"Tales from Transylvania: A Conversation with DRACULA UNTOLD Director Gary Shore" By Jason Anders

Gary Shore, an Irish filmmaker from Artane, Dublin, spent seven years of his life trying to break into the business as a director. Completely broke, on social welfare, and six months into having given up on his dream of making movies, Shore received a phone call that changed his life. Today, he has a feature film behind him with Universal Pictures and multiple movies in the making. He responded to an interview request by taking the time to meet up with me at a coffee shop in Hollywood. He bought me an iced cappuccino and spent the next ninety minutes telling his story, which will inspire anyone with big dreams to endure the hard times...  

Jason Anders: It's pretty cool that your origin point of directing feature films is in telling an origin story of an icon. How did Dracula Untold (2014) come to be your fist project? 

Gary Shore: It was a combination of hard work and luck, initially. I had a general meeting with Jeff Kirschenbaum, the executive on the project at Universal Pictures, around 2010. I was showing him my previous work, some short form commercials, and he really dug it. When we ended the meeting he said, "let's try and find something to work on together." Two weeks later there was a shakeup at Universal and Jeff ended up becoming Co-President of Production. One of the particular companies who had a project with Jeff was Michael De Luca Productions and they had the Dracula Untold project for several years - it came close to being made a couple of times, but they never could quite make it happen.

They said they were interested in the version I pitched. I was really surprised because I had this skepticism about Dracula, feeling that we'd seen enough films about him at this point. However, having said that, I was very interested in the backstory of Vlad the Impaler. A few years before that I had seen a documentary about him on the History Channel and I put it in the back of my mind as being a wonderful story to bring to the screen. The hook that got me interested and touched me about the script was the opportunity to tell a dark hero story. I'm really interested in the tragic hero. I love tracking the rise of characters like Darth Vader, Michael Corleone and Caesar in Planet of the Apes (1968). For any filmmaker who likes dark material it's great to try and tell that arc, but that on its own wasn't enough.

There was an idea of family in there that I felt was interesting - how do you rationalize this mass murder at home? To dig into those details is what interested me. I told them I'd love to take a stab at this, but in the story Vlad's son was only a baby and I wanted to make him eight years old so that he could have a relationship with his father that actually resonated. For me, that became the center of the story. It's a father and son story, even though they had always imagined it as Braveheart (1995). It was the darkest ending I had read since I arrived over here - all of Vlad's people die, the people of the town kill their own children and drink their blood, and Vlad's son is the only survivor who says at the end, "I love my father but I pray I never see him again." There's no fucking way that is ending up in a studio film, but that's the ending that I would love to have.

JA: Were there specific movies that inspired you to become a filmmaker?

GS: I loved going to the cinema, I went every Sunday as a kid, but I never thought of it as a profession. I wish I had that romantic story where I started making films as a kid on Super 8, but unfortunately that's not the case. I was always into painting, illustration and drawing and I wanted to be a comic book artist.

JA: Which comics were you into?

GS: I was into Jim Lee and the Adam and Andy Kubert illustrations. It wasn't the stories that interested me, it was what was being drawn.

JA: What made you decide to go to film school?

GS: I ended up in film school by accident. I went to art college to become a painter. The way the system works in Ireland is that all higher education is free, so it's equal opportunity. I studied pretty hard and ended up doing better than average and had the option of going to this film school that wasn't portfolio-based, it was points-based. With my love of both film and art I thought that maybe I could go into advertising. I was a total failure the first year. I eventually got my first short made, and looking back at it years later I really thought, "wow, that's pretentious."

I always imagine it like you get into a little dinghy and you're out at sea - you can see the shoreline as you row away and want to see what's farther out. It's the same when you make shorts or music videos, you find yourself accelerating to a point where you say, "it's too far to go back now."

Eventually, I woke up to a phone call from Warner Bros. saying "we've seen your work, how would you like to come work for us?"

JA: What was it that they saw to make them call you?

GS: A trailer that I made for a film called The Cup of Tears, adapting Japanese animation into live action. I was really inspired by the techniques they were using back then in anime. It ended up being something that was quite bonkers as a script, which I loved, and the teaser evolved out of it.

JA: Which filmmakers do you really respond to?

GS: David Fincher, Terrence Mallick, Akira Kurosawa, Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese - they're great entertainers who delve into great drama and have all made masterpieces.

JA: Since the first director you listed was David Fincher, I'm curious as to if you've watched the Alien 3 (1992) documentary.

GS: Yes, it's fascinating.

JA: Have you had similar experiences to his?

GS: Absolutely. There's a reason you get hired as a first-timer on a studio film and it's a huge gamble that they put on the director. It's a lot more nuance than the bottom line equaling a job well done. Everybody goes in trying to make the best film that they can and at the end of the day it's the director who has to take responsibility. The editing room is a pretty lonely place because all of the people who were telling you what to do on set are now gone. Alien 3 I've always put up there in the crosshairs - it baffled me that someone of Fincher's quality could be so disrespected, they just didn't know who they had on their hands. There's a missed masterpiece in that film if they'd just go back to all those reels sitting in storage and put together a feature film the way he designed it. You can see Fincher in the griminess and desolation of that movie.

It's the same with Paul Thomas Anderson - when you look at Cigarettes & Coffee (1993) you can see that same DNA which translated into Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999). Fincher's DNA goes all the way back to his music videos.

JA: You and David Fincher have similar origin stories.

GS: I sent him a message a while ago about having a rough experience with the studio thing and we ended up getting coffee together to share horror stories, he guaranteed his stories were darker than mine. He's one of those guys who looks at other filmmakers and wants them to do the best they can and be given the opportunity to see how a lot of the nuance and the politics work in the system over here to help us avoid certain mistakes. He's championing the filmmaker and is incredibly generous with his time. It's rare, a lot of people are very protective out here, but he's all about passing it on.

(Dracula Untold merchandise)

I always had the Alien 3 thing in the back of my mind and I ended up getting into those realms during post-production, there was a lot of heavy involvement from the studio and it was incredibly frustrating. Our release date got moved forward, we were going to be opening up against Gone Girl (2014)... fucking irony. It's like you start out boxing and the first fight you get is against Muhammad Ali. This is the guy I've put up on a pedestal and looked up to on every aspect of what I do. I sent him that message before Gone Girl opened saying that I hope it does incredibly well because we need films like that to be made by auteurs like himself. He makes these very interesting and commercially difficult films - there are only so many guys on the front line who can yield that kind of power to make those films without compromise. For every one of those films that hits and is successful, it gives the studio and marketing an opportunity to see that an adult thriller can do incredibly well without having to dumb everything down to this PG world. 

JA: Do you have a commercial you're most proud of?

GS: I'm not necessarily proud of commercials for the very fact that they are a cynical ploy to help people buy shit. It's also hard to tell a story in thirty seconds. It started off as a way of just trying to get work and make a living. Had I been doing this fifteen years ago things may have been a bit different, it was all a little bit more in the filmmakers' hands. It was they heyday of music videos, commercials and auteur short films.

(Gary Shore's concept art for Dracula Untold)

JA: It seems like the way in is always changing...

GS: Everybody's journey is so different. If I could package that into a course I could make a living out of it. You can do something that you think will get a great response and nobody looks at it - when you just do it for yourself and it happens to get through it can be satisfying, but then you realize the easy part was getting in. Now you have to actually deliver something that has worth, meaning and longevity.

JA: Did Universal Pictures tell you what they saw in your work that made you stand out?

GS: My commercials were quite visual. My comic book and anime days came back to influence my style. Also, my use of green screen.

When I was making music videos I started doing a lot of green screen, only because I had a really bad experience shooting at nighttime where I didn't have lights and someone put grease in our actress' hair instead of conditioner... she looked awful... we were out in the middle of nowhere on some mountain in Slovenia near Lake Bled and it was freezing. It was a fucking disaster. I said I would never shoot somewhere where we were that limited again. I wanted to have green screens and do all my own backgrounds and all my own matte paintings.

Study to be a writer and study After Effects, that way you're not limited by everyone's problems. You're a master of your own destiny. If you can write well, and you can articulate it visually with modern animation software, you're gold. People will want to see it. Storytelling is the most important part. You're only limited by your imagination.

JA: What was your initial reaction to the first screening of Dracula Untold?

