Gallery: Inside the "Silent Hill" House at Universal Halloween Horror Nights

This year, for the first time ever, Universal has incorporated a video game-themed house in the annual Halloween Horror Nights Celebration. And they couldn't have chosen a better game to base it on: Silent Hill.

A trip through any Silent Hill game is fraught with nightmarish sights and sounds, and physical manifestations like the nurses, Pyramid Head, and "Otherworld"—the bloody, hellish dimension heralded by those haunting sirens—make the perfect fodder for one of Universal's famously well-produced haunted houses.

We were "lucky" enough to visit Universal Studios Orlando for Halloween Horror Nights' opening celebration last week and chat with Universal's show director Patrick Braillard and Konami's Silent Hill producer, Tom Hulett, about bringing the foggy, restless town of Silent Hill to life.

The maze itself is incredible—inspired by both the movie and the games, there are countless nods to the source material inside—but what struck us the most was how excited Hulett and Braillard really were for Konami and Universal to be collaborating like this. And it's clear that Braillard is as big a fan of Silent Hill as anyone, including Hulett.

So check out our gallery from the inside of the Silent Hill house—we risked life and limb shooting these photos—and read through our chat with Braillard and Hulett for the full scoop on the collaboration.

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Complex: Why did Silent Hill jump out at you versus other horror games?

Universal's Patrick Braillard: One of the reasons is the scope of work that both the films and, more to the point, the video games have showcased over the lifespan of the story of Silent Hill. I'm a gamer by nature. I've loved video games ever since I unwrapped my very first Atari 2600 (now that's dating me). But the idea of being able to bring ourselves into the world of Silent Hill is something very special because a lot of the games out there that are in the horror genre skirt [around] being horrific, or showing something horrific, but Silent Hill actually immerses you into an environment. And you begin to relate to it and care about the characters that are in that story. And also the depth to which the developers, and later on the filmmakers, have kept the aggressors in the story, it's just something fantastic. And I think that that's something that we look for. Plus, it's just damn scary.

Complex: So when you say the aggressors, do you mean specifically Pyramid Head and the Bogeyman, or all the enemies overall?

Braillard: I think that you're so on edge whenever you start one of those games. But you know what you're getting into without knowing what you're getting into. And so i think that when you label "aggressor," it's anybody who isn't your main character. Because you never know what to trust. You never know who to trust. You never really get a sense of anybody helping you out, even when they are helping you.

Complex: Did you always plan to include both Pyramid Head and the Bogeyman?

Braillard: That's the great thing about doing a maze with multiple rooms, is that you get to have your cake and eat it, too. You get to say, "Okay, I'm going to take something like Pyramid Head, that is extremely well recognizable, if not—I won't say the face of the franchise, but he's definitely recognized worldwide to being a part of the Silent Hill franchise. And then you get to take a character that is one of our favorites, who is going to place an immediate threat on our guests. I mean, and that's what we're all about. We're about scaring our guests. That's what we're in the business of. So it's really fun to be able to do that.

Whether or not they were [both] in the mix to begin with, I'm not exactly sure. Because when you work on conceiving an event like this, if you know where an idea came from, if you know who spoke up during the meeting, you know it's a bad collaboration. Everybody needs to be talking over each other and everybody needs to be yelling at each other and figuring it out. And [the Bogeyman] I know was a point of contention because we wanted say, okay, we need somebody who the true fans are going to know, but somebody who's still going to be scary enough to carry on inside our maze. And I think we accomplished that.

Complex: Tomm, what exactly has your role been as Konami's agent in designing these mazes?

Konami's Tomm Hulett: So basically the last couple years I've been kind of the Silent Hill bible at Konami. So when Universal was talking to us, obviously they wanted me to be involved. And usually on this type of thing, I kind of lay out: here's what the franchise is about, and here's the rules, and here's what you should hit on. But with Universal, when they'd met with us, they'd already done a lot of research, and really had a good handle on, you know, what it needed to be and what it needed to include. So my job's been easier and more fun, because I don't have to be like the mean guy forcing them to do things. I just get to see what they do and go, "Oh, that's really cool. What if you did this?" Or, you know, "I just came up with a cool idea for the super super hardcore fans."

