Halloween Horror Nights Unofficial: The Story & Guide 2020

by Mr Christopher Ripley, Molly Buckner (Illustrations)

Stakes? Check. Silver bullets? Check. Survival guide? If you're brave enough to attend Universal Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights, you better believe you'll need a survival guide. Complete with a detailed history of the event, this book is all that stands between you and them. For over 29 years, Universal's Halloween Horror Nights has been the pinnacle of holiday events in Orlando. You won't find Mickey there (he's too scared!), but you will find the bloodiest, goriest, most intense thrills of your life. Christopher Ripley pulls back the shroud and tells the history of every HHN event, from the earliest Fright Nights to what to expect in 2018 and beyond! The fear-filled coverage * Walkthroughs of every house and scarezone in HHN history * Backstories of HHN icons like Jack the Clown and icons-that-never-were like Nathaniel Crowe * Survival tips, crowd levels, maps and wait time graphs, and other tools for making the most of this year's HHN * Behind-the-scenes commentary from HHN notables Mike Aiello, James-Michael Roddy, Jason Surrell and event co-creator Julie Zimmerman * A rundown of houses that never saw the light of day * Lots of "Fun Fear Facts" about little-known HHN moments GET THE STORIES BEHIND THE SCARES AND NEVER MISS A TRICK!

362 pages, Paperback

Published June 17, 2020

Reviews

[Megan Spaulding · Rating 3 out of 5]

The information is very good, and it's a book I will probably read annually leading up to my trip. There are more noticeable typos as the book goes on, as a former reviewer pointed out, but they didn't detract from my enjoyment. I do wish some of the more recent years had a little more detail - more akin to the earlier chapters. But it's a fun read.

[Adam Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The information in here is invaluable, and the maasive effort Christopher Ripley took in compiling it should not be understated. As someone who has only just recently been attending Halloween Horror Nights, I thought this was a great way to get caught up with the lore and the ebbs and flows of the fandom, and it's a far more convenient resource than a fansite or the wiki. It propelled me to try to dive deeper into the event, trying to find walkthroughs from yesteryear and look up more podcasts, sites, and rumor mills in the community. Now I had a working knowledge of what's beloved and what I would love to see come back.

However. There are a significant number of typos and inconsistent formatting errors that really hampered my reading experience. There are so many instances where convoluted sentence structure could have been made more readable and engaging with creative punctuation and concision. Especially in the middle third chapters, old ride and new ride names are treated interchangeably, which won't matter too much to someone who knows Universal but could throw off other readers. Maybe I wouldn't have been as bothered by these things had I gotten the cheaper ebook version over the paperback, but they were too noticeable to ignore when I just wanted to get lost in the history.

Content-wise, some years and mazes are also treated with less depth, and I would have loved to see more interviews with the creatives and unnamed sources. However, I also understand this can't be a doorstopper, and selectivity is a necessity.

HHN Unofficial is a great primer resource - I want to stress that. If you're still fresh to Horror Nights and want to learn about the past, this is a good place to start. But if the niggling things I talked about would also bother you, I would stick with the $8-10 eBook until they are (hopefully) edited out in the next edition.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

What starts as a wonderful book of the history of HHN, with each chapter going into the history of how and why and whom, unfortunately turns into a description of each house per chapter/year.
A good read with the last 5 chapters being mostly skimmed over.