By Charly SHELTON

Finally, after weeks of waiting and anticipation and previews and concept art … it’s finally time for Halloween haunts at the theme parks. First up is the big one – Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights.

This is the name of the game when it comes to haunt production value. Universal boasts incredible sets, costumes and gadgets to make the coolest, highest tech haunt around. And with mazes based on popular properties from throughout film and TV, it has a built-in fanbase. From “Poltergeist” to “Stranger Things” to “Trick ‘r Treat” to “Halloween 4,” the fans come for the premise and stay for the scares.

The mazes were all pretty well done with some being better than others. Personally my favorite was the “Poltergeist” maze, based on the 1982 horror film directed by Tobe Hooper and written by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais and Mark Victor. This is a classic of horror cinema featuring huge, stop-motion monster ghosts that stay within the nightmares of movie goers. To see them in life size as they pop through curtains to terrorize guests is really stunning. Between the big ghost monster scares and a few really clever film-specific scares that I won’t ruin for readers, this is one of the best haunts I’ve seen from Universal.

Of course the big one that everyone is looking forward to is the sensational hit of Netfilx, “Stranger Things.” Last week, we took a look at this maze and the “Trick ‘r Treat” maze in a special behind-the-screams tour with creative director John Murdy. (For those who haven’t read that article yet, find the Sept. 13 issue.) To see these mazes as they were being built out and then to see them on show night really puts in perspective the kind of foresight these haunt designers have in knowing exactly where the eye will be drawn in a particular room. The gags work well, they look just like the shot in the movie for the most part and they get a good scare.

As cool as “Stranger Things” is, the one I was most excited about was the Universal Monsters maze. This is the studio that invented the horror genre and the classic monsters – Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Masque of the Red Death and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. These are the reasons most horror fans are drawn to horror, and the legacy they carry was a daunting task for Murdy to do justice to.

“The Monster [maze] is a personal culmination of everything, because I was a Universal Monsters fan from the time I was 4 years old, so that’s been a long time coming to finally get the chance to do that the way I want to do it. It’s something that has taken 13 years to finally do,” Murdy said.

There was a Universal’s House of Horrors daytime walkthrough haunted attraction in the park from 2006 to 2014, but Murdy said that wasn’t his perfect idea of what the Monsters maze should be.

“That’s for the day. Horror Nights is a different audience and the challenge with those films, in particular and what’s always been the challenge when you remake movies in the modern day, is how to make it relevant and scary to a modern horror audience while not eliminating what makes it iconic in the first place,” Murdy said. “It’s having a respect for those movies, a love for those movies, but fully recognizing it’s not 1931. That’s a very difficult challenge. Sometimes when you’re trying so hard to make it scary you forget what made them iconic and they don’t even look like how they started.”

The maze brought the Universal Monsters together with greatest guitarist ever, Slash, to do a custom written soundtrack throughout the maze, with 19 different tracks of variations on the same theme. The music was great, the sets were incredible and the maze altogether was really a lot of fun.

This year, Universal brought me out to review the mazes and gave me a front-of-line pass, called Universal Express. And for the first time, I didn’t really need it. Most of the mazes on opening weekend (Sunday) were posted at 20 minutes, but actual wait times were more in the three to eight minute range, except for the 18 minute Stranger Things line. These low-wait nights will not last, however, so get your tickets now and head down to Universal Studios for Halloween Horror Nights.

  Charly Shelton