GS: It came in ebbs and flows. The studio was very keen to get it down to 90 minutes. There's a lot of wonderful elements that the writers envisioned and put into the story, this collage of great ideas that had taken them years to write. On their own those elements were wonderful, but as a story I was trying to figure out what it was. If I had more experience making films with a studio I could have spotted those mistakes early on. We did not have enough sub-plots to sustain a two-hour film, it wasn't The Lord of the Rings (2001) or The Hobbit (2012) where you have multiple strands of story all moving and meeting at one point, it was the story of one man. There's barely a scene in the film without Dracula.

JA: I don't think there could have been a better vampire for this film than Charles Dance.

GS: We were actually trying to get Gary Oldman for that role since he was Dracula in Coppola's film, he would have nailed it. We also talked about getting Christopher Lee while he was around, God rest his soul.

JA: I don't know if it was intentional, but when Dance licks the blood off of Vlad's neck it reminded me of that scene in Alien 3 where Ripley is cornered by the Xenomorph...

GS: That wasn't a mistake. I was doing that because of the Charles Dance connection and I wondered if I'd actually get away with it. You're actually the first person to pick up on that. That's funny. I was always asking Charles between takes about his experience on Alien 3 and he actually had to tell me to shut the fuck up at one point because I was asking too many questions. He didn't say that exactly, it was in a much politer way.

JA: It's interesting that you wanted Gary Oldman for the Dracula (1992) reference, but then accidentally ended up with Mauro Borrelli who worked on that same film as your illustrator for the "book of the dead."

GS: The funny thing about Los Angeles is that you have this concentration of great artists, filmmakers, writers, illustrators, seamstresses, directors of photography - Fincher's take on it is that you have twenty-five miles of this talent and you can fill your time with bullshit meetings but, ultimately, you don't have control of your creative future. The important thing about living here is putting in your time every week to meet these people, if you do that then it's the greatest town in the world... if you don't, it's just a waste. That's the only way I was able to get an illustrator with that connection, Borrelli just happened to be in town by a wonderful coincidence.

JA: Were there other intentional homages in Dracula Untold?

GS: I think the biggest reference in that film was probably to Predator (1987). There's particular moments such as the Turkish soldier shaving with the knife before the bats fly into the camp (referencing Mac), the heat signals (or bat vision, as we called it), and then Vlad just getting out of the water after he wakes up in the river with the big wide shots... you can almost hear Alan Silvestri's score coming in, very man versus nature. I think I remember counting 10 Predator references total. The biggest overt Predator reference wasn't in the film, we were shooting the battlefield sequence where Vlad and his men run out to fight the Turks - it was 4 a.m. and I blasted the end credit music from Predator on the loudspeakers. I told Luke before shooting one of his scenes to take his cue from the end of Predator when the device goes off and the ash is just raining down... walking back to the choppers, Dutch is beaten but not broken. He was just like, "Gary, what the fuck are you talking about?"

There's a couple of Spielberg references, actually - when the bats are circling the tower with Ingeras and Mirena at the window it's a clear rip of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), I was even playing John Williams' score on the set that day. There's a Goodfellas (1990) reference, the bit where DeNiro is smoking and the camera pushes right into his face and he takes the cigarette and stabs it out - I wanted to use that moment when the Turks first walk in during the Easter gathering in the Great Hall, I just push into Vlad's face the exact same way. If there were a cigarette in his hand he would have stabbed it out on the pig in front of him that he's having for dinner.

I made the film school mistake of wanting to get a long tracking shot like the one from Boogie Nights or Goodfellas to introduce the Great Hall. I had this idea of making a political drama with a Boardwalk Empire (2010) type story with everybody vying for a piece, which is what Transylvania history books were saying at the time. It was a political turf war. Vlad and his brother were put in there as puppet leaders and I wanted to get a sense of that with a long tracking shot. After about fifteen takes and half a day we finally got the shot, and then the studio heard about it and flew in the accountants and executives who all said, "fuck you, you're not going to waste our time and money on shots like that again." It was a good shot, but you've got to know what film you're making. It's just not going to happen on a big tent-pole movie. I wanted it there to give an impression of the environment, but there's just this appetite of the studio to move things along and get rid of all that stuff. You end up with this compromised vision.

JA: Were you a fan of the original Dracula (1931)?

GS: I think that's the world of Guillermo Del Torro, the fascination with old Gothic literature and classic storytelling, which wasn't my education or what captured my imagination. The films that captured my imagination were movies like Empire of the Sun (1987) or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) - these little movies about characters under pressure were my first impression of films with an engaging power over an audience that aren't just warm, fuzzy feelings. I absolutely adored E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), it gave me a gut-wrenching feeling at the end.

JA: You mentioned you saw The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at seven years old, how did you arrive at it?

GS: My dad. It was on during a Saturday morning close to Christmas and my dad just said we were sitting down to watch it. Every Christmas I watched it again and it became my holiday movie. It's those formative years. Unless you get exposed to the classics then, you can appreciate them in a different sense but it's not as engrained in your DNA. 

(Dracula Untold concept art)

JA: What else drew you to Dracula Untold?

GS: The original ending of the script - it was a total downer, but completely true to the tone of what it should be. Dracula should have ended up on his own. Alone. There's a love story there that a huge part of the audience responded well to, but for me that wasn't the ending. We shot a scene of all the kids being killed by their parents who drank their blood and at the eleventh hour the studio asked for that scene to be removed. I asked at what point were we going to make a Dracula film. My sad ending never ended up in the film, but the movie was a mild success for the studio and I don't think it would have been anywhere near that had all of those elements stayed because people would have reacted badly to such a depressing ending.

It's like I told you earlier, with the stories of Darth Vader or Michael Corleone - how is it ever going to be a happy ending? This guy has just sold his soul and is going to Hell. Purgatory. These tragic characters end up destroying themselves. It was dark, but we could've gone darker. Dracula isn't just shades of gray, and I wanted to go all the way into the darkness but I couldn't get away with it.

JA: Any chance that you'll be involved in the sequel?

GS: I think it would had to have done better financially to warrant a sequel. But who knows, there's certainly a core group of fans out there who would like to see it happen. I hope for their sake it does.

JA: What are you working on now?

GS: I wanted to focus mostly this year on a short film - my wife is having a baby in about four weeks time and I wanted to make sure I didn't have a film on the other side of that. I'm finishing it today, which will be a segment in the film Holidays (2015). I want to go back to the stuff that really captured my imagination. I've had a lot of mythological stuff sent to me and I don't want to work in a Medieval setting again.

I'm one of those people who can only do one thing well at a time. I like to pick one thing and then really go for it.

(Universal Orlando's 2014 Halloween Horror Nights featured a Dracula Untold maze)

JA: What advice would you give to someone who wants to be creative for a living?

GS: It's not absolutely necessary, but it really helps if you have someone at home who doesn't judge you for what you want to do. I was extremely lucky that my parents were supportive... and not in the financial sense, they just told me to do my best. A lot of people get stuck in a situation where their parents want them to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer - if it's a job that you don't want to do then don't do it.

There is no easy way to break through and make a living creatively, and in most cases it takes about ten years to even get in the front door. If you have parents who are supportive and allow you to stay home until you're 28, working in your room, that's what you need. I've worked in bars all night and creatively all hours of the day at home and had to just keep on reading, drawing, writing and watching stuff. You've got to put in your hours. A great chef is going to know the taste of good food because they've developed a palette, they know what is great from testing. You have to watch as much as you can and study as much as you can in order to be able to have taste. This isn't to say that I have great taste, but I know what I respond to and what I like.

You need to be prepared to put in a lot of time. I got to a point at twenty-seven when I was living in the suburbs of Dublin at my parents' house and all of my friends had started work two years earlier - they'd all bought houses at that point and were professionals and I was completely broke. I remember one night deciding between buying two beers and walking home or one beer and taking a bus - I remember walking home thinking, "I never want to be in this situation again." I was on social welfare and living at home with fuck-all options left. Literally on the breadline. I'd given up film at that point - about six months prior I said "I can't break into this" after spending the best part of seven years in Dublin working on it. Having someone else who really believes in you is what you need.

(Gary Shore's concept art for Dracula Untold.)

JA: That's an inspiring thing to hear from someone who just directed a big-budget Universal horror movie - there are a lot of people on the edge of giving up.

