Preview Halloween Horror Nights’ bloody good ‘Sinners’ and Ozzy Osbourne haunted houses

A stake through the heart. A throat that’s been ripped open by some ungodly creature. A woman in a snazzy purple dress lying lifeless on the bar. Playing cards scattered across the floor. Broken tables and whiskey-slicked glasses. Bottles of Old Crow Beer lining the wall. And blood. Everywhere. Something seriously wrong happened in this room—and things will only get worse for the souls who make it out of here alive. Welcome to “Sinners,” the new, meticulously designed haunted house at this year’s Halloween Horror Nights, which runs from September 3 to November 1 at Universal Studios Hollywood.

“Not only was it a massive hit,” John Murdy, Halloween Horror Nights’ veteran creative director, explains of the film Sinners, during a behind-the-scenes, lights-on preview of this year’s event. “But it was also incredibly critically acclaimed to the level of 16 Academy Award nominations, which is a record—and just unheard of for a horror or horror-adjacent movie. So we knew we needed to treat this film differently than how we’ve treated other properties.”

How Murdy and his team, which includes art director Chris Williams, treated Ryan Coogler’s juggernaut started, like a lot of projects at HHN, by collaborating with the artists who brought these films to our screens themselves. “[Coogler] very much wanted to be a part of Horror Nights,” Murdy says. “We worked with his producers and music department through this process. That’s what we always try to do: work directly with talent.”

And walking into “Sinners,” you can tell. Before even entering the proper haunted house, fans queue in a recreation of Club Juke, complete with an old-timey piano, an actor performing “I Lied to You” and, of course, a dude shredding on guitar and another doing his thing behind turntables in a recreation of the film’s famous time-travel sequence that showed how blues influenced rock and hip-hop and other genres. Meanwhile, a host revs you up for the frivolity of the night ahead.

Once inside, though, things quickly go south as you’re chased by vampires (sometimes from above, with a nifty scare coming from two glowy-eyed members of the undead hovering overhead) in and outside Club Juke, hoping to make it to the next morning. The level of detail is impressive, with Murdy pointing to a truck that’s parked outside the joint. “The movie is set in the ’30s,” he says. “Because all of the people who are going to be attending Club Juke tend to be like sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South, they wouldn’t have had new cars. They would have had cars from the ’20s. This is a real Ford Model A,” he notes, explaining that it was used in the park by “Laurel and Hardy” walkaround characters back in the day. “So we had to know exactly where it had to land, and then everything got built around it.”

That attention to detail extends to choreography too. That aforementioned bloodbath “involves six live performers on multiple levels,” Murdy says, creating a scene for guests that he calls “absolute chaos” and “really cool” that still moves the carefully plotted story forward.

“Jack, whatever we do in this house, there’s one scene we have to do: I want a giant bat to bite the head off your father.”

Elsewhere, in the shadow of “Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift” (which officially opens September 16), lies another notable new haunted house: “Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness.” When meeting with Ozzy’s son, Jack, to first discuss this project toasting the late, great frontman, Murdy had one demand. “I said, ‘Jack, whatever we do in this house, there’s one scene we have to do: I want a giant bat to bite the head off your father.’”

That moment does indeed unfold in this spectacle, in which you enter the crypt-esque, stone facade of Osbourne Station and board a train—of the crazy variety, naturally—while evading various things going bump in the night. For fans of the Black Sabbath singer, there are a ton of Easter eggs to behold: the tattoos on his fingers spelling his name that he inked himself as a teen, callbacks to his time as a boy in post-World War II Birmingham (including a replica of a photo his wife, Sharon, provided for this project), nods to his killer Black Sabbath run and solo albums like Bark at the Moon (think werewolves and mad-scientist chemistry sets with bubbling neon liquids), an insane asylum and both his Christian upbringing and embrace of his Prince of Darkness moniker.

“This is something I worked out with Sharon,” Murdy says, showing an image of the singer folding his hands for prayer above the text “God bless Ozzy Osbourne” and noting that he had meetings with her about the project every two weeks or so. “The very end. This is a very personal house for all of us involved. We knew Ozzy. We loved him. We wanted to do something to honor his legacy.”

This year’s onslaught also boasts a bunch of other haunted houses themed around everything from Hellraiser and this year’s Evil Dead Burn to the final season of Stranger Things and the ’80s curio Killer Klowns from Outer Space. (Oh, there’s also one dubbed “KILLceañera: Music by Slash” featuring an original score by the guitarist.) And that’s not to mention the return of The Purge stunt show, a Terror Tram led by Terrifier’s Art the Clown, a whole lot of “scare zones” and interactions with characters from the likes of Obsession. “Doing Horror Nights is the equivalent of making eight horror movies at the same time,” Murdy admits. And honestly, it’s hard to argue with that.

Halloween Horror Nights runs select evenings from September 3 to November 1. Tickets cost $77 to $107, depending on the night; with Express Pass add-ons, options range from $249 to $399.