‘Terrifier' House Inspired by 2022 Sequel Set for Halloween Horror Nights
Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Orlando Resort announced the slasher franchise as the latest addition to the 2025 house lineup on Thursday. The news follows previous reveals of houses and experiences based on Fallout, Friday the 13th, and Five Nights at Freddy's.
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'Friday the 13th' House "Jason Universe" Announced for Halloween Horror Nights 2025
Based on the universe created by writer-director Damien Leone, producer Phil Falcone along with Dark Age Cinema Productions, the maze promises to deliver 'a grisly haunted house oozing with a new sense of terror.'
Inspired by Art the Clown's nightmare funhouse at the abandoned carnival from the 2022 sequel, the house will see attendees become the latest victims of Terrifier's titular murderer. As they walk through, fans can expect to be overwhelmed by the 'sights, sounds, smells and dread' of Art's grotesque kills, which will be 'gleefully displayed for all to see,' according to the event.
In addition to witnessing a number of iconic kills from the franchise, within the house's 'claustrophobic' corridors attendees can also expect to run into some familiar faces, including Vicky and the Little Pale Girl, as they move through recreated locations like the Clown Café, a revolting bathroom, and a deadly Christmas horrorscape.
Known for its unbridled brutality and unabashed gore, the Terrifier franchise is one of the horror genre's biggest modern success stories, with the low-budget, unrated trilogy garnering around $100 million at the global box office on a combined budget of less than $2.5 million. The slasher universe began its feature journey in 2016 with Terrifier, but its leading serial killer appeared in several of Leone's short films dating back to 2008. Since then, the franchise has spawned not only a big screen trilogy, but an arcade game, novelizations, and comic books, alongside a fourth film in the works.
Set in the fictional town of Miles County, New York, the Terrifier franchise follows the demonic serial killer known as Art the Clown, who has been terrorizing and torturing residents on Halloween in increasingly sick, cruel and sinister ways.
Halloween Horror Nights kicks off at Universal Orlando Resort on Aug. 29 and Universal Studios Hollywood on Sept. 4, with both events running through Nov. 2 and tickets already on sale.
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Wordle hints today for #1,507: Clues and answer for Monday, August 4
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The New York Times thinks generative AI is like Pac-Man ghosts and also the Matrix, because nobody gets to be normal about this stuff anymore
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The New York Times is being hazed by game dev social media over what I can only describe as one of the most naive articles about AI I've ever seen. The pointing and laughing is happening on BlueSky, among other places, over a paragraph that claims generative AI is being embraced by the videogame industry, which sure, makes sense, because we were giving those funny Pac-Man ghosts AIs in the past. And isn't that the same thing? No. No it's not—though being wary of simply taking a lone paragraph out of context, I went ahead and read the full thing. It does not get much better. Get out your bingo cards. The piece immerses us into a nice balmy pot of misunderstanding soup with the sentence "It sounds like a thought experiment conjured by René Descartes for the 21st century." Hoo boy. Its writer, Zachary Small, then goes on to reference this video that went viral a couple of years ago, wherein a YouTuber gets proportionately freaked out as generative AI NPCs start getting a bit existential in a tech demo by Replica. I'd link to Replica's website, but the company doesn't exist anymore which, to be fair, the article does acknowledge several paragraphs down. The NYT frames this as some kind of brush with the machine god: "Everything was fake, a player told them through a microphone, and they were simply lines of code meant to embellish a virtual world. Empowered by generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the characters responded in panicked disbelief. 'What does that mean,' said one woman in a gray sweater. 'Am I real or not?'" This sort of open-mouthed astonishment might've been apropos three years ago, when all of this tech was still relatively new, but AI doesn't actually think or understand anything. It didn't then, and it doesn't now. Here's a solid breakdown by MIT from the time period, which explains: "In this huge corpus of text, words and sentences appear in sequences with certain dependencies. This recurrence helps the model understand how to cut text into statistical chunks that have some predictability. It learns the patterns of these blocks of text and uses this knowledge to propose what might come next." In other words, what we might call an 'educated guess'. Replica's AI was trained on text written by people, and people have written about machines becoming self-aware before, which is why the NPCs spat out lines about being self-aware when they were told they were machines. This is like saying Google is sapient because it fed me a link to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot when I searched for it: A program taking educated guesses does not a singularity make. 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Sure, Nvidia's CEO says AI is coming for everybody's jobs, but also, it's sort of his job to sell AI technology. You know who else said we'd all have to adapt to AI? Netflix's former VP of GenAI for Games, who stopped working there four months later. CEO of Larian Studios Swen Vincke (note: someone who actually makes games) isn't nearly as convinced—while the developer does use generative AI for the early, early stages of prototyping, basically anything thereafter is made by hand. CD Projekt is also steering clear, because the quagmire of legal ownership just isn't worth it. Some executives have done some restructuring that may or may not be related to AI—I certainly don't doubt that AI plays a part, but widespread layoffs and studio closures are also down to, say, buying a company for $68 billion, or flubbing a $2 billion investment deal. You know. CEO things. 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Nintendo pointed Small in the direction of its prior statements, wherein the company said "would rather go in a different direction". Even the experts at companies Small quotes are downright tepid, often pointing towards cost and realistic expectations for the things he says are just five years around the corner. Look—generative AI's gonna have, and already has had, an impact on game development, and will be used inside of it. But I would implore both the writers at the NYT, and just about anyone else, to apply a little bit of skepticism before you believe claims that these models are forming relationships, inventing art styles, or becoming self-aware. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
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TV Star Dies After ‘Acute Prolonged Illness' Days Before Birthday
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