GS: In your country you're maybe going up against a thousand other people who decide to go into this business. People get distracted and that thousand people dwindles down to two hundred... maybe one hundred. Once you get to your late twenties there may only be five of you left. It's the very last people standing who make it through because eventually you're going to become competent and there will be so few people left to race against you that you'll start breaking away from the rest of the crowd and come into your own. You just need endurance and the support of other people.

JA: Since it's Halloween, let's close on your essential scary movies.

GS: The only film that ever scared me in a really psychological way was The Exorcist (1973). It still would. It goes to a whole other dark place that you just don't see in modern movies, with imagery that just disturbs. It's also beautifully structured with a very clever sound design. It gradually stretches between horror and normality, which makes the disturbing stuff work. Also Salem's Lot (1979) and It (1990). I enjoy John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) but it's not going to scare me, it's just really good storytelling.

JA: How would you sum up your life with just three words?

GS: Make your luck. I don't think anyone is lucky, I think you have to earn it.

Follow Gary Shore on Twitter at @GaryShore81

"Unmasking Halloween Horror Nights: A Conversation with Universal Orlando Director of Entertainment - Creative Development, Michael Aiello" By Jason Anders

It's been 25 years since Julie Zimmerman and John Paul Geurts launched Fright Nights (1991) at Universal Studios Florida, coining the term "scareactor"and orchestrating a "Ghoul School" for performers to learn the scaring techniques that are still making us jump out of our skin at what is known today as the premiere haunted event, Halloween Horror Nights. One of HHN's biggest fans (Jaws skipper turned Director of Entertainment - Creative Development), Michael Aiello, is also one of the key players responsible for the bloody good time which is officially celebrating its silver anniversary. Today he joins me to take us behind-the-screams of the Halloween party we're all dying to attend... about which you just might discover, you don't know Jack.

Jason Anders: First off, congratulations on a successful 25th Halloween Horror Nights!

Mike Aiello: Thank you! I've been a part of Horror Nights creatively since 2002 and have been through every single major tectonic shift that it's taken, and this year we have good bones to make up the skeleton of the event. Not only have we upped the number of scareactors and scare zones, we also did a conscious shift in our overall soundtrack. Where we typically do spookier, atmospheric texture-based music, this year we infused Jack's edgier, carnival rock star look into the overall soundtrack. I think it's subliminally changing people's mental game as they go through the park, even beyond the scare zones, creating an energy level which I don't think we've had in the last couple of years.

Another really great year for our scare zones was 2013 with The Walking Dead as the overall template because it all tied together and everyone felt immersed in a thematic the entire time. I think this year has that sensibility.

We try and put the same creative effort (and then some) into every event, learning from what we did the year before. We really examine the pieces and parts as it's happening and are already going into a creative concept phase for the next year. The theme park haunt event is a tough game because you want it to be successful while at the same time you're faced with the amount of people that come. A constant focus is on how to make sure all of our guests who show up are able to get what they want out of Horror Nights, it's 40% of our process.

JA: What were the conversations happening during HHN 24 about the challenges of living up to the expectations of a silver anniversary?

MA: We in Art & Design felt that it would be appropriate for HHN 25 to bring back Jack the Clown, who had not led charge of the event since 2007 with Carnival of Carnage. He was part of our 20th anniversary but wasn't key art or in the commercials, he was just one of the many icons representing our past.

Carnival of Carnage (2007) and Reflections of Fear (2008) represent two great modes the event can live in; 2007 was the first year we were able to have an original icon and market brands at the same time, 2008 with Bloody Mary had a complete storyline and everything tied together, and in 2009 it shifted again. Ripped from the Silver Screen (2009) had the Usher as an icon but he wasn't really represented in the commercial, it was the theater and brands like The Wolf Man, Saw and Chucky. The brands, because the business dictated it, began to really drive the marketing of the event... and successfully, too. Attendance would rise every year because of brands like The Walking Dead, which is a beast of a show. From that point on, all for great business reasons, the visual face of the event kind of went by the wayside.

For HHN 25 we wanted to bring an icon back, and if there was one that we had to bring back it'd be Jack. It was our want, but the need was to figure out a way to bring him back and still keep what we know is driving the average person who isn't a hardcore fan of Horror Nights back to the event, those who want to see The Walking Dead, Halloween and An American Werewolf in London...

(An American Werewolf in London at HHN)

JA: Did the success of An American Werewolf in London surprise you?

MA: We tried to do that maze for years, I have treatments from 2007 for it. I'll never show it to John Landis, but we wrote a sequel with a completely different storyline that we ultimately decided wasn't right because, as fans, we'd rather see the film played out before our eyes rather than this new story. Brass tacks, I think the success of that maze was the puppets. Those things have to work a hundred times an hour and that repetition has to be set and maintained or else it doesn't work. An American Werewolf in London also wasn't a lead marketing house but one that became a great maze because people just loved it. It was the difference in the scare application we hadn't really done before.

Your original question was about planning for HHN 25 during 24 - The biggest thing was figuring out the best way to bring Jack back, shifting him in a way that won't be too far from how the fans know him while also making him engaging to people who have no idea who he is or what relevance he has to Horror Nights. There's a majority of fans coming this year to whom he's just a scary clown; he doesn't have the reverence or the pedestal that he has for a lot of the hardcore fans.

We knew we wanted to do some kind of show bringing Carnival of Carnage back; the template of that show and its theme really began to inform the identity of the event. The first few words I wrote down were "rock show" and "festival feel" - edgier than Oddfellow's Carnival of Thrills that we did in 2007, with a lot of metallic-infused sensibilities. Leading up to the marketing, I didn't want him to talk as much. I wanted him to be a mystery for the fans who don't know him. We've been very limited with the interactivity Jack has, which is all calculated. We really wanted his presence to be bigger than him. We also didn't want him to overshadow the fact that it's our 25th.

JA: I love the animated logo of Jack with the saws on the sides.

MA: Brian Beauregard created all the merchandise designs and drew that logo based on a meeting where I told him I wanted a hand-drawn concert poster. Brian went to town doodling and nailed a really cool color, too. HHN has lived in this saturated tone for the past few years with browns and tans and dark greens being the color palette for The Walking Dead, therefore the commercials lived in that tone. We wanted to make sure that the key art, and the palette of the commercial itself, had brighter colors.

Getting Marketing comfortable with a non-IP figure representing the event was important, to really level the playing field so that this could be just as important as the brands. It hasn't been that way for a number of years, but for 25 it felt we just had to go down that route because we wanted to celebrate the fact that Horror Nights has been around this long and the fact that it's been a different event every single year. It's something we really take pride in. A lot of haunted theme park events don't do that.

JA: For my money, nothing even comes close to Universal in this category.

MA: I've been to Knott's Scary Farm and Howl-O-Scream... in fact, I have good friends who work at Howl-O-Scream including Scott Swenson who was there before moving on to The Vault of Souls in Tampa, which I hear is amazing. I think that every theme park event offers something uniquely different. Personally, as a haunt fan, I really love Howl-O-Scream. They do a great job and it's a really different feel.

(Michael Aiello)

What I think Universal has settled themselves into is an event that is literally split in half; we're bringing HHN to life with brands fans already know (which is key right now for the sensibility of the audience member that's coming) and the other half of that equation is the original content. We can play both sides of that coin. Honestly, I think the fact that we have sound stages to build mazes in is huge. For years there was a huge line that separated our tents from our sound stages, which we've been able to blur lately...

JA: You have no concept of Halloween: Michael Myers Comes Home being a tent maze when you're inside, it's an incredible design.

MA: Halloween was great, and I think it really began with the year we did Nevermore: The Madness of Poe (2011) in Tent 2 - the scenery in there was beyond anything we'd ever attempted before and it really paid off. It allowed us to be able to improve ourselves in a tent scenario so that there isn't as much of a divide. Obviously, sound stages have a scale to them... the facade for Body Collectors: Recollections (2015) is enormous and gothically beautiful, and being able to build 1428 Elm Street to scale inside the sound stage for Freddy vs. Jason (2015) is a great thing.

