Halloween Horror Nights™ 2000

For the first time ever, in an effort to counter the event’s mounting overhead, the headliners of Halloween Horror Nights™ weren’t Universal monsters or genre titans, but brands on loan. The World Wrestling Federation spun off The Undertaker’s dark ringside shtick into his own haunted house. White-hot WB sensations Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel combined their prime-time powers into a single, double-billed maze. Clive Barker designed one more maze for the event, but it’s Rob Zombie’s contribution that would prove historic. 

Early on in designing what he’d dubbed “House of 1000 Corpses,” Zombie realized it may make as good a movie as a maze. Universal agreed and greenlit what would be his directorial debut. The film was shot in the summer of 2000. A Universal-approved trailer for it even screened outside the maze. But studio brass got cold feet about letting young guests walk under a marquee for what was shaping up to be an NC-17 rated horror movie, so the maze was hastily retitled “Rob Zombie’s American Nightmare.” Continued concerns over the violent content would eventually convince Universal to shelve the film entirely until Zombie bought the rights back himself and released it independently in 2003. Because of the strange timeline of their creation, “Rob Zombie’s American Nightmare” and House of 1000 Corpses share a chicken-egg legacy as the first maze to tease an upcoming release and the first film ever based on Halloween Horror Nights, respectively.