Editorials
Universal’s Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights Delivers on a Gory Spectacle of Fun (Video)
Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights kicked off last weekend, and I was able to attend the opening night to experience the fun for the first time. I give my in-depth thoughts on all of the attractions in my video review, so I’m just focusing on my highlights here.
There are seven haunted mazes and one permanent addition on offer this year, with included properties such as: Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Exorcist, The Purge, American Horror Story, Krampus and The Walking Dead. Some are better than others, but the overall quality of each of the mazes is great.
My favorite haunt was “Halloween: Hell Comes to Haddonfield”. It’s based on Halloween 2, so you start off in the house and see Dr. Loomis shoot Michael in a well acted and choreographed encounter. Then you make your way into the hospital where Laurie and Dr. Loomis stand off with Michael at the end of the film. The attention to detail is painstaking and there’s even a nod to Halloween 3: Season of The Witch.
“Freddy vs Jason” scared me the most, and I think that’s because it’s by far the darkest of the attractions. It’s split up into two different arenas, just like the film, with Jason’s washed in aqua green and Freddy’s illuminated by blood red fog lights. They clash machete and knife-fingered glove multiple times throughout the haunt, and there’s an incredible scene where the worm Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors eats a child version of Jason who looks awesome. My favorite scene took me through a small version of Camp Crystal Lake. The smell of pine trees was being pumped in, and the immersion caught me off guard.
The biggest surprise of the night for me was “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Blood Brothers”. It takes a humorous approach over a scary one, taking you through a barbecue restaurant and introducing you to the entire Sawyer family. Even Choptop is there! There’s a whole room dedicated to him actually, and it’s pretty far out. Leatherface makes a few appearances, and I jumped at a couple of them. My only complaint is that it’s very short. I would have definitely ran through it again if I had the time.
“The Walking Dead” has the benefit of being a year-round attraction, so the sets you get to walk through are incredibly detailed. There’s fenced in sections full of walkers reaching out, some choreographed walker vs human fight scenes and even recreations of some of the shows creepiest moments. Don’t skip it thinking it’s the same as it is the rest of the year, since for Halloween Horror Nights the walker count has increased dramatically.
If you’re planning on attending the event this year, I have two huge pieces of advice. The first is to spring for the Front of The Line ticket. The price increase is a little steep, but if you want to see every special attraction this year without going multiple times, you’re going to need one. The haunts mainly contributing to this factor are “Freddy vs. Jason”, “American Horror Story” and “The Exorcist”. Even with the special pass, we waited about 15 minutes for each of these, and the signs at the beginning of the line said that the wait times for regular ticket holders were over two hours.
My other recommendation is to start at the bottom and work your way up. It’s a bit of a hike to get to the area where “Freddy vs Jason”, “Krampus” and “American Horror Story” reside, and two out of those three will have extremely long lines so your best best, especially if you just have a regular ticket, is to make your way over to those as soon as the park opens at 7PM.
Halloween Horror Nights is an absolute blast, especially if you like to see grisly recreations of gory parts from your favorite childhood horror films. I’ll definitely be back with my friends closer to Halloween.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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