It's an aspect that sets us apart from anyone creating a haunted attraction in this industry (I'll separate theme parks from local haunts, like The Shallow Grave in Winter Haven which I'm hearing wonderful things about.) It's because of our history and the branded characters we have access to, as well as being able to fill the event's creative gaps with original content that the IPs aren't bringing to the table, that we achieve a nice, well-rounded thematically-driven event. The creators of these events all have the same passion and drive... maybe not all the resources, but I've seen some local haunts do some really creative things I'm blown away by that we'd never be able to do, even just letting in three or four people at a time... a scenario that just doesn't work in a theme park. Sometimes, though, there's these happy scenarios that occur where you find yourself alone in one of the rooms. There's a great haunt here called Delusion, produced by Neil Patrick Harris and Jon Braver, where they were doing amazing stunts like high-falls which would be amazing to have here.

(Michael Aiello & legendary filmmaker John Landis)

JA: Having grown up a fan of his work, how does it make you feel to hear John Landis speak so highly of the event?

MA: It's huge. It's gratifying and, taking my professional hat off and putting my total geek hat on, it's completely ludicrous to me.

JA: What steps did you take for Landis' suggestion to improve the puppets for this year's An American Werewolf in London?

MA: When we did An American Werewolf in London two years ago, we created those molds off of really great photography, sculpted off of reference John had given us, but we didn't have the original molds. Universal Studios Hollywood actually got with a guy named Pat Magee from the company Magee FX who had already obtained original molds and did recreations of the wolf. So when John told us to contact him, sure enough it was the next phone call I made.

Michael Barnett, who designs all of our make-up, called Pat and told him that we loved what he did for Horror Nights in Hollywood and that we'd love for him to collaborate with us. It was as simple as that. Once we got Pat involved it really changed everything. Those puppets just barely made it through the last night two years ago, so this year there's a whole different understructure - it was mainly bungee-driven before, now it's all steel cable with a metal understructure and also easier for the performers to move and manipulate. Being able to do it again and improve it was invaluable.

(Greg Nicotero, John Landis and Michael Aiello)

JA: What has been your most surreal career moment so far?

MA: Honestly, it's really every day that I'm engaged with the team. Having these amazing, well-known creators collaborate with us is great, but I also get to be with a team of brilliant artists and technicians every single day who are just as passionate, if not more passionate, as I am about Halloween... and that's saying a lot.

Everybody who works on this event, and this is fact, is completely invested in what Horror Nights needs to bring every year... on top of all the other projects they're working on. Our team is not only responsible for Horror Nights, but for every live component in the resort. To have a team able to manage all of those things while still putting forth the energy and commitment to this event, keeping it as authentic and engaging as possible, and giving these die-hard fans everything they want out of it is truly a testament to them and how committed they are to Halloween Horror Nights. Having people just like me who went to the event every single year as a guest, or worked the event as a scareactor, who appreciate all sides and facets of what it does and needs to do and never settling is important. This year is going to be tough to top.

(Original Fright Nights (1991) and Halloween Horror Nights (1992) banners)

JA: How much different is your job now from when you started?

MA: We've grown a lot, just from a workspace standpoint alone. It's dramatically shifted. The first year that I worked Horror Nights I was just hired on as a writer for Bill & Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure - I was in this tiny office in a trailer where the parking lot is now. It was this rickety trailer that leaked when it rained, but it was fun. The tools have changed, our designers work off of Cintiq tablets now... although we all still love paper. Every room is still designed on graph paper first. We conceive of a room layout like we're playing Dungeons & Dragons mapping out a dungeon. The personnel have grown - when I first stared working on Horror Nights there was only a show director and performance captain. Now I've got multiple show directors working on mazes alone with performance captains who are able to work with all the scareactors. I'm sure all the other disciplines are able to say the same thing about how much their personnel has grown.

(Greg Nicotero, Michael Aiello and The Walking Dead at HHN)

Being involved with brands has also shifted the creative palette, especially because of the approval processes. Every brand has a different approval process and differs in how involved they want to be. When we did Alien vs. Predator Fox was great, but they also wanted to be involved every step of the way - every drawing, treatment and sketch had to go to them prior to us doing anything. That's one end of the spectrum, then you've got Halloween where we became good friends with Malek Akkad, Moustapha's son, who is now the caretaker of the brand and said, "just get the mask right." That was pretty much the end of the process. He came a week before we opened to see the maze and offered some critiques. There's two ends of the spectrum - one that's heavily engaged and one that allows you to just go based on confidence.

JA: Are there any properties you've always wanted but haven't been able to get?

MA: There's a couple right now that we're working with who have been elusive up to this point, but there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. We'll see if it happens.

JA: Do you ever have moments where you have to say, or people say to you, you've gone too far in the realm of being too gory, gruesome or explicit?

MA: I think we've gotten really good at being our own gage of what we feel is appropriate, or what we feel a guest is either going to want to see or be comfortable with. Our mazes, although intense, never include nudity or excessive language. We don't go there. It's all about the visual intensity. It was a pretty extensive process just to get our guests to be able to crawl through the tunnel at the end of Alien vs. Predator (2014) - it was great, but it was a pretty arduous process operationally and safety-wise to figure out how to do. Every maze like that has an alternate pathway.

(Jaws Ride - Amity Boat Tours - Aiello's first Universal job)

JA: When you started with Universal Studios Florida as a Jaws skipper, did you have any idea this was the career you wanted?

MA: No way. Jaws was a summer job. I knew that I wanted to perform and earlier in high school I did some short films with Florida State University. I also did a lot of commercials as a teenager. Even while at Universal I did a few local commercials, so performing was the passion I had. Writing was something I kind of fell into; I loved writing stories as a kid, but it was just a way to get my brain to do something different. It was never anything I felt anybody would ever want to read.

Because I loved the show, I wrote my very own Bill & Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure while I was working at Universal. I had been cast in the show as Elwood Blues the year Blues Brothers 2000 came out, but was cut a week before the show opened because of time. That was my first really cool engagement with Michael Roddy and a guy named Jason Surrell - they were co-writers and co-directors on the show. Actually, Roddy hired me as a Blues Brother. I had the really cheesy script that I had written and I gave it to Roddy during rehearsal one night and said, "if you like this, feel free to take whatever you want. If you hate it, throw it away." This was back when we could accept scripts from people, which we can't now. He called me three weeks later and asked if I wanted to come in for four hours and punch out the end of the 2002 show, which was the first year at Islands of Adventure. He brought me in for four hours and we spitballed some ideas on how to end the show.

By luck of the draw, the next year he went on to do other things and TJ Mannarino (now Senior Director of Art & Desing) and Rick Spencer (Creative Manager) saw that I had written that script and they brought me on to co-write that next year's show. That was it, that was the door. From that point, it was getting to know everybody and putting myself out there to assist in maze creation and then just building from there. There's no real one path, just a lot of little things that kind of occurred.

The short answer being "hell no, I had no idea I'd be in the position I am now" - not only creating Horror Nights, but creating content for the The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and the lagoon show.

(Universal Cinematic Spectacular)

JA: The lagoon show, Universal's Cinematic Spectacular, is incredible. It makes me cry every time.

MA: Thank you. Thanks a lot. That is probably one of my favorite things I've ever been able to work on. That show is the kiss goodnight. That show is simply a love letter. I'd grown up there and loved all those movies. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was one of the first films I remember seeing in the theater.

JA: I love that you save it for the end, that the show builds up to E.T. being the finale.

MA: That was just selfish on my part because it was my first huge movie experience. You can't beat that score, it's an amazing finale. When you hear that score you think about the film, and if you don't get a little lump there's something wrong with you.

JA: Do you still have any involvement in writing Bill & Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure?

MA: I oversee it, but Jason Horne is the writer. We actually brought in a female writer this year, Sharon Yost.

JA: The response that she and Erin Cline received at 2014's Bill & Ted for the Frozen parody was easily the biggest audience reaction I've ever seen at any theme park show.

MA: Let me tell you, that was all her. That was a bit she wrote for her audition and Jason not only cast her but asked her permission to wrap it into the show because it was really funny. Because of that, Jason and I both really saw something in her, and once we had the nuts and bolts of what the show might be we brought her in to help brainstorm some other ideas and keep a show flow going. If you've seen the show this year, she wrote all of the Jurassic Park, Game of Thrones and Pitch Perfect a cappella moments. She's been great. And, again, it's a similar scenario - she came to the audition saying "hey, I wrote this" and everyone loved it and wanted to get her involved. That's how a lot of this works.

