[This story contains spoilers from Halloween Horror Nights 2026’s Stranger Things L.A. house and Orlando lagoon show.]
When Universal Studios Hollywood debuted its Stranger Things house as part of the bicoastal Halloween Horror Nights 2018 event, it was already two years into the show’s pop-culture takeover. Season one had garnered buzz, but the Duffer Brothers-created series would ultimately cement itself — and its ensemble of young stars — into a massive global hit by season two, just in time for its HHN debut.
“All of them were just little kids,” John Murdy, creative director of USH’s event, recalls of Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink and Priah Ferguson’s season-one house walkthrough. “I said, ‘Hey, this is the moment. This thing’s blowing up. Buckle up.’”
Now, nearly a year after the Netflix show’s long-awaited conclusion and during the 10-year anniversary of its series debut, Murdy confirms the cast has already been asked back to take a final walk through Hawkins and the Upside Down — alongside their fans. Opening on Sept. 3 in Hollywood and Aug. 28 in Orlando, the Stranger Things 5 houses will double as the end of an era for Netflix and as a major milestone for the after-hours event, which will have adapted the entirety of a TV series for one of the first times in its history.
“Everyone knows what an impact Stranger Things has made on pop culture, even if you don’t watch the show,” says Jason Horne, assistant director, Entertainment Creative Development, Universal Orlando Resort. “The second we did the first house, you could feel a shift in our demographic. We immediately got younger. It brought in a brand new fan base that probably carried on with us even in the years we weren’t doing Stranger Things. And that is what’s going to keep our event alive — that next generation finding reasons to fall in love with it.”
For four years, Stranger Things’ multi-generational fandom has been able to share its love for the IP before even entering a house through the event’s themed menus. This year, Jens Dahlmann, vp, executive chef at Universal Orlando Resort has prepared dishes including El’s Battery Jerky, mac ‘n’ cheese with twisted fusilli noodles and peppered beef jerky, alongside drinks like Hopper’s Recharger, featuring yuzu juice, lemon-lime Powerade, and Monster Energy Zero Ultra. In L.A., Julia Thrash, Hollywood’s vp of culinary, has served up the savory Hellfire Club Spicy Italian Sandwich alongside the sweeter Steve’s Smuggled Peanut Butter Bites.
Previous L.A. menu items included Eleven’s Waffle Extravaganza, the Demo-Dog, a Hellfire Club Push-Pop, and the Mind Flayer, a gin cocktail with pull-apart licorice and dry ice. As fans and the story were growing up, says Thrash, “we wanted to make sure the menu was reflective of that. Now we represent scarier things with spice or unexpected flavor, and instead of going the Eggos or the Benny’s [burger] route, it has become a collection of destinations — Surfer Boy Pizza, Scoops Ahoy and the ’80s-inspired Stellar Bar.”
Hollywood’s offerings are at the Studio Cafe, right across from the house entrance, which is nestled within the Lower Lot’s 5,000-square-foot Soundstage 15. Home to every previous maze for the Netflix series, this walkthrough experience was created “before we had seen any of it,” says Murdy.
“I went over to Netflix with my counterpart, [Senior Director, Entertainment Creative Development, Universal Orlando Resort] Mike Aiello, and we sat in a conference room with an exec producer. Everything was so secretive at that time because it hadn’t come out,” he recalls. “They talked us through the whole season from start to finish, and were showing us some visuals. There was no footage shown. So when we actually saw it, it was like, ‘Oh boy.’ By the last episode, I was just like, ‘How are we gonna do this?’”
The answer is a season’s worth of content — almost the equivalent of eight films — adapted down to seven to 10 minutes. “You’re really trying to pick iconic scenes and characters you think the fans are going to relate to, but some of those episodes they’re cutting back and forth between three or four different locations,” says Murdy. “So how do you tell this story in a walkthrough experience, knowing that the scope is so large? Just the Mind Flayer’s belly alone, that set was bigger than our soundstage.”
