Universal Studios Hollywood Built a Flying Vampire Rig and Invented Glowing Eye Tech for Sinners Haunted House

Creative director John Murdy reveals the new technology, live performer flying stunts, and painstaking film accuracy behind the most ambitious Halloween Horror Nights house the park has ever built.

By Jeanpierre Florent · FirstDrop News TeamAug 28, 20266 min read

Universal Studios Hollywood has built its most ambitious haunted house ever for Halloween Horror Nights 2026, transforming the Oscar-winning Sinners into an attraction that required inventing new makeup technology and building a flying vampire rig. The house opens September 3 when the separately ticketed event kicks off, running select nights through November 1.

Creative director John Murdy says the Sinners house features more live performers in a single scene than any haunted house in the event's history. It also marks the first time Halloween Horror Nights has incorporated an actual stunt into the experience, with a performer flying through the air on a rig developed over six or seven months of testing.

The house tracks the climax of the film at the besieged juke joint, beginning with Preacher Boy's performance of I Lied to You and building to Smoke and Remmick's final showdown at sunrise. Murdy pitched the concept to director Ryan Coogler and the team at Proximity Media, who approved it and stayed engaged through the entire process. A similar Sinners house will open at Universal Orlando.

A Pre-Show Sets Up the Story

Murdy wanted to recreate the film's signature surreal montage where Preacher Boy's transcendent performance of I Lied to You beckons spirits of the past and future. He describes watching it for the first time and being thrown by the sequence, which ultimately became one of the most iconic moments in the film.

The challenge was adapting a five-minute scene for a haunted house where the mantra is a new show every 10 seconds. The solution was creating a pre-show that extends the queue line.

As guests wait in line and come around the corner, they enter the juke joint with Preacher Boy up on stage as a live performer with a guitar, lip syncing to I Lied to You by Miles Caton. As the song progresses, the walls burn away using cinema quality practical effects, revealing a Parliament-Funkadelic-channeling guitarist, a hip-hop DJ, and the Smokestack twins created using a Michael B. Jordan look-alike doubled with techniques similar to the film.

The entire sequence happens as guests move through the queue, all to set up the plot of Sinners. The last beat is the entire room disappearing. As the juke turns to ash, the trio of Remmick, Bert, and Joan are revealed lurking outside.

Inventing LED Eye Technology

Guests make their way to the exterior of the club, navigating wooded spaces where Cornbread and Mary have ill-fated encounters with the bloodsucking vampires. At first the vampires are silhouettes with glowing eyes. Then they appear in the flesh, which required solving a major problem.

The makeup artists for the film created a special metallic contact lens specifically for Sinners. But those lenses could only be worn for a few minutes, which is not practical for Halloween Horror Nights performers who work 45-minute stretches over a seven-hour shift.

The Halloween Horror Nights makeup artist created a new technology to solve it. He designed artificial eyebrows that are applied over the performers' real eyebrows, concealing a tiny wire that runs along the brow, into the wig, and down into a battery pack. Hanging in front of the eye is an LED about the size of a grain of rice that makes their eyes look like they're glowing.

The team went through all the testing with optometrists and health and safety, creating mock-ups until they perfected it. Murdy says it's a new piece of technology they invented specifically for this house.

Buzzards Mean Death Is Coming

The Sinners attraction painstakingly reproduced key moments from the film, down to avian Easter eggs. Studying the film, Murdy realized that Coogler had a very intentional thing with buzzards. There are always buzzards circling, usually three. And when they land, it means death is coming.

That led to a trio of strategically placed vultures. Two sit on a log where Mary meets her temporary doom, and a third is perched on the Club Juke sign. Not a good omen, Murdy says. Death is coming. A whole lot of death is coming.

More Live Performers Than Ever Before

Visitors reenter the juke joint and wind through corridors, passing the storeroom before coming back into the main showroom. An epic battle between the survivors and the monsters unfolds throughout the space, including the walkways overhead. Preacher Boy, Stack, Annie, Pearline, Bert, and Joan all appear at various points.

There are more live performers in this scene than in any single scene in the history of the event, Murdy says. Guests are just in the middle of all this chaos.

More live performers makes for a difficult casting call. Traditionally, most of the Halloween Horror Nights scare actors are masked or heavily made up. But because Sinners draws on a hugely popular film with well-known stars, Universal needed to find appropriate face characters, a term they use for anybody not wearing a mask or prosthetic.

There are more of those characters than the event typically has. Murdy says that more than 2,000 people will show up for an open casting call but sometimes the team is trying to find a very specific type for a very specific role, so it's quite a challenge. Once the actors are cast, Universal's hair and makeup team style them for maximum screen accuracy.

A Flying Vampire Stunt

Late in the maze, Remmick comes flying out of nowhere. The team developed a flying apparatus in collaboration with a company that specializes in theater, the kind of rig used for productions like Peter Pan, as well as the Universal stunt team.

They built a huge flying rig, most of which is concealed by the set, with a winch system. The performers are literally hanging above guests in midair. They come down in about a second, land, do their business, which puts them on the ground about five seconds, and then they disappear.

It's the first time Halloween Horror Nights has done anything like this. The team has been working on it for probably six or seven months. They built a test rig and put the performers through their paces, figuring out all of it and how it needed to work. This will be the first time the event has an actual stunt as part of Halloween Horror Nights.

Adding Freaky Nikki at the Last Minute

It takes six months or more to execute a haunted house, so when a film like Obsession blows up the box office in early summer, it's almost always too late to work it into the show. But Universal found a way to add Freaky Nikki anyway.

As soon as the team saw Obsession, they wanted to work with it. During an interview, director Curry Barker was discussing the inevitable popularity of Nikki as a costume this year and mentioned in passing that he was a regular at Halloween Horror Nights and would love to see the character incorporated someday. Fans alerted Murdy, who connected with Barker through a friend at Universal's Focus Features.

Murdy told Barker he was going to grant his wish. The character based on Inde Navarrette's Nikki will be wandering the park and spooking guests during the event.

Written by Jeanpierre Florent, part of the FirstDrop News Team

Jeanpierre is the Southern California based creator behind JPLAND21, a theme park community of more than one million subscribers across YouTube and Instagram. Our reporting is grounded in regular firsthand park visits. More about us