It's cool to start seeing similar career scenarios start to evolve, even at the capacity I am now. Half of being a creative leader is also understanding and knowing when you want your creative people to take it and run. I'm blessed in the fact that I've got an amazingly talented team that I can just oversee everything and say "that works" or "what if we did it this way or punched this up a little bit," especially from a Bill & Ted standpoint... I've done eleven of those shows now.

(Props used in Bill & Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure)

JA: Do you have a favorite Bill & Ted moment?

MA: Last year's Frozen moment was absolutely amazing. My favorite would have to be the 2009 show with the Land of the Lost set featuring Phil the Fanboy as the main character - it was the one year out of all of them that I wrote that had a main villain character with a complete arc. That show is rapid-fire sketch comedy, and in '09 we still did that, but I really wanted this fanboy character to be the villain at the beginning and then kind of be redeemed at the end where he discovers the fangirl who also loves everything that he loves. I really dug that one. That was my second-to-last Bill & Ted to write and direct and it has a special place in my heart.

JA: Those shows always have such great quotable moments. I just tweeted this morning, "They have sex with their taaaaiiiiiils!"

MA: We're in a constant battle with that character, but he worked again this year. Do we just keep doing it every year until that place opens? And then when it opens, what do we do with that guy? It's hit every year. I love that a gag like that can have sustainability for multiple years. That's just due in part to the fans who attend. Jack is Jack because the fans made him that way, we had nothing to do with that. He was built to be a representative of Halloween Horror Nights the one year that he did it, but it really was the fans who made him more than we ever imagined. I didn't create Jack, I was still an actor at that point. Michael Roddy and Kim Gromoll and the design team at that time created him never knowing that he was basically going to be the icon of Halloween Horror Nights.

(Jack the Clown riding one of the infamous Lake Eola swans)

There's a great picture, I'll send it to you if I can find it, of Jack in one of the floating swans on Lake Eola. There's another great one of him on a park bench downtown feeding pigeons bread. Very Krusty the Clown-esque. I played Jack in the park that year with Kenny and James (who truly is Jack, he was the one on the billboards.) Kenny and I were there because there weren't two more of James Keaton to play the role. There were stories of Jack delivering these jack-in-the-boxes to news stations and they'd call the cops because they didn't know what it was. No one had really done that kind of PR campaign before. Our media gifts that we send out every year are almost expected at this point, but that year no one knew what to make of this insane clown going to the courthouse and dropping a package off.

JA: Do you remember the first horror movie you fell in love with?

MA: It was Frankenstein (1931) and then Halloween (1978). Frankenstein was the first one that I saw at a really young age - I had an old black and white television that my mom had bought at a garage sale and they were playing it on one of the late night programs and I'd never seen it before. I was absolutely horrified. I think I was 6 or 7 and wasn't supposed to be awake. I have a very distinct visual of the glow from the television, and when Frankenstein was getting raised into the air I saw the flash of lightning hit the Star Wars ships on the ceiling of my room. From there I wanted to know more. I had no idea there were more Frankenstein movies. I went to the local video store to find them and they didn't carry those kinds of things. I developed an obsession for seeking out the classic monsters.

Classic monsters really were the building blocks for me, and then having grown up in the mid-to-late eighties it was all slasher movies. I remember being at my friend Wade Vose's 11th birthday party and we rented A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987). I was terrified when the lights went out that night. I was completely horrified that I was going to fall asleep and Freddy was going to come slash my wrists and puppeteer me.

I was asked a lot about what I thought the most terrifying scene in Halloween was when we were doing the maze, and for me it's when Loomis shoots Michael, he falls, Loomis looks over the edge and he's gone. Jamie Lee Curtis asked "was that the boogie man?" and as a matter of fact, it was. What terrified me the most were the establishing shots in the streets of the neighborhood afterwards that were empty. It was the camera just giving you a viewpoint of where he could be. I remember distinctly looking out the window in my neighborhood thinking, "he could be there." And then you have all the chaos of Halloween II (1981)...

JA: ... and the poor kid who gets hit by the cop car.

MA: Yes! And it just explodes because it's full of gasoline and he burns.

What I love about the character of Frankenstein, though, is that he isn't evil... he's abandoned. He starts having ill-will towards man because of how he's been treated. I've always loved that character path.

(Universal Studios Florida archway)

JA: When I was a kid, Universal Studios Florida was my film school. I still feel like I learned more from the Alfred Hitchcock attraction, Art of Making Movies, than I ever learned in film school. That's what is so cool about the reverence you give Halloween Horror Nights; there are future filmmakers leaving the event every year inspired to learn more about the content represented.

MA: I love that you brought that up because that's a really cool aspect of the last few years as we've been doing these passion project mazes like An American Werewolf in London, Halloween and Cabin in the Woods.

Cabin in the Woods wasn't one that Marketing knew anything about, they didn't know why we wanted to do it, and it ended up being the number one maze that year. We become that really cool gateway for people who didn't see these movies and when they leave, to your point, they are seeking the information out. It's kind of this reverse-engineering where we're doing it because we love it and know a lot of people will love it, but the fact that there are people engaged in these films as a result of coming to Halloween Horror Nights is just too cool.

JA: Have you seen any great horror films recently?

MA: Right before we opened the event I watched a movie called The Sacrament (2013) directed by Ti West. It's a very real, documentary-style film inspired by the true story of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. It was pretty terrifying. I don't know if you've seen It Follows (2014) but I'm in the camp that really loved it - it's all about a sexually transmitted curse. The soundtrack is very eighties and it feels like a 1985 horror film. It's very cool and worth checking out. I watched a slow-burn thriller the other night that I really loved called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), all shot beautifully in black and white about a female vampire who stalks a town.

I've also got my staples - I love to watch The Monster Squad (1987), Trick or Treat (1986) and Re-Animator (1985) around this time of year. I basically bring out my entire Scream Factory Blu-ray collection...

JA: I never thought I'd see bonus features for Psycho III (1986) and Scream Factory provided them.

MA: I just ordered Shocker (1989) and From Beyond (1986) from them. I love that they provide the slip cover with the modern art and then with the case you can flip it so that it's the original cover art on the inside. Also, if you pre-order you get a poster!

JA: What is your advice for anyone who wants to be creative for a living?

MA: This is a learned thing - a person is naturally creative but they may or may not know it, or they may not know how to unlock it, but once you do it's a muscle you must constantly flex. It's an actively ongoing mental state that takes work to keep doing. I've seen a lot of creative people fall because they fell into the trap of thinking that no one is allowing them to be creative, which is the complete opposite way to think about it. You have to be creative in order for people to want you to be creative, you have to actively do something. There are a lot of fans who come up to me and say "I want to do what you do. How do I get your job?" I tell them all the time that I have no idea how you get my job because I have no idea how I got it. I know my path, but there was nothing written down... no family tree showing me a line of events to get me here. The one thing I always say to someone who is passionate about something is that it's all about putting yourself out there and actively engaging the process.

(James Keaton as Jack the Clown & Erin Nicole Cline as Chance)

JA: Because no one asked you to write that Bill & Ted script, but doing so changed your life.

MA: Absolutely. That could have gone either way; Michael Roddy could have been insecure and not let me on. In hiring people, and this is something I follow intently, I'm hiring people that are better than I am. That's what you want on your team. They can fill in the gaps for things I don't have - for example, I can't draw and I want someone on our creative team who can draw beautifully.

Half the game is just trying to build a team that works collectively who have the personality traits that work well together. It's happened on teams I've been a part of where there's someone who is the most creative person in the room but they're unable to engage the other creative entities effectively, and that can derail a process. It's placing them somewhere they can thrive and be successful while not prohibiting the creativity of others who are collectively trying to work towards a goal. That's huge and so important in the process we work in. In any creative application, you want to have people who not only share the passion and know the goal but also aren't insecure or afraid of the people around them. In every brainstorm we do, there are no bad ideas. There's a Back to the Future paradox thing going on with getting from A to Z in the creative process. It's a constant effort to maintain that and to improve on it as well.

JA: I love seeing all the classic monsters out on the streets for 25.

MA: That was must. That's our homage to the first few years of the event because the classic monsters were the icon for the original Fright Nights (1991).

JA: Do you have an all-time favorite Universal attraction?

