sometimes it takes a little bit of convincing, but I believe in it, and the reason I have confidence is that I’m the father of two young ladies and I have a wife. I know that romance can be a powerful thing — and not just for girls. For guys, too.”
The decision to include a love story alongside danger goes beyond a desire to appease certain audiences. “In horror, the feeling that it’s got to be scary the whole time doesn’t work unless you can take a breath. Experiencing joy, something sensory, or being distracted makes the next moment that much more potent. You need that pendulum swing,” he tells THR. “At the very last moment of the show, when they’re dancing together, he bites her and the whole crowd goes wild. They sometimes forget he’s a vampire. It’s the seduction. She and you get seduced into this darkness.”
For Stephen King and ‘90s movie horror fan Janelle Anderson, SeaWorld’s Howl-O-Scream BookTok-themed scare zone, One More Chapter, and Nightmare Fuel are examples of the crossover potential. “When I made the video summoning fellow book lovers to Nightmare Fuel, the male dancer in the video reached out and told me he was so excited. He showed it to everyone because they were trying to reach BookTok,” she says. “It is exactly what we are seeing in so many books right now.”
Anderson hopes future years can tap more into both book influencers and horror’s library of subgenres. “I would love to see more of the classic horror books come to life, but I would give anything for scare zones inspired by popular book series like Lights Out, Butcher and Blackbird, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Fourth Wing,” she tells THR. “Readers want to feel like they are part of the story. They want to dress up like their favorite characters, take pictures, eat themed food. It’s why companies like Broken Spine Society have sold out events every month.”
For Anthony Long, who opened horror bookstore Thrillerdelphia with his wife Tina after launching of their romance-focused Cupid’s Bookshop, his customers are generally “not trending towards romance.” But the stores do share authors, like Rachel Harrison (Kiss Slay Replay) and Clay McLeod Chapman (Devil Inside), thanks to a growing interest in horrormance. Like the re-popularizing subgenre of gothic horror, horrormance — which can include dark, creature, and paranormal love stories — is for people “not ready to dip their toes into the extreme section” but who are “looking for safety in fear and fear in safety,” says Long. “A cool mansion, a little atmospherics? That’s a lot easier to envision yourself reading.”
It also appeals to studios and publishers wanting to capitalize on the genre’s success beyond the fall calendar. “A movie like Wicker getting greenlit is really interesting, and does correlate to reader tastes taking a turn,” he tells THR.
The Hellraiser house at HHN 35 was mostly designed to excite a certain generation of horror fans. But some history, a little psychology, and even more industry data support the idea that the novella and its genre intersections have people chattering. The last few years have seen a rise in romance on TV amid the domination of horror at the U.S. box office. And while romance frequently tops U.S. book sales charts, horror is currently experiencing a commercial and critical surge of its own, including a 39% increase over last year in the U.S. That’s despite a major decline in American adults reading for pleasure.
Looking ahead, there’s not yet a blueprint for how HHN will continue leaning into the literary, but with 35 years of success in the space, “it will always be part of the conversation,” says Aiello. “There’s absolutely a never-say-never attitude about where our next inspiration might come from. We’re always looking for the next great nightmare. As for when we reveal it, you know us, we like to keep you in the dark just a little longer.”
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