The process started with a 100-page treatment, the earliest envisioning of what guests see, hear and experience scene-by-scene. It features behind-the-scenes assets that help the production design team catch the angles TV doesn’t show you for the maze. There are also the ground plans, created by Art Director Chris Williams, who lays out the “path where the characters are located, and all of the physical set pieces,” he adds. “All of this is drawn by hand. Every wall in every scene.”
Those images are then digitized through CAD, before construction and prop lockdown on the house. Hollywood is well into this process on the tunnels under Hawkins — where Derek Turnbow will make a colorful appearance — and the demogorgon-infested hospital where Lucas saves Max. But guests will begin their journey in the queue line, where they can expect a full recreation of Will Byers fort. When THR arrives, it’s so early in the maze’s construction we can’t take photos, but everything around us is “all for assembling Castle Byers,” Murdy says. “This is the real behind-the-scenes. Definitely more than we normally do on the first tour.”
Branches — provided by the same foliage vendor for nearly 20 years — sit piled on the floor or resting on the fort’s black frame as part of Murdy’s effort “to create a scene that paid off that first five minutes of season five,” he explains. “We have to individually attach all of these [branches], and it’s all real treated wood. But you go over here, and this is all fake. We built these [tree trunks] specifically for A Quiet Place because they mask speakers. We use them because everybody’s all in front here.”
Behind the structure is a cyclorama of the Upside Down sky and under our feet, the floor is covered with brown paper to protect what’s beneath: a giant graphic of the forest floor in the Upside Down. Various chalk markings on that same paper designate the placement of incoming elements like the fort flag and a custom-built tree that will hold up an animated Will figure, his feet kicking as he hangs by his backpack from the branches. Once completed, guests can hear Will hauntingly singing The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” while in surround audio, a demogorgon stalks and crashes through the woods amid the cracking of lightning and thunder.
As fans cross from Castle Byers into the house’s hallways, they’ll traverse the Upside Down version of the Hawkins library, where two video projectors generate the appearance of particles “all over the walls and all around you.” Further inside, fans will witness battles between a wine-glass-wielding Karen Wheeler and a demogorgon set to ABBA’s “Fernando”; a white-eyed Will and a demogorgon he powerfully “lifts” around 10 feet into the air; and Eleven as she faces down Vecna inside the Mind Flayer’s belly surrounded by towering teeth, cut for the house by KUKA robots.
These types of creature-driven action sequences are often where HHN delivers its most visually impressive or boundary-pushing experiences, with Vecna frequently at the center for Stranger Things. But after the show “completely changed his look” in season five, the HHN team had “to figure out a new thing to do,” Murdy explains. “Previously he was a head-to-toe foam creature suit. That’s tough for our performers who are on set 45 minutes at a time. But when we were watching the behind-the-scenes of season five, they did like a dye-sublimated [3D] printed under-bodysuit and applied all the other stuff physically on top of that. So we have a printed bodysuit and a whole series of pieces that go over that.”
In a similarly involved effort, the house recreates the melting hallway — “urethane poured layer after layer to do the melting look, and then a fluorographic to tie it together,” says Murdy — with a live performer dressed as a soldier encased in the wall. And as part of a recreation of a “whole city block” that Mike moves a group of kids through, the house carefully moves guests around a Quonset hut and cargo containers before they encounter “what we call a banner sensor. It’s a beam that you trip, and that’ll make half of a full-size Humvee roll out,” Murdy teases. “It’s all foam-constructed — the tires are fake — and there’s a big demogorgon on top of it. Vecna comes around the corner and uses his power, so the reset is motivated by him making it go back and explode with smoke effects.”
Guests will navigate these various sequences through a version of the show’s rift portals, the team’s answers to the series’ location-hopping. “We always have to have curtains in our house to separate scenes, so we made it out of a translucent material, printed it, and then we’re backlighting it so it glows like the portals in the show,” he tells THR. As we pass through them into each room, even in mid-construction, the level of detail illustrates a faithful effort to bring the Duffer Brothers’ world to life, even if only for a few months.
“Part of all this work, which is the equivalent of making eight movies at the same time, is that it all goes up, we do our show, and it all comes down,” Murdy tells THR. “And this might be your only opportunity to see it.”
