John Murdy, creative director of Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood, walked through the event’s Sinners haunted house with the lights on and laid out how his team turned one of the most decorated films in Oscar history into a maze full of firsts.
“This house has a lot of innovations. Things we’ve never tried to do before at nights in the past that were completely born out of Ryan’s movie.”
Why Sinners, and why it works as a maze
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners was both a box-office hit and a critical one, and it went on to collect 16 Academy Award nominations, the most of any film in Oscar history and a first for a horror movie. Murdy points out that the only horror film to win Best Picture before it was The Silence of the Lambs, and even that leans more psychological thriller.
The film’s structure is part of what makes it maze material. It opens with the Smokestack Twins, Smoke and Stack, arriving in town with money from the Chicago mob to open a juke joint, then turns into a vampire story once the character Remmick shows up. Murdy reads the movie as a reinvention of the vampire tale through the Robert Johnson blues legend, in which the musician supposedly sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.
The scares, beat by beat
The house runs the film’s turn from period drama to bloodbath in order. The first live vampire guests meet is Remmick, played as a face character with no mask, just a glowing-eye effect and blood across his face after feeding on Mary. He stands in an almost ecstatic trance, lip-syncing the a cappella opening of “Rocky Road to Dublin” that he performs in the film.
Past him, the house springs a double scare, with Bert and Joan hitting from both sides of the path, before guests reach Mary, now rejuvenated as a vampire. Deeper in, Cornbread gets a setup straight from the movie. Guests first hear his line, “We’re supposed to be nice to one another,” before a masked, glowing-eyed Cornbread rounds the corner with his face shot apart and blood everywhere.
The film’s big shootout becomes a looping live beat. Mary enters first and tells the crowd, “We’re going to kill every one of you,” then Smoke steps in with two pistols and fires. Mary takes the hits, retreats into her scare position, and the whole thing resets for the next group.
A flying vampire, built by a Broadway rigging company
The house’s showpiece recreates the film’s big battle. Murdy’s team decided they needed a real stunt performer, so they brought in a flying company of the kind that rigs Peter Pan on Broadway and hid a large winch system behind the sets.
“He can jump off, land right in front of you, take a swipe at you, and then fly up to disappear into the darkness.”
That flying Remmick carries the same red glowing-eye effect as the live one. Murdy says the team proved the effect on standing performers first, then handed it to the stunt performer once they knew it worked.
A 1925 truck with a Laurel and Hardy past
Not every effect is high-tech. The period truck parked in the scene is one Universal has owned for decades, a 1925 Model A in Murdy’s telling. Laurel and Hardy characters used to drive it around Universal Studios Hollywood back in the 1970s, and it has sat in the studio’s vehicle storage ever since.
“When we were designing Sinners, we were like, oh, we have a 1925 Model A truck.”
It fits the world even though the film is set in the 1930s, because the sharecroppers coming to the juke joint would be driving older 1920s cars they could afford. The rest of the dressing comes from a large offsite production facility Murdy compares to the final crate-filled scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a database-tracked warehouse where production designer Chris pulls specific doors and hardware. Because real branded products are trademarked, the team fabricates its own period-accurate labels, and a head prop master who has been with the event since the beginning runs a crew of film and television veterans who build pieces and thrift local yard sales for the right era of clutter.
Eight movies at once
The performances are engineered for volume. Actors run a fast, repeatable cycle, and any given guest is in a scene for only about ten seconds, which keeps the walkthrough moving while the chaos resets behind them.
That pace scales up to the whole event. Murdy says he has already finished the written treatments for four of the 2027 houses while the 2026 event is still being built.
“It’s the equivalent of trying to make eight movies at the same time from a production standpoint. It’s insane.”
More Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood coverage from HAN
- Sinners Announced for Halloween Horror Nights Orlando and Hollywood
- Dead, Deader, Deadest, HHN Hollywood’s First Original House for 2026
- Slash Scored HHN Hollywood’s Killceañera House
- Art the Clown Takes Over HHN Hollywood’s Terror Tram
- Haunted Houses in Los Angeles 2026: Dates, Tickets, and What’s New
Details from a lights-on Sinners house tour given by creative director John Murdy, recorded by Haunted Attraction Network.
