Here’s a rundown of all the Ghostbusters easter eggs and references included in the new Halloween Horror Nights maze, starting with …
Returning Characters and Familiar Locations
The maze draws most of its narrative elements from the original 1984 movie. Familiar settings include the Ghostbusters’ renovated firehouse headquarters, the New York Public Library, the Sedgewick Hotel, Dana Barrett’s apartment, and the Temple of Gozer. The main Ghostbusters that maze attendees will encounter are the original quartet of Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddemore.
Other characters from the original movie who pop up include a possessed Louis Tully, the Terror Dogs (recreated via big puppets), the zombified cabbie, the Library Ghost, and Gozer the Gozerian. While the attraction culminates with a recreation of the original film’s climactic rooftop showdown against the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, it starts off on a lighter note with the Ghostbusters’ sarcastic secretary Janine Melnitz, who will be played by a live performer attendees can interact with.
“Because of the property we’re dealing with, which is a comedy that has horror elements in it, we wanted to pay off both the comedic sides of Ghostbusters and also the scary side of the movies as well. So that means Janine Melnitz is going to be the first character you encounter in the maze,” Murdy revealed.
Attendees enter the maze through a facade that looks like the Ghostbusters’ firehouse headquarters. Murdy took us to a recreation of the headquarters’ main office, which was decorated with period and movie-accurate details including newspaper clippings and plaques.
“Things are already starting to go bad in New York when you enter [the office]. She’s manning the phones, the phones are ringing off the hook,” Murdy explained. “We gave this performer the option to trigger, with her little buttons on her desk, multiple different channels of audio that she could pick at any given time. So sometimes it’s, ‘Ghostbusters. What do you want?’ Sometimes she’s yelling at you as if you’re the EPA, you know, ‘Excuse me, where are you going?’”
If she gets a call that the Ghostbusters got a job, Janine will ring the bell and yell her classic “We got one!” line. Then one of the Ghostbusters, sometimes Egon and other times Winston, will bust through the door holding a smoking trap.
Obviously no Ghostbusters experience would be complete without an appearance by Slimer, who pops up in the maze’s Sedgewick Hotel section. In a recreation of the room service cart scene, attendees will even get “slimed” via LED projections and blasts of compressed air and water. (Sorry, no gooey ecto-plasm will be used on guests.)
While the protagonists of the 2016 reboot aren’t mentioned in the maze, two ghosts from the Paul Feig-directed film do show up: murderous aristocrat Gertrude Aldridge, and Sparky, the electrocuted prisoner seen in the subway.
An Unused Idea From Aykroyd’s Original Script
Gertrude and Sparky are joined by the executed criminals Nunzio and Tony Scoleri, the maze’s only real nod to Ghostbusters II, in a set-piece inspired by something that didn’t make it into the original 1984 movie.
According to John Murdy — who consulted with Sony and Ghostbusters filmmakers Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman on the maze — “[in] one of Dan Aykroyd’s early drafts for Ghostbusters, in the Containment Chamber, there was a scene where (Ray) looked through, like, they had a camera hookup, so he could see the ghosts inside the Containment Chamber and check up on them. And it was something that got cut in the original film.”
The Ghostbusters maze will now give fans the chance to look inside the Containment Chamber that filmgoers never got. Murdy took us to the maze’s Containment Chamber set, where he explained how the effect will work utilizing black light and smoke effects.
“When the Chamber looks like it’s going to blow, all the lights go out and these walls disappear. And on the other side of the wall are all the spirits that are in the Containment Chamber looking in at you,” Murdy said. “In Dan Aykroyd’s script, when they look at in the Containment Chamber they see people playing cards, and people hanging out as if they’re in the prison in an old 1940s movie. So we have two live performers in this scene and they’re both from Ghostbusters 2016.”
The Video Game’s Influence
The only element directly taken from 2009’s Ghostbusters: The Video Game is, according to Murdy, the “slime portals that allow you to go back and forth between the spirit world [and the real world].”
Murdy said he and his team “embraced the idea of going in and out of the spirit realm with these portals that came from the video games, because it allows us to take you into a pitch dark environment where we can use black light to payoff some of the ghost-type effects you’d want to see in this particular property.”
He added, “That allows us to take you into environments where we could scare the living daylights out of you. After you leave the library scene, which is a very presentational scene, you turn a corner immediately you get hit by the Library Ghost. … You turn another corner, you get hit by her again, and then you pop into the Sedgewick Hotel.”
From there, maze-goers will follow the journey until they witness the four main Ghostbusters’ battle against Stay Puft – the final boss battle, if you will, of the maze.
Those are all the biggest nods to the established Ghostbusters canon we caught in our walkthrough. Ghostbusters fans can experience all the laughs and thrills the maze has to offer for themselves when Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood screams to life on select nights from Friday, September 13 to Sunday, November 3, 2019.
And after you’ve gone through the Ghostbusters maze, be sure to also check out the other film and TV show mazes there this year including Us, Stranger Things, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Creepshow, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, and The Walking Dead.