MA: Jaws is special, but that's a cop out because I worked there. Before I started working at the park, my favorite attraction was Back to the Future: The Ride. Jaws was fun but you always knew it wasn't the movie because it's this other story from the outside looking in, Back to the Future: The Ride was literally the closest to a sequel of Back to the Future: Part III (1990) as you could ever come. The facility was built (Institute of Future Technology), Doc Brown led the scientific department, and the narrative they were able to tell via the queue videos with Biff was absolutely brilliant. Honestly, it hasn't been done that way as effectively since. People's attention span has changed as far as the information we take in while standing in a queue, I honestly don't think we could do a storyline like that today and have it be received nearly as well. It's no reflection on the content at all, it's simply the way people are taking it in. They're not looking at that screen anymore, they're looking at their phones.

(Back to the Future: The Ride)

Seeing the entire narrative, the three acts that develop from the time you walk into the queue, with the outdoor queue being about the facility and what it represents and why it's there, and then going inside with that knowledge and seeing Biff having traveled from the past and into the future and affecting the integrity of that place, which carried into the pre-show room and onto the ride... and the fact that you're getting into the DeLorean and Doc Brown is talking to you... it was the first time you saw something on that scale enveloping you. Before a lot of other immersive motion-based rides, man, that thing took you to another place. It is canon for Back to the Future fans. Completely canon. It's a story that was told so well and based on such strong source material. It's my favorite from the past.

JA: If you were taking friends or family into Halloween Horror Nights tonight, what are you most excited for them to see?

MA: For this year it would have to be Jack Presents: 25 Years of Monsters and Mayhem. That's where I would go if I only had one thing I could attend. From my standpoint, it's a really great photo album to show what the team has created over the past twenty-five years. The environments are all very vivid with a lot of different scenarios happening at once, morsels of content, one after the other throughout. It's a really strong maze with a lot of great bells and whistles - like the gothic hallway with the mirrors making you feel like you're three stories above where you were. The classic monsters are also in there.

A close second would be The Carnage Returns which is an experience you're not going to get anywhere else with the level of content that show has. As a very different theme park show, it hits the mark.

(The Carnage Returns at HHN 25)

JA: Finally, how would you sum up your life and career with just three words?

MA: Childlike. Passionate. Humbled.

Follow Halloween Horror Nights on Twitter at @HorrorNightsORL
Follow Michael Aiello on Twitter at @Michael_Aiello
Buy tickets to Halloween Horror Nights at HalloweenHorrorNights.com/Orlando

"Unmasking Halloween Horror Nights: A Conversation with Universal Studios Hollywood Creative Director, John Murdy" By Jason Anders

Universal's Halloween Horror Nights, known early on as Fright Nights at Universal Studios Florida in 1991, has been terrifying guests for over 25 years, now taking place in Orlando, Hollywood, Singapore and Japan. John Murdy, Creative Director of Universal Studios Hollywood, was kind enough to invite me up to his office (overlooking the historic Universal backlot) to talk about his life, career and behind-the-screams stories of producing the definitive Halloween party we're all dying to attend...  

Jason Anders: I can't believe I'm conducting an interview on the Universal lot.

John Murdy: So much great history here. You'll see things around this lot that are definite reminders of not only the earliest days of the studio, but the tour as well. The old Runaway Train is just sitting on Denver street. It's a trip being around Universal for so long; you're constantly reminded of your past.

(The Runaway Train on the Universal Tram Tour)

JA: I love that the Psycho set is still on the tram tour and that Norman Bates chases after you with a knife...

JM: Yeah, I wrote that! That was my idea.

JA: I read that you played a huge part in the refurbishment of the Bates mansion.

JM: Yes, it's one of my favorite films. The house is the original house but it's been moved several times from the original filming location. Psycho was originally a Paramount film and the last film for that studio of Alfred Hitchcock's career. At the time he wasn't churning out the hits and it was deemed a low budget B-movie. Either Paramount wouldn't let him film Psycho on the lot, or the stages were reserved for other productions. He had already been doing Alfred Hitchcock Presents here at Universal, so Hitchcock shot the vast majority of Psycho on this backlot and today it is a Universal film, so are the sequels. The original filming location is directly above Jaws where the Chicken Ranch set is, which has been used in everything from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) to Murder, She Wrote (1984) to Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003.)

The house was originally a true facade, not fully enclosed, and it was moved to the location it is today for Psycho II (1983) and III (1986.)

(John Murdy on the set of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho)

JA: Do you remember what originally sparked your interest in horror movies?

JM: My mom made the mistake of allowing me to watch the original Frankenstein (1931) with Boris Karloff when I was four years old. I grew up primarily in the 1970s and during that time the classic Universal horror films were experiencing quite a revival; that's when the Aurora monster models came out and on television every town had an Elvira-like host of a horror show who would always re-run the classic Universal horror movies on Saturdays.

So she let me watch Frankenstein and when she came back I was crying...

JA: Do you remember what made you cry?

JM: The ending, absolutely. What my mom quickly figured out was that I wasn't afraid of Frankenstein, I was crying because I felt so bad for him. The great power of the classic Universal horror films is that the monsters are sympathetic characters, and that was never more true than with Frankenstein. When you really look at that film, everyone around him is a monster - the villagers with the torches and the pitchforks running around our little Europe set downstairs, setting the windmill on fire. He is a poor, hapless creature that was stitched together from the body parts of criminals who were put to death and robbed from graves. He didn't have a choice. He was brought to life by electricity and throughout the entire film he's just trying to figure out where he belongs in the world, and specifically looking for a friend. It's so damn sad.

(Bride of Frankenstein - 1935)

They're still sad to me today. When I watch Bride of Frankenstein (1935) there's that incredibly powerful scene when they finally bring the Bride to life and he reaches out to put his hand on her shoulder and she hisses at him like a cat. The look on Karloff's face is heartbreaking.

From a very early age I was obsessed with the Universal Monsters and had this weird feeling like I needed to protect them from all of these terrible people. I have birthday pictures of me from when I was four with a 1960s-era Aurora Wolf Man monster model and King Kong next to my cake. I have a plate collection at home from 1975 when I was five years old of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man and The Mummy that I made with my parents on an arts & crafts night where you'd draw a piece of artwork and put it in the oven and turn it into a plate... which sounds really dangerous now.

JA: Was House of Horrors part of the park before you started working here?

JM: That particular attraction has a very long history. When I first started coming here, that building was a restaurant called Womphopper's Wagon Works, then it became a Victoria Station restaurant and eventually Marvel Mania. At one time it was a walkthrough themed to The Grinch, then Chicken Run, The Mummy, Van Helsing and eventually House of Horrors, which I created with Chris Williams.

(Universal's extinct attraction House of Horrors)

I started coming to Universal in 1972 and there's a photo of me with The Wolf Man with this look of utter admiration in my eyes - even though he looked pretty darn cheesy. He looked less like Lon Chaney, Jr. and more like Michael Landon's I Was a Teenage Werewolf in really tight pants. They always had Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and, even better, in the earliest days of the theme park, they had a make-up show with a store located across from the tram entrance which sold make-up supplies and the Don Post monster masks. When I was ten I got made-up in this store; it was very gory with a big slash across my cheek, blackened flesh and all this fake blood, and they just let me wander around the park. People were coming up to my parents telling them to take me to first aid. It was the greatest day of my life. It was those moments early on of seeing classic Universal horror movies and coming to Universal Studios Hollywood in its earliest days that inspired me to do what I do today.

JA: The first movie to get me interested in filmmaking was a Universal horror film of sorts, Jurassic Park (1993).

JM: I kind of worked on that film in a weird way. Initially I was a tour guide at Universal, I started here in 1989, transitioning into what was then MCA Planning & Development (now Universal Creative) located off-property down Lankershim Boulevard and worked as a P.A. on the old special effects show, World of Cinemagic. After I finished that job, they didn't really have a core creative staff and I had the choice of going back to being a tour guide or to keep trying to move forward in this field. Through the connections I made on that project, I went to work for another company called Kevin Biles Design. Gerald R. Molen (producer of Jurassic Park) contacted them because Kevin Biles was known throughout the industry for being kind of a guru of the corporate theater. He did these crazy, state-of-the-art multimedia slide shows and they specifically wanted to talk to us about the scene where Hammond is presenting the concept for the park, right before they play the video with Mr. DNA. I was in my early 20s and they brought us into Steven Spielberg's conference room at Amblin...