And that's another good thing about Universal, is they're trying to hit the entire spectrum of Silent Hill fans. So, you know, there's people who've only seen the movie, and so there's stuff in there for them. And then there's the gamers who pore over every single detail, and they'll recognize anything no matter how obscure. And so Universal wants ideas for them too. And then everyone in between. So it's actually been a lot of fun, and my role has just been kind of to add things to their already cool things, which is pretty nice.

Complex: Have you had free rein to pull anything from the whole series?

Braillard: I think that we're only limited in the scope and the size of the real estate that we have as far as the house is concerned. We were given full rein as far as the characters and the environments that we wanted to bring, and what's nice and what's wonderful about it is that our sister park in Hollywood is also doing a Silent Hill maze, and when you come to either Universal Halloween Horror Nights in Hollywood, or you come to the Orlando event, they're two completely separate mazes, even though they're both based in the intellectual property of Silent Hill. And I think that that's something that's phenomenal.

I think it's a huge hook for our fans, not only the horror fans that would normally come to Halloween Horror Nights, but also the gaming fans Tomm was talking about, or even the fans of the film. We like to say that if you're a fan, you're going to be able to see a lot of stuff that you can relate to, and if you're not a fan, you're just going to get plain scared. So it's a win-win either way for us. As far as environments are concerned, we pored over, man, all the video games that are out right now, as well as—we were able to catch a preview screening of the second film, and we know the first film extremely well. So it's nice to be able to take all the environments that we wanted to use, pass them by the folks at Konami, and build a maze.

Complex: Want to give any hints about specific things or easter eggs that fans will recognize?

Braillard: Yes we do, but I'm hesitant to talk about "easter eggs." And I don't mean to be cagey, but I'm going to love to see the reaction of the fans when they come through the house and say, "Oh! I can't believe they had this!" or, "I can't believe they had that!" And what's nice is that it runs the entire gamut of all of the games as well as the films.

Hulett: And this is stuff that I would hope, without giving anything away, it's not necessarily in-your-face stuff, you know, they're not just throwing, like, a scary thing from an obscure corner of the game, but it's really subtle things. So fans will have to be as eagle-eyed as they are when they played the games.

Braillard: [That] was a much more eloquent answer.

Hulett: [Laughing] In gaming we're a lot more used to hiding spoilers.

Complex: That's true. What exactly is different between the two parks? They're completely different?

Braillard: Oh, absolutely. And one of the nice things—and we pride ourselves at Universal Orlando, in particular for our original mazes—that every single year, we bring original content to our guests. But the nice thing is that even though we're using intellectual property like Silent Hill, which has such a huge swathe of information to pull from, it's still an original maze in the fact that we worked with Konami to say, "Okay, which rooms or which environments from the game are not only the most impactful to our guests, but which ones are also our favorites?"

And so Hollywood has done the exact same thing. Where then, we do have fans who will spend their vacation time flying from coast to coast to see the differences between the two houses. And that's something special, too, because we now know them by name, and when they show up, they love to give a critique.

Complex: So there are some hardcore Horror Nightsfans out there?

Braillard: Oh yeah. We have people that will actually spend their entire vacation time from the UK to fly to our resort just to spend two or three weeks just going to the event every single night.

Complex: Obviously there are some fan-favorite games—which ones were you inspired by in particular?

Braillard: Not to go in too much, but you're going to see things from Book of Memories, you're going to see things from Downpour, you're going to see—we're pretty heavily influenced from Silent Hill 1, 2 and 3. So there's quite a few different games that we've shown, and balancing that with the film properties inside the house, it really is a hodgepodge and a nice smorgasbord of different pieces.

Complex: Tomm, what's your favorite game from the series? Is it represented pretty well?

Hulett: My favorite game, well, my favorite game I didn't work on is 2, and obviously Pyramid Head is a big part. And then my favorite that I worked on would probably changed based on the day you asked. I think it's Downpour, I would say. And there's some pretty cool Downpour-related stuff. So yeah, my favorites are definitely represented. But, you know, and a lot of this I also told [Universal] when they'd ask, you know, "What's, like, the fan favorite room from this game?" or something. I would just say, you know, here's a bunch of examples, pick the one that is the scariest. Because at the end of the day, you can't fit literally every single favorite thing in there, so even hardcore game fans really, they're just going to appreciate whatever scares the crap out of them. So I think that's the most important part.

