The Orlando Vacation Store Blog

Halloween Horror Nights 21 is drawing near! The frightening event, anticipated worldwide every year, will be on select nights from September 23rd until October 31st. After Universal Studios Florida is closed, the park is transformed into every horror lover’s dream. With chilling (and often humorous) live shows, scary scare zones, mysterious mazes, and horrible haunted houses, Halloween Horror Nights 21 is the place to be this Halloween season!

Past events have featured popular icons such as Bloody Mary, a demented psychiatrist who, possibly possessed by her deceased grandmother, killed her patients and was brutally murdered but the body was never found; Jack the Clown, a particular Halloween Horror Nights patron favorite, a child murdered and then undead killer; The Caretaker, an ex-doctor with an insane family of cannibals; and several more, such as Fear, the Usher, the Storyteller, and others.

This year’s event is a play on the number 21 (it is, after all, Halloween Horror night’s 21st year), with hints at a gambling (“blackjack”) theme. So far, not much is known about this year’s hair-raising horrors, but we -do- know that there will be an area themed after Universal’s reboot of The Thing, in theaters October 14th of this year. The new version of the movie will be decidedly scarier than the 1980’s film. Basically, a group of researchers go to an abandoned base in Antarctica and find… an alien? a virus? a demon? a government experiment? Whatever the Thing is, it has no form of its own, taking instead the shape of its victims. The researchers soon become paranoid as they are infected one by one.

And that’s just one of the many areas. Stay tuned for more information as it comes out!

My last blog covered the first part of Halloween Horror Nights event icon Bloody Mary. A crazed psychiatrist possessed by her grandmother’s music box, she killed her patients with her deranged “fear treatments.” Here’s what happened next…

Dr. Mary Agana’s patients were not usually killed by her physically; her first two patients require asylum treatment after she attempts to cure them, while the rest start dying. The first is suffocated in a box; after that, one is attacked by hypnotized mental patients, while another is incinerated by a jet engine. Another is hanged.

After Mary Agana inadvertently kills her first patient- a freelancing photographer- the private investigator who hired him for a different reason starts to investigate her. He makes an appointment with the deadly doctor but on the night of his appointment in 1958, Mary is murdered. Although everyone assumes it was the detective, it was actually David Gronoll, an ex-con and boxer who wasn’t at all connected with her.

In 2008, the Legendary Truth: The Collective, an investigation group started by the P.I., began to investigate what happened. Field operatives detected some form of Bloody Mary manifestation and vanished, never to be seen again.

It is said that she screams when she comes out of a mirror because it causes her pain. She first appeared in Halloween Horror Nights XVIII, Reflections of Fear. She was popular enough to make more appearances, including media “interviews.” Personally, I always thought her commercials were the creepiest, with her attacking people from her mirror.

While we’re waiting for some more news about this year’s Halloween Horror Nights event, you’ve likely read a few blogs already about some of the more popular and interesting Halloween Horror Nights event icons. One of my personal favorite event icons is the terrifying Bloody Mary.

Dr. Mary Agana, psychiatrist, had been rejected funding by the National Association of Mental Health after it became clear she used fear as a torture device against her patients. Her attempts to cure them of their fears by immersing them fully in them resulted in two asylum admissions and one accidental death. The lovely doctor felt no sadness, only excitement. Her following few patients died as well. At one point, one of the doctors that had rejected her became a patient; she killed him outright and at that point was completely insane.

Her story begins in 1908, with her grandmother, Mary Worthington. She was a schoolteacher in a small town killed by a Halloween prank involving six students and the school handyman. Although there was blood and shards of glass everywhere, her body was never found.

Her granddaughter was Mary Agana. She inherited several heirlooms from her grandmother after her mother died; one of them was a silver music box that slowly begins t possess her. She starts her Living Fearlessly: Specialized Treatments For Fear based Ailments in 1958 and hires probably ex-cons and mental patients as her new assistants.

Of course, if that was the whole story, it would be rather boring… the next blog will talk about what happened to Mary Agana to make her into Bloody Mary.

The Director is another of Halloween Horror Nights’ icons; he was the main event icon at Halloween Horror Nights: 12 and co-iconed for Halloween Horror Nights: Sweet 16 with the Caretaker, Jack the Clown, and the Storyteller. He also appeared in Halloween Horror Nights XX as the Fear’s minion, Sacrifice- fitting for a director who sacrificed real people to make his movies.