(Entrance to Amblin Entertainment on the Universal backlot)

JA: Were you freaking out?!

JM: Oh yeah! I literally grew up watching Spielberg's movies. I was very aware of the company I was in and I had an enormous amount of respect for the people who were in that room. We did all kinds of work on that scene; we were originally going to shoot it second unit. At the end of the day we didn't end up doing it. I still have all the storyboards somewhere. I don't have any credit on the film or anything like that, it was all on the development side of it - in particularly talking to them about the theme park aspects of it, because we also did theme park design at this company. Years later, I found myself on the set of the sequels; I remember being alongside Stan Winston while shooting the T. rex scene on Stage 12. Stan and I later worked together on a project for the Universal theme parks that never saw the light of day, spending a lot of time at his shop. It's interesting how everything comes full circle.

JA: I freaked out when I saw a parking space reserved for Robert Zemeckis downstairs earlier, by the way.

JM: Back to the Future was filmed in my hometown, Whittier. I was working in a toy store while in high school at the Puente Hills Mall when they shot the scene in the parking lot with the DeLorean. I just hung around the set from a distance and watched them film. Years later, when I started as a tour guide here in 1989, we were making Back to the Future: Part II (1989) and III (1990.) With our tour guides, it's always meant to be a stepping stone into the industry; back then I was able to request visiting a set on my day off and that year I spent a lot of time on the set of Part II where I met Bob Gale, with whom I just finished restoring the DeLorean (which you can see in the NBCUniversal Experience in the Lower Lot.) The production designer for that film, Rick Carter, did the plane crash scene for War of the Worlds (2005) which I took from him to add to the tram tour.

(Promo shot for the Tram Tour's War of the Worlds set)

I've been able to thank people, like producer Frank Marshall, for being so cool to me when I was young and trying to learn about the film industry for not kicking me off their sets. I even shot baskets with Michael J. Fox once outside the soundstage. I saw Fox's production schedule during that time and it was just crazy, shooting Family Ties at Paramount during the day and Back to the Future at Universal all night. He's a great guy who gave a classic performance and I put that film in the top ten list of all-time Universal classics.

JA: I hated to see Back to the Future: The Ride retired from the parks. As a kid, Universal Studios Florida was like my film school, specifically because of attractions like Alfred Hitchcock: The Art of Making Movies.

JM: Susan Lustig produced that Hitchcock attraction. I don't think Susan knows this, but when they were filming that opening piece with Anthony Perkins (which they shot in Hollywood) I totally crashed the set. I was literally inside the Bates Motel when they were filming Anthony on the steps. I ended up working on the L.A. version of that, World of Cinemagic. I have these wonderful photos of Anthony Perkins dressed as Norman, reading the script with the original owl from Psycho behind him. It's funny to look back on your career and realize what a trip it's been.

JA: What are your thoughts on the Psycho sequels?

(Anthony Perkins in Psycho III - 1986)

JM: Psycho is a classic. In my mind, it's as close to a perfect movie that there is. There are very few movies I would consider perfect, and I would put Jaws (1975), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) in that camp. I particularly like Psycho III (1986), to tell you the truth. Anthony Perkins' sense of humor was very similar to Hitchcock's. I've spent a great deal of my career trying to preserve some assets from these movies, so it's neat that when we opened the NBCUniversal Experience we were able to showcases pieces from Psycho that still exist, like the owl from the back of the office (which is very fragile and can only be put on display once in a blue moon), Anthony Perkins' wardrobe from that film and the set plans for the Bates mansion. The iconic top of the house was a stock unit which was used in the movie Harvey (1950) with James Stewart, and if you go back and watch that film you can clearly see the top of the Psycho house.

It's a lot like playing detective when going back to find the history here, because in the early days of movie studios they never thought it was going to be important. There's always been controversy over whether or not Janet Leigh had a body double in the Psycho shower scene, and there was; we found the written authorization to hire the person to be the body double, right there in black and white. It's pretty exciting when we find these things. My favorite prop-find here were six pallets that had been in the warehouse for decades and decades. Very Indiana Jones-like, we went in and rescued them and took them back to the archive. There were pieces from To Kill a Mockingbird, military props from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and all kinds of things that will now be preserved and here for all time. This lot has so much history, it's been here since 1915.

JA: You mentioned being on the set of Jurassic Park earlier, do you know which productions also shot on Stage 12?

JM: Stage 12 was built for the 1929 film Broadway, Universal's first talking picture with Technicolor sequences. It was and always has been the biggest stage on this lot. It was used for the lab from Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), it was the main interior set of Dracula (1931), there was an indoor version of the clock tower built on that stage for Back to the Future for close-ups, the town of Whoville from The Grinch (2000), the final scene from Scarface (1983) and in Jurassic Park it's the Visitor Center. The other famous soundstage is Stage 28, which we call the Phantom Stage because it was built for The Phantom of the Opera (1925), which is where the interior of Norman Bates' home was filmed for Psycho. You'd also see it in films like The Sting (1973) and Deanna Durbin musicals.

(Stage 12 on the Universal backlot)

Speaking of Spielberg, we recently found the memo from 1965 first granting him access to the Universal lot. He worked as a clerk in the editorial department as an unpaid intern. That's his entry into Hollywood and I've interviewed him about that.

JA: Which other heroes have you been able to work with as a result of your job here?

JM: I got to work with Alice Cooper for Halloween Horror Nights. I grew up obsessed with horror and rock & roll and his music was the marriage of those two things. As a kid I had six-foot tall posters of him in my bedroom that my mother hated. I really got into his music and would write him letters and he wrote me back. He sent me an autograph when I was in junior high that I still have. It's pretty surreal to find myself working with him. He was truly scary to authority figures in the 1970s, the stake-in-the-heart to the peace & love generation. When he came out it was shocking. I told him he had a really positive influence on my life. I had a daughter recently and his family sent a baby gift. It's a trip, too bizarre to stop and contemplate.

I also got to work with Sam Phillips of Sun Records, who produced the original recordings of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison. I got to go to Sun Records and be in that recording booth and listen to stuff that had never been released. Also getting to meet and know Rick Baker - all of these people were heroes to me.

(My ticket to this year's HHN... and Michael, of course.)

JA: The first Halloween Horror Nights I went to was Universal Orlando's Sweet 16.

JM: I never produced an Orlando Horror Nights, though I think I was living in Orlando at that time. Horror Nights actually started out here in Hollywood. I didn't get involved with Horror Nights until we brought it back out here in 2006, it's actually the reason I left Orlando and Universal Creative. The last thing I did there was Revenge of the Mummy (2004.) At the time I got a call from Michael Taylor, our then general manager, who really wanted to bring Halloween back. We had known each other for years starting back in my tour guide days. He asked me if I would be interested in coming back to Hollywood and leave designing rides behind. It's tough when you're someone who grew up going to theme parks and making model miniatures of attractions when you were a kid.

JA: I read that you built a scale model of Pirates of the Caribbean when you were a kid.

JM: Yeah, none of it survived. It's all destroyed. There was only one thing that was going to get me to leave designing rides, especially after I had just finished Revenge of the Mummy, and that was the idea of possibly jump-starting Halloween Horror Nights for the studio that invented the horror movie.

(Promotional photo for Revenge of the Mummy)

The first year we did it was 2006, and it was really just a baby step to see if we could do it. This is an extremely competitive market out here in L.A. There's so many great entertainment offerings out here on any given night. The first year we did it, we did one maze, which was an original maze, and an overlay to House of Horrors. It was successful enough that we got to do it a second year. That was the launching pad.

I should mention that I don't do Halloween Horror Nights alone; my partner in this, Chris Williams, is my art director and production designer. Chris and I, since day one, have hand-in-hand created all the entertainment for Horror Nights. In my opinion he's the best in the business at creating sets. The big idea we wanted to do that we just didn't see anybody else doing was to try and license horror movies and create what we call "living horror movies." To take something like Friday the 13th (1980) or A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and try to make the guest feel like they got up from their theater seat, walked through the screen and are now living a horror movie. That was really what I thought would be the best thing for Universal to do because we're the studio that invented the horror movie. The hard part was getting the first one to say yes, and that was New Line Cinema in 2007 with Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface. The event just took off once we did those three houses and every year it's been bigger and bigger. We've now done every major franchise, from Halloween (1978) to Saw (2004.)

