It’s barely been a month since grand opening of Epic Universe and we’re just days past the summer solstice, but already theme park fans are focusing forward on fall, eagerly awaiting announcements about Halloween events. And there’s no better place to kick-start the countdown to Orlando’s spooky season — which gets started in just over two months — than at last weekend’s Spooky Empire horror convention, held June 20-22 at the DoubleTree near SeaWorld.
Saturday’s headlining celebrities included actor Simon Pegg and composer Danny Elfman, but Friday evening’s big draw was the Halloween Horror Nights panel, with some attendees lining up four hours early to hear from the creative minds behind Universal’s annual fright-fest.
“The thing that we all pride ourselves on is that we are transforming the event every single year,” began Michael Aiello — the senior director of entertainment creative development who started out his Universal career as a Jaws skipper — as he unveiled the unifying theme behind HHN 34.
“For 2025, what we’ve decided to do is take a kind of a step back [and ask] ‘What is horror?’ What are the beginnings of horror? What are the textures that come to mind? When you think about the initial horror, feel, and Gothic textures come to mind: stained glass, vines, gargoyles. … And a place that we have identified as the house or the environment our event lives in this year is a place called The Conservatory.”
Much as some previous years were permeated with a neon-soaked 1980s vibe, look for the Conservatory’s late-1800s emo aesthetic to expand throughout the park. “We really this year more than ever want to fully immerse you as our guests in this overall thematic. So as soon as you cross through those turnstiles, you are going to be hit with those Gothic tones and textures,” promises assistant director Lora Sauls, who began as a singing Bride of Frankenstein.
“You are going to feel those same textural tones in our lighting elements all around the park, in our overall music score that is all around the park. This year, our word of the year is ‘immersive.’ We are immersing you in Horror Nights everywhere you go.”
A few minutes later, panel moderator and show director Ramón Paradoa made the much-rumored reveal of the first officially confirmed original concept haunted house for this year’s HHN. “El Artista: A Spanish Haunt” is “the tragic ghost tale of a tortured artist consumed by evil” named Sergio Navarro, whose Gaudí-inspired manor houses the aforementioned cursed Conservatory.
“Within this conservatory, this deep sense of evil overtakes Sergio’s mind, influencing his art, forcing him to paint these horrifying things that come to life, and the spirits want to use his artwork as portals to break into our world,” Paradoa explains. “One night when the veil is at its thinnest, Sergio has to overcome his own madness and the ongoing whispers of the ghosts as they proceed to break through.”
Those who brave the attraction will get to experience those spirits courtesy of special effects techniques both old and new. “We wanted to take inspiration from some [past ghost-themed] houses, but then also push the boundaries on how we achieve ghost effects in the haunted house,” says Paradoa. “We all know and love the Pepper’s Ghost effect; lots of Pepper’s Ghost in this haunted house, we’ve got that going on. You’re gonna physically see ghosts trying to burst through paintings, pushing through the canvas of paintings, and you may or may not see ghosts walking through walls.”
For Paradoa, a relative newcomer among HHN’s long-serving senior staff, “El Artista” sounds like much more than just a chance to deliver jump scares.
“As the show director and writer of the story, this haunted house is the honor of my career, especially as a Latino. For all my Latino folks, the original tale that we’re getting to tell — Sergio’s story — has never been told before. We’re so excited to be presenting it. So many incredibly talented people came together [and] treated this project as a passion project,” says Paradoa, a self-proclaimed HHN “superfan” who became a scareactor in 2017 and worked his way onto the creative development team as as a performance coordinator. “There is Latin influence in everything you see in this haunted house. I’m very, very proud to say that the entirety of the cast is Latinx.”
Scant additional details were dropped about the event’s previously announced intellectual properties — Fallout (based on the video game and Amazon show), Jason Voorhees (of Friday the 13th infamy) and Five Nights at Freddy’s — although Aiello did confirm the latter’s homicidal animatronics will appear “identical” to those seen in the Blumhouse-produced movie. He also couldn’t confirm the return of the Nightmare Fuel dance shows directed by Jason Horne, saying only, “If we bring that show back, we’ll have new creative there.”
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Aiello had no affirmative answers for Q&A participants who queried if old queue videos could be released (“We would love to [but] there are so many legal things that go on with media”) or if HHN would return to Islands of Adventure: “The event lives in the Studios. It started there, it should stay there. … Islands is so unbelievably themed, it is very difficult to break out of that into something unique. … For me, this event’s heart and soul lives in Universal Studios Florida.”
But Sauls did give some hope to diehards who want to see favorite houses like “Graveyard Games” get resurrections: “For those of you who’ve been around for decades, you’ve seen that in anniversary years, we bring back some of our most popular [original concept houses]. So just think about that, because you know, next year is 35.”
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This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2025.