Born in Eastern Europe, Paulo Ranvinski made snuff films, obsessed with capturing suffering, death, and torture on film. His film “The Widow’s Eye” was so shocking that Ranvinski was exiled; he fled to the U.S. so he could continue his sickening projects. Universal hired him to make a horror film at Universal’s Islands of Adventure. They asked him for a short sample of the movie to show to executives; upon seeing it, the higher-ups found it to be far too graphic and unsettling for audiences (it contained real torture and real death, after all). They cancelled the project and had Ranvinski banned from the studios for life. Instead, he snuck into an unused backlot set, wanting revenge. He would attempt to get it at Halloween Horror Nights 13 (“The Director will see you now.”). There, he tortured a park guest by placing a poisonous insect on their head. In Halloween Horror Nights XIV, he was an event icon along with Jack the Clown, the Caretaker, and Eddie Schmidt, Jack’s younger brother. He would appear again in Halloween Horror Nights: Sweet 16 with Jack the Clown, the Caretaker, and the Storyteller; and once again in Halloween Horror Nights: Twenty Years of Fear.

The second event icon developed for Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights was the Caretaker. One of the creepier of the event icons, Albert Caine was a respected surgeon until it was discovered that he would use deceased patients’ bodies for experiments. He became the Shady Oaks Cemetery caretaker, converting the Victorian mansion his family lived in into a mortuary and funeral parlor. There, his gruesome family- relatives and crazed assistants- dug up the dead and used them for experiments as well as house decoration and strange parties. After a while, Caine would lure homeless people into the house and tie them to an operating table, performing dissections, chemical injections, amputations, and other horrifying experiments without the use of anesthesia. Other times he would perform experiments on them to cause death by fear, sometimes burying his victims alive.

One day two teenagers were walking around the cemetery. They found the family dancing about decaying human corpses and ran. This caused the family’s story to leak out. The shocked townspeople formed a mob and set fire to the house and cemetery, the family still inside…

…But of course the story can’t end there. A police investigation revealed that the only body found in the house was the possible body of Caine’s daughter Cindy. Beneath the house there was a network of tunnels that ran beneath the cemetery as well. Over a year later, the house was to be demolished, but three recent bodies were found on the property. After that, research teams and anyone walking in the area would go missing.

The Caretaker appeared in Halloween Horror Nights XX (20) as the Fear’s minion, Death.

Our last post covered some of the back story for popular Halloween Horror Nights icon Jack the Clown. Here is the rest of the story:

After his body and the bodies of the 13 children he murdered were found and consequently vanished in a freak accident, Universal found and bought the box, unleashing the clown. He was turned mortal and placed in an asylum. Shady Brook Asylum for the Criminally Insane was known for an inmate escape several years earlier. After Jack’s admittance, everyone else in the asylum began going even crazier. Everyone rioted, torturing the hospital staff, and Jack took charge. He found evidence that Dr. Oddfellow, his ex-boss and murderer, was still alive. Wanting revenge, he tracked down the doctor and his new carnival, murdering him. He took Dr. Oddfellow’s cane of souls and dressed himself as a circus ringmaster. He spent months going around the world, luring monsters, madmen, maniacs, and mutants with promises of fame and fortune and, of course, victims. After almost a year, Jack opened his new carnival- the Carnival of Carnage- in Orlando.

Included in his group of stars are Mary Shaw and her 101 Dolls, a master ventriloquist killed by a mob who suspected her of murdering a rich boy; The Thing, an unknown monster/demon/alien/government experiment that can change its shape; Jason Voorhees, the hockey mask Friday the 13th killer; Leatherface, the Chainsaw Massacre killer; and even Freddy Krueger, the dream killer.

Jack the Clown first showed up for Halloween Horror Nights X and has returned several times since.

Following the theme from the last blog post about The Fear, let’s talk about one of the most popular event icons: Jack the Clown.

Jack the Clown, real name Jack Schmidt, was the first original character created by Universal just for Halloween Horror Nights. He is said by many to be the most popular Halloween Horror Nights A former circus clown gone completely mad, he is a serial killer who kills his victims in creepy and horrible ways. For Halloween Horror Nights XX, it was revealed that Jack is one of the Fear’s minions, Chaos.

Let’s get into some back story, shall we?

Jack Schmidt ran away from an abusive, poor family and joined the circus. He left behind his little brother Eddie and became a carnival performer. Wanted for the abduction of small children in the Southern US, Jack revealed the bodies of thirteen children hidden inside three small trunks to the owner of the carnival, Dr. Oddfellow. Himself wanted by the police for several accidental deaths under a different name, the good doctor murdered Jack and his the clown’s body inside the House of Horrors, using it as an exhibit. Eventually he sold the carnival.

Six years later, his body was discovered, decaying, attached to a spring inside a jack-in-the-box. The unfortunate discovery was made by a film crew for the BBC, who was doing a documentary on the forgotten rides and relics of carnivals. The police were called and found the 13 children’s bodies as well. All 14 bodies were sent to be examined but the van transporting them was lost in a freak accident in the Louisiana swamp. After that, Jack was said to have been wandering the swamp, murdering people. The host and cameraman of the BBC crew were found dead.

In the next post: What happened to Jack?