Horror as a genre is spreading and expanding with television like The Walking Dead, as well as in video games and music, which creates endless opportunities for HHN.

JA: Do you have a favorite Horror Nights maze you've created?

JM: I don't have a personal favorite. We always say they're all our demented little children - you conceive it, you give birth to it, it's perfect in its infancy and then you have to guide it through the whole production process and make sure that the end product resembles what you wrote on the board. As far as movies that were important to me growing up, Halloween would certainly be way up there. Of course the Alice Cooper houses - I was talking with him once about one of the houses we were going to create and he said, "I always imagined that there was some kid in a dark room with headphones on listening to Welcome to My Nightmare and the music is causing him to imagine something like a horror movie." That was me. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre house was a particularly good one, there's just something about that franchise and that character that's very disturbing.

The films that you have an attachment to from childhood hold a special place.

JA: How old were you when you started working at the tram tour?

JM: 22. I was born in 1967.

JA: Was that your first job?

JM: No, my first job was delivering drugs to mental hospitals in the L.A. area. I was 16, I think? I don't think it was legal. It's inspired multiple scenes for mazes which featured mental hospitals. There's a certain smell you have to have, you know it if you go into a mental hospital, and we produced that scent. I had a bunch of weird jobs. I did my first professional haunted house when I was 14, producing and designing a local haunt that was doing it for charity. I worked in a toy store the year that the Cabbage Patch Kids came out, which was horrible because it created a mania with parents engaging in fist-fights in the middle of the store over the last doll. I got to see the dark side of humanity at a very young age.

I also worked in a video store, which was absolutely my film education. When I started working there it was all Beta, then went to VHS, then Blockbuster put all the mom and pop stores out of business. Now it's all in a whole other world. My store was the only store to carry the great Universal film, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988.)

JA: Did you ever consider a different career path?

JM: I remember 1980 was the year I wanted to be an actor because it was a banner year for great performances like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, John Hurt in The Elephant Man and Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People. I had an acting scholarship and that's what I thought I was going to do, but as I went to college I started discovering writing. I wrote and produced my own plays in college and was lucky enough to have one of the many critics I invited show up and write about it. He listed it as one of the ten best plays of the year. It was bizarre seeing my play on a list with Les Misérables. It led to writing a movie that wasn't very good... horrible, actually.

By the time I graduated college I was looking for a job. I had a friend who was a tour guide here and he called me up inviting me to the audition. I knew the park really well because I came here all the time as a kid, but I don't think I realized how difficult it was going to be - it's not easy to be a tour guide. I wrote a lot of what they have to learn now and it's like a phone book. The tour isn't literally scripted, you don't have to say every line, the hope is that the tour guides will make it their own. You never know what the route is going to be one day to the next because of production. We have always viewed our tour guides as the ambassadors to Hollywood because people come here from all over the world. We can take it for granted. I don't know how many times I've parked my car out by the Psycho house to help with Horror Nights lighting, but I'm always conscious of the fact that that's incredibly special. I can't not walk by that house without stopping to look at it. There's no way you can walk around this lot and not fall the history of 100 years of moviemaking.

I'm always amazed at the questions our guests ask. It's awesome. People are passionate about the movies they love, which is absolutely true of our Halloween Horror Nights fans. It's pretty cool.

JA: I love the title card for the Universal tour at the end of John Landis' movies that said "Ask for Babs."

JM: We used to do that here for decades, if you asked for Babs you'd get a discount. I talked to Landis not that long ago and he asked me if I remembered that.

JA: How different was the tour then by comparison?

JM: When I was a guide all we had was a microphone and the tour was about three hours long. The tour was mostly all that this place originally was. The first year was 1964 with a trailer down on Lankershim Boulevard with three trams and maybe five tour guides. One of the first tour guides was actually John Badham, who directed Saturday Night Fever (1977.) He was working in the mail room before they launched the tour. So many people got their start here.

One of the things I did for the tour was put video on it because the lot is constantly evolving and changing. Wisteria Lane is a great example; Harvey (1950), Bedtime for Bonzo (1951), Leave It to Beaver (1957) and The Munsters (1964) were all filmed on that street, but if you walk down it today it's going to mostly look like the set of Desperate Housewives (2004) because that's the most recent big production that did a whole lot of filming on that street. The idea with the video was to connect the dots for our guests. Courthouse Square is another good example because you can show video of it used in Back to the Future then in To Kill a Mockingbird, it was also the courthouse in Psycho II, Ghost Whisperer (2005) and Sneakers (1992.)

So now the tour guides have over 200 pieces of media at their fingertips that I update all the time, which they can pick and choose from. I've also gotten a lot of directors to talk about their experiences on the lot such as Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Stephen Sommers, Bob Gale, Oliver Stone, John Carpenter and Peter Jackson.

(Vintage merchandise on display at the NBCUniversal Experience)

JA: Do you still see employees in the mail room going on to bigger things?

JM: Yeah, the President of the studio (laughs). He started in the mail room. He was also an agent's assistant. I think the tour guide position is the mail room equivalent. A friend from my era of being a tour guide has gone on to being camera man who works all the time - he worked on The Tonight Show and I'm not even sure which show he's on now. Another co-worker is now a major casting director, another is a producer and one is a director. Another is an actress who I see in commercials all the time. It was a stepping stone for all of us and a way to get into the business, and it still is. Universal has always been a great company for promoting from within. Michael Taylor, who I mentioned before, started here in the 70s sweeping the park and he was the general manager of this place when he retired.

Universal puts a whole lot of energy into what you'd call a front line employee. When I give speeches to those who show up to work Horror Nights, I literally get down on my knees and I thank them. It's not me interacting with the guest, it's them. If you're a tour guide, you can absolutely make or break a guest's day. If you invest in people, they're going to do a good job. Our actors are incredibly important to us at Horror Nights. Everything Chris and I do, from the sets to the lighting to the props, at the end of the day is just set dressing unless those guys bring it to life.

Particularly with Horror Nights, we never want to rest on our laurels. I think that's how you do good stuff, you have to constantly push yourself and be passionate about it. If you don't, and you don't care,  then you probably shouldn't do it to begin with. You've got to believe in what you do. There's plenty of movies and properties that I've passed on because I wasn't passionate about it. If I don't feel like I can get excited about doing it, then I don't do it. That's the philosophy.

(Universal founder, Carl Laemmle, with his niece, Carla)

JA: It means a lot that you preserve the history for the guests, and that you keep Carl Laemmle's memory alive in the park. He's as important to Universal as Walt Disney is to The Walt Disney Company.

JM: Absolutely. I've interviewed his niece, Carla Laemmle, and that woman was a prima ballerina in The Phantom of the Opera in 1925 and she's in the opening scene of Dracula in 1931! She's from the silent film era and literally lived on this lot. There was a reason they called him "Uncle Carl", it's because he had a whole lot of relatives working on this property and they would literally live here over where all the bungalows are now. She told me a wonderful story once about Halloween, they'd decorate the wilderness out there and have the kids go through the spooky forest. I would love to have seen that.

One of my favorite stories she told me was about a guy who lived up on Beachwood Canyon, Hermit Pete (or Hollywood Pete), and he raised goats during the silent film era. He would go down to Hollywood Boulevard dressed like Moses and direct traffic with his goats. She said they would always see him wandering around the hills. For a while he became this icon of Hollywood - there was merchandise that they made about him, like bookends and postcards, which I found through researching him. We take guests into these hills during Horror Nights and I'm always out there thinking, "... the ghost of Hermit Pete is going to get me one day."

Carla Laemmle had so many fascinating stories about growing up on this lot and working on the classic films. Carl Laemmle was hugely important to the movie industry. A lot of people credit him with inventing the idea of the "movie star." He's the guy who basically saw the potential of Hollywood. He came out here and capitalized on it and, in a lot of ways, brought moviemaking to Hollywood. He's also the guy who realized that the general public might be interested in that.

JA: Thank you so much for your time and insight into Universal and Halloween Horror Nights...

JM: I just want to say thank you to the people who are fans of Halloween Horror Nights and support the event. Without them I wouldn't get to do what I do, and I am always very aware of that fact. For a little kid who grew up making haunted houses in his garage, I really owe the fact that I get to do this to the fans.

Follow John Murdy on Twitter at @HorrorNights