4. The Legendary Truth

From a bird’s eye view, there’s little Halloween Horror Nights lore thornier than The Legendary Truth. The story of Universal’s pet paranormal research organization has been written almost exclusively in the margins, of optional online games and one-off upcharge experiences, across 13 years and counting. The average attendee would only recognize the name from the two houses it adorned - Legendary Truth: The Wyandot Estate in 2010 and Case Files Unearthed: Legendary Truth in 2021. Here’s a rough history of the Truth:

In the 1940s, private investigator Boris Shuster started seeing things. They should’ve been hallucinations - dozen-eyed hellspawn, sewer-dwelling moss golems, lounge singers with horns - but hallucinations aren’t allergic to lead. Eventually Shuster noticed patterns and classified the monsters into “Legions”: Strengoits, Cerebins, Baccanoids, Maschorians, Morphans, Kerezans, and Iniquitous. They followed vaguely conventional lines - strengoits meant vampires, kerezans meant zombies, etc. - but the findings were still shocking enough to make the P.I. hide them in plain sight as 30-cent pulp novels. He only faced the music himself a few years later, when an investigation into “Bloody Mary” ended with him on trial for her alleged murder. As soon as he was cleared, Shuster founded The Legendary Truth, sometimes known more specifically as The Collective.

Boris Shuster’s office can be seen in Universal Studios Florida’s New York section, across Delancey Street from the Film Vault. Taken as a reverse-engineered grace note for Halloween Horror Nights - the window has bared his name since the park’s opening day - it’s a clever bit of placemaking, the perfect stomping grounds for a period gumshoe. Considered within the canon, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

 Across three nights from October 25th to 31st, 1991, bright-eyed Legendary Truth member Tim Foil pored over Shuster’s casefiles. In so doing, he accidentally unleashed the evil anew and undid all of Shuster’s arcane work. Those fateful dates line up with the first ever Halloween Horror Nights, making the Truth connection nothing less than fundamental. It had already intervened - earlier in event history but later in the fiction - with supernatural goings-on at Universal Studios Florida in the explicit understanding that it’s a theme park. Shuster also allegedly retired to Amity Island, a long-lost land at Universal, though his mortality remains in question.

It’s a metatextual chicken-egg conundrum - what came first, Universal Studios Florida or The Legendary Truth? Is Delancey Street an elaborate tribute to “real-world” Truth founder Boris Shuster? Is the organization investigating specific happenings at the park or is the park commemorating past happenings already investigated? The answer to all of the above is that it’s a fragile narrative woven backwards over a decade by shifting teams and creatives all trying to make the most sense of it for anyone who came in late.

And that makes The Legendary Truth perfect for interpretation. Shuster’s story is Lovecraftian noir, all trenchcoats and tentacles. The organization proper is a down and dirtier X-Files, that department’s precinct headquarters replaced by a foreboding Victorian mansion. That’s not even counting the divisions within Truth, like the foolhardy Spirit Seekers, who used experimental ghost manifestation technology in a violently haunted house and paid the expected price.

If this hypothetical HHN movie focused more on the event than its malevolent inventions, there’s no better bridge between the two than The Legendary Truth.

5. Saws N' Steam: Into the Machine

Saws N’ Steam lurks at the highest concept end of terror.

The initial scarezone was tantalizing enough to earn its own house the following year, the first-ever such promotion. What happens in a steampunk society when all the water dries up? The answer may vivisect you.

Desperate denizens of “New Yorkshire” got their precious fuel by any means necessary but mostly chainsaw. Massive, brick-and-brass machines lined the streets, meat grinders by way of Wells. The snarl in the air wasn’t fog but an endless funeral pyre. On a scorched Earth, blood’s as good as fresh iced tea.

The rev-centric premise was a sly way to give Universal’s famed Chainsaw Drill Team its own playground. It paid off in screams, but the better movie material lies in its claustrophobic “sequel,” Saws N’ Steam: Into the Machine.

There is but one refuge from this thirst-choked hellscape - The Horizon. Posters color it heavenly. The Horizon is Benevolence. The Horizon is Contentment. “Never again will you shed a tear or suffer an injustice,” promises the PA system. It sounds like a pretty good deal, even with the admitted catch that circumstances will change when volunteers turn 30. Much easier to accept harvesting with a few good decades of peace and harmony.

Naturally, those are luxuries nobody can afford in a Halloween Horror Nights house. Screams break the serenity before the propaganda gives up. The Horizon is lipstick on a pig farm. As soon as volunteers leave the waiting room, a ceiling alive with circular saws closes in on them. The only noises left are agony, small engines, and the squish of compacted meat.

Like many dystopias, Saws ‘N Steam is alliterative. The human recycling recalls Soylent Green, the age limit, Logan’s Run. The water-logged art deco look should ring bells among BioShock players. But in this case, the cocktail of influences makes for a fresh hell. It’s a more cravenly nihilistic world than any of the above. Death arrives on swifter, rustier wings and anyone can appreciate its visceral form - steam-powered or no, a chainsaw is a chainsaw. The hardware-store soul of it makes for a cheaper apocalypse as well. The scarezone encompassed an entire city, but the house keeps it simple, showing only how the sausage is made.

Saws ‘N Steam: Into the Machine would make for an audacious movie, no question, but it cuts to the heart of HHN’s nihilistic streak a lot deeper than most originals. Emphasis on “cuts.”

6. The Wicked Growth: Realm of the Pumpkin

This house feels like channeled frustration. Not at the event or any creative overseers, but at a too-long absence. Short of the house based on Trick ‘r Treat and some scarezones, Halloween Horror Nights hadn’t really tackled the most festive traditions of its namesake holiday.

In a single, three-minute walkthrough, The Wicked Growth checks every last autumnal box and then some - plenty of folks would expect pumpkins, but a monarchal Pumpkin Lord is truly the extra mile.

Carey, Ohio, as usual, cannot catch a break. Each year when the leaves blush and jack-o’-lanterns start scowling on their porches, the Pumpkin Lord’s strength grows. The more people celebrate Halloween, the more powerful he becomes. Wary eyes can see his emergence in the perpetually encroaching vines, the unnatural bounty of the harvest. All it would take for him to break through into the natural world is an enterprising horde of ghosts, goblins, and well-read witches.

The Wicked Growth finds middle America under spooky siege. Reanimated skeletons bust through picket fences. Carnivorous pumpkins claw at shuttered windows. Grim reapers reap and the headless horseman rides again. It’s an all-out Halloween extravaganza, a killer party unfortunately interrupted by actual killers. Universal Art & Design’s passion for the season oozes off the walls like so much carved pulp.

Because of its, pardon the pun, universality, Wicked Growth is an easy frontrunner for the Halloween Horror Nights Cinematic Universe. In the same way H.R. Bloodengutz is horror to many,  this house is Halloween to most. Everybody’s got something nostalgic to latch onto. Covered bridges dignified with bramble. Haystacks too high to peek around. The cold, dry smell of trampled soil - the unmistakable perfume of corn mazes and pumpkin patches. And that’s just in the walkthrough. At feature-length, there’s room for all these textures and plenty more.

More than any other Halloween Horror Nights original, The Wicked Growth would make for the perfect festive viewing. Sure, some will always watch Fright Night or Friday the 13th or Night of the Living Dead. But what better way to celebrate Halloween than with the terrifying story of a small town swallowed whole by Halloween itself?

The wider audience would certainly make things easier on the Pumpkin Lord. And that's the real reason for the season.