Braillard: [Laughing] Amen.

Complex: There are a lot of interesting visual effects going on in the games and movie, like the transition into Otherworld. What was it like translating those effects into the house?

Braillard: It's a constant challenge, as well as one of our favorite things to do. We have to envision the game—game designers—and I don't want to speak for Tomm—but game designers have the wonderful thing of being able to place the camera in a location and hide things that they don't want you to see until the time that it's ready to go. We're also in the same game, in the respect that we're able to hide things until we let you see the, but also you can't stop somebody in our maze from turning around. So we have to create a full, 360-degree immersive environment.

And one of the great things that we got to do is go into Otherworld, using the siren, using the change of light, using a change of atmosphere in the score, using a different piece of the set, and being able to blend those two pieces together. So as you walk through from the beginning of the house to the end of the house, you literally do go through one or two different transitions back and forth between the two worlds, and it's amazing when you actually walk through as an individual, because you actually, you get to see it in a way that you don't get to see it in the game.

Complex: Is it challenging to get the "scaracters" to replicate the movements of some of Silent Hill's enemies, like the nurses?

Braillard: That's a really great question, because it's got a couple of different answers. The first answer is: yes. When you use a property like this, you always want to make sure that you get it picture-perfect, so you want to adhere to all the strange movements that a Grey Child may possible have, or how Pyramid Head moves, or the nurses, and things like that. Fortunately, because of the tradition at Halloween Horror Nights—we've been doing this for 21, we're going into our 21st year—we have fans that have grown up playing Silent HIll, and are just as ravenous about the game franchise as we are. So when you cast somebody, and they get told that they're going to be a nurse, they get so excited because they know and they want to make sure it's as accurate as you want to make sure it's accurate.

Which, it's really fun to have people who are as die hard and fanatical about it. But yes, there is training for them. We'll spend time during rehearsal in every single room, teaching our characters how to walk and how to move. For this year it's especially challenging with all the different characters that we're going to be bringing from the Silent Hill franchise, but it's going to be so worth it, because you're absolutely correct. We want to have that attention to detail, and those characters wouldn't be those characters without the movement styles the way they are.

Complex: How different is it translating an interactive experience, versus translating a movie or TV show? Is the maze going to be more interactive because of that?

Braillard: The way we were talking about it when we first were talking about Silent Hill as a property that we wanted to attach to Horror Nights was it's kind of already a haunted house. I mean, the video games are built level by level, or phrase of the game by—beat by beat, so it kind of already is an immersive, horrific story. So it just became a lot of fun. Rather than a huge challenge to be able to say, oh, how are we going to do it this way or that way, as opposed to a film or a movie—because a film or a movie, it's attention to detail in the sets, and you want to make sure that you get the characters correct. And that's about where it stops.

A video game, because there are so many different incarnations of all of those characters throughout the huge amount of information that we get to pull from, you get to start having fun. It's like a kid in a candy store. You're like, yes, I'll have some of this, and I'll have some of this, and say, "Tomm, is that okay if we do that? And he says, "Yes" or "No," and we keep going. Which is, it's a lot of fun. And to be able to double dip on me being able to say, yeah, I'm a horror fanatic, but also I'm a game fanatic, so I get to play with both of them, it's kind of like Christmas came early.

Complex: Do you find that the maze plays out differently when you're going through it than other mazes play out, because it's based on a game?

Braillard: I'd like to say it's a seamless addition, but I guess that's going to be for our guests to decide. I would love to say that it fits very, very well into the canon of all the houses that we've done.

Complex: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Hulett: I'll add that the amount of effort that Universal puts behind this is really huge. It's kind of like they're making a movie that they have to play out 25 times a night, or I don't know the stats, but just that everything, the props and everything, their dedication, looks perfect to the games and the films, is commendable. So if anybody heard there'd be a Silent Hill haunted house and thought of, you know, the rinky-dink thing in your garage, or whatever, it's not that. This'll be your best chance to walk around in Silent Hill. So I'm looking forward to it for that reason. After working on the games for so long, to have some way to actually be there, I'm pretty excited. So hopefully a lot of people come to check it out.