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David Howard Thornton has some words of wisdom for those brave enough to take on the Terrifier haunted house at this year’s Halloween Horror Nights.
2025 marks the first year the Damien Leone-helmed clown-slasher franchise — starring Thornton as Art the Clown — has made its debut at the horror-fan-favorite event, which takes place at Universal Studios Hollywood and Orlando every fall, drawing scare lovers from around the world. The event has become so popular that this year, Universal Orlando Resort has even made changes to their Scream Early ticket option, allowing guests to get into lines for houses earlier than ever.
The gore-heavy Terrifier makes its debut as a new intellectual property this year, taking its blood-soaked bow as one of the 10 houses guests have to choose from — a tall order, considering years of clowns past including attractions inspired by Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) and even the event’s own original icon, Jack, who made his HHN debut 25 years ago, in 2000.
But as Thornton, 45, tells PEOPLE, the Terrifier house — which will be featured on both coasts — will be a vastly different experience, depending on which event you’re attending. In Hollywood, you’ll get “drenched” in liquid that’s supposed to be “blood,” but in Orlando, you have the option to choose between a wet and a dry path.
For those brave enough to choose the wet path, Thornton “definitely” recommends one item that no Florida theme-park-goer leaves home without during the summer months: a poncho.
“You are going to get very, very wet during this, because they are going to be spraying blood at you and [a liquid resembling] bleach at you and all kinds of crazy stuff,” he tells PEOPLE.
The Terrifier haunted house promises to be a complete assault on the senses — perhaps most notably with scent, including that of feces and blood.
As Lora Sauls, Universal Orlando Resort’s Senior Manager of The Creative Development Group and Show Direction and a 25-plus-year veteran of HHN, told Entertainment Weekly, “[The feces smell] sticks to you. It clings to your clothes, to the walls — even when that house isn’t going, it smells.”
“Not only are the water effects leveled up, [but] we have smells representing the second film, in a scene where Art scalped his victim and poured bleach and salt on the body,” she added.
As for other tips on getting through unscathed, Thornton himself is a self-professed “puncher” — meaning that even despite his onscreen role as one of the most feared modern movie villains, he is likely to throw hands when getting scared, which is obviously a big no-no for the HHN Scareactors.
So with that in mind, “I like to go through the house with my hands in my pockets and have a person in front of me just in case,” he tells PEOPLE. “So they are the person that [Scareactors] usually pop out at. They usually don’t pop out of the person in second or third in line.”
“So I like to have a buffer between myself and whoever’s popping out just so I don’t accidentally punch someone,” he adds.
Most importantly, though? “Go in there and just have fun,” Thornton says. “You’re going to see recreations of different death scenes from all the Terrifier movies, but they’re also adding their own twist to things because it’s basically Art’s funhouse of horror, in a lot of ways.”
“So there’s a lot of embellishments, and there’s some new things in there that we haven’t done yet in the movies,” he teases.
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Tickets for Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights — running on select nights now through Nov. 2 in Orlando, and from Sept. 4 through Nov. 2 in Hollywood — are available at universalorlando.com and universalstudioshollywood.com, respectively.
