Image from John Murdy on Twitter.
John Murdy is the creative director of Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood. He worked on Universal Studios Hollywood's Revenge of the Mummy ride and Universal Orlando for a bit. He successfully brought back the Halloween Horror Nights event in Universal Studios Hollywood from 2006-present.
History[]
John Murdy grew up on horror movies ever since he could remember, he started doing haunted houses in his parents house at the age of 10 years old in 1977. The first house he had built was based on a movie that had just come out that year and he remember that they made everything themselves because they couldn’t afford to buy any decorations back then. He had continued to make haunted houses until he was 14 years ago until it was shutdown by his father after an incident where his found had seen him running around with an actual butcher knife. At the time, his haunt had become very well known bringing 200 people lined up waiting to experience it.
In 1989, John Murdy started work at Universal Studios Hollywood as a tour guide on the Studio Tour right out of college. A couple of years later he would become production assistant on World of Cinemagic, then spent of his career with Universal Creative, creating attractions such as Revenge of The Mummy: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood and reinventing the Studio Tour in 2000.
In 2004, Murdy was living in Orlando for a few years until he received call from a then general manager of Universal Studios Hollywood asking if he would consider moving back to Los Angeles and leaving the Universal Creative team to bring HHN back to the Hollywood park. At the time for Universal Studios Hollywood, they had been out of the Halloween extravaganza for four years dating back to the 80s, it was tough decision to make but Murdy accepted and would go on to return to Universal Studios Hollywood.
In 2006, Murdy would reopen Halloween Horror Nights 2006 (Hollywood) as a much smaller event as it would than it would become to be now that would only run seven nights and had only one haunted house and some scarezones. One year later Murdy would be able to change the game for the event that would set itself apart from its Orlando's counterpart by implementing intellectual properties to the event.
Some Notes about him[]
He likes to use IPS though he does some original content sometimes. He only used two original characters from Orlando’s event: The Director and Jack; and the latter was forced by executives to be consistent with Orlando’s marketing in 2007. Although he later said on Twitter that him not using the director in later years was more to do with today’s political climate than of originality[1].
Cameos[]
- Psychologist (Terror Tram: Horror Comes Home
- The Screecher (Titans of Terror)
- News Reporter (Halloween: Hell Comes to Haddonfield (Hollywood))
- Michael Myers (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Hollywood))
Pictures[]
Trivia[]
- The criteria John Murdy follows when deciding what is and isn’t HHN material, there are three things he and his team are looking for:
- Good environments that we can replicate in a seasonal haunted house;
- Characters that translate to live performers, after all, everything we do requires actors, so we have to make sure that we can work with real talent;
- And if it’s based on an intellectual property, is it a movie or tv show that people know and want to see?
- He has voiced a lot of characters over the years, from Jack’s psychologist in the Tram video to many horror villains.