Exclusive: First look at Universal Horror Unleashed at Area15
The scarecrows are coming, and they’re out for blood, revenge and your entertainment dollar.
With the new, year-round Universal Horror Unleashed attraction set to debut at Area15 in August, we’ve got the first details on one of the four haunted houses that make up the experience.
And it involves some vindictive nasties made of dried human flesh and burlap.
Set on ravaged farmland in the Dust Bowl-era of the 1930s, “Scarecrow: The Reaping” aims to frighten visitors like its namesake does crop-eating birds.
“Our scarecrows aren’t normal scarecrows,” clarifies Nate Stevenson, show director and writer at Universal Destinations and Experiences. “This is really the land kind of rising up, these sentinels from the ground, and now they’re wreaking havoc and their revenge on any human that walks. It’s like human and animal bone mixed with vines and roots and mud.”
Gnarly.
“Scarecrow: The Reaping” joins “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Blumhouse’s The Exorcist: Believer”and “Universal Monsters” among the themed experiences at Universal Horror Unleashed.
“People love the classics,” notes T.J. Mannarino, vice president of art and design, entertainment division at Universal Orlando. “People love horror that they’re familiar with, the brands that we bring to life, like ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ or ‘Universal Monsters.’
“But they also like something new and different that they’re not familiar with,” he continues, “a story that they can get involved in and have something that really becomes exciting and different for them. And that’s what ‘Scarecrow’ has given us within our parks.”
The “Scarecrow” concept dates back to Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights in 2017, before branching out to Universal Studios Hollywood.
Unlike previous incarnations, the Vegas “Scarecrow” was built from the ground up instead of being installed amid the infrastructure of a pre-existing theme park.
And it’ll be open whether Halloween is around the corner or not.
“The exciting piece that is unique to this location is the aspect of being year-round,” Mannarino says, “being able to tell our story that constantly evolves and changes throughout the landscape of time, where in the parks, we live for a certain number of days in that kind of fall season.”
It’ll also be bigger and even more elaborate than the Orlando and Hollywood versions.
“You’ll go to multiple places within our story,” Mannarino says. “You might start at the beginning of the farmhouse and end up in the in the actual cornfield itself. But just as important as the environments are the characters that you come in contact with.
“What we learned early on was that those levels of storytelling, the environments and the characters have to be to a level of degree of detail that makes it real for our guests,” he continues. “It’s real because it’s right there in front of you. It’s stuff you physically touch, you see, you experience. That level of detail has to be film quality but, at the same time, give you that sense of this is real, these scarecrows are alive and there are about to attack me.”
The immersive theme of “Scarecrow” continues at “Jack Alley’s Bar” next door, where guests can take in themed specialty cocktails, acrobatic performances and more in an interactive, circuslike environment starring the evil Jack the Clown and a crew of malicious jugglers, dancers and fortune-tellers.
“We put a lot of our great scare moments in there that are kind of proprietary to Universal that we’ve built over the years, some of our best scares,” Stevenson says. “And it just really killed.”
No pun intended.
Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.