The same could be said for Universal Orlando Resort, which, alongside its own Stranger Things season five-focused house, is producing the “Stranger Things: Return to Hawkins” lagoon show. “This is a way to experience Stranger Things unlike anything before. Unlike the Broadway show, unlike watching the series at home,” says Horne. “We’ve also leaned into a lot of the moments within the show that will play to a Halloween Horror Nights crowd. I’m not ruining anything when I say we got demogorgons in there.”
After appearing as part of 2019’s “Halloween Marathon of Mayhem,” Stranger Things returns, marking the first time the water, light, music and projection experience will feature only a single IP. “It made so much sense with the scope of the show, the amount of music that’s involved, and just how connected the fans are to the characters. Knowing that this was the final season, it felt right to take that to Netflix and say we want to offer this experience as well,” he says.
“Return to Hawkins” takes fans back to the very first episode, with its 12-minute, musically driven retrospective of all five seasons. With the help of Universal Studios Florida’s New York section skyline — which serves as a canvas for the show’s map projection — the 350-foot lagoon’s five water screens, around 230 water jets, and major lighting system will tell a story not just shaped by the show’s iconic moments and characters, but by thematic arcs like friendship and fear.
“You go from dark, heavy moments and the monsters to funny moments with the relationships and friendships. We’re trying to hit all the flavors of what a Stranger Things show would be. At the same time, we want to provide a celebratory goodbye for the franchise, getting fans together with these characters one more time.”
Things kick off with a six-minute pre-show, inspired by the fictional Hawkins radio station WSQK The Sqwuak. “For the first time, we’re starting our map projection in the pre-show. You see WSQK on the Eagle Warehouse across the way with the radio tower along the building. You’ll listen to music played from the Squawk and hear bumpers while you wait for the show to start. As that pulls down into the darkness, the show climbs up out of the radio dial of the station.”
For the main event, things will launch big. “There are two ways that we utilize water within the show: content and energy. The water screens provide us with storyline content. Then we have our jets, which we use to provide energy,” Horne explains. “One hundred and thirty-one feet is how high we can go, and we go real high in this show almost immediately.”
The water fans will project visuals, with the fountain’s jets providing strategic storytelling support. That includes “a moment where the Mind Flayer is lit all of a sudden through red lightning” with an effect created through the falling water from the previous fountain shot. Behind the fountain, the buildings will lock audiences into the story’s location. During the friendship arc, fans can see Hawkins High School, while in a darker moment, windows will be illuminated with the images of scurrying rats. “You’re going to see inside the Byer’s house, and the Christmas light sequence. There are moments, if you look at it just right, it appears like we’ve hung lights on those buildings.”
The music — a medley of the Netflix series’ score and soundtrack — will drive the storyline and energy of scenes, while also melding with the pattern of dialog in the clips, creating a natural flow to the show. Horne promises tracks fans immediately associate with the TV series, but also a few more surprises.
The show will honor a story told across 10 years, meaning audiences won’t see everything from all five seasons, but can expect memorable moments with the core ensemble, including Eleven, Will, Max, Lucas, Steve, Nancy, Robin and Vecna. “Eddie’s a big one,” Horne teases. “I don’t want to give away too much, but [Metallica’s] ‘Master of Puppets’ is one of the coolest sequences we’ve ever had out there.”
As part of its close, there will be a 40-second walkout that comes “out of this big epic moment,” Horne tells THR. “We do pay it off in the end, especially for people who have watched the show. It’s going to take you back in a very beautiful way.” Only as part of Orlando’s HHN event, “Stranger Things: Return to Hawkins” will run six times a night beginning at 9 p.m., with repeat viewings encouraged. “If you’re on the far end of 350 feet, you’re not seeing the other end, so I do invite people to watch it from different places,” Horne adds. “We have so many water screens; each direction gives you a completely different show.”
Halloween Horror Nights runs from Aug. 28 and Sept. 3 to Nov. 1 at Universal Orlando Resort and Universal Studios Hollywood.
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