Horrors Untold is a book that has never been done before – a rather grandiose claim, sure, but one that is nonetheless true. It combines three different components – fact, fiction, and puzzles – and wraps them all up in a found-footage premise that means nearly every chapter has its own look and feel. When combined with the story wrinkle that multiple characters have gone through and rearranged the book, attempting to manipulate what you read and, thus, what your perceptions are of the events that are slowly unfurling around you, it results in the impression, as one of our creative partners put it, that every single page looks truly bespoke and handcrafted. When we say that you’ve never seen anything quite like it, we mean it.

Why did we do this? And how did it come about? Those are two separate questions, but they feature interconnected answers that not only reveal the thinking behind our approach to this project, specifically, but also get at our new little startup company’s philosophy, generally, moving forward.

The long and the short of it is this: we wanted to see if we could take the essence of Universal Orlando Resort’s Halloween Horror Nights and, basically, bottle it up and ship it off to you at your home, allowing you to crack it open whenever you wanted throughout the year to create a little theming pick-me-up, if you will. But it’s important to linger on the word “essence” and explain, exactly, what we mean: not the street-party ambience that floods nearly every corner of Universal Studios Florida during the fall nights, but the narrative atmospherics that engulf you as you set foot into one of the haunted houses or scare zones for the very first time. It’s that tingle that goes up your spine that only immersiveness can bring about, the anticipation or tension that only gets released when a scareactor darts out at you from his boo hole. That’s the feeling we wanted to have every single one of the book’s 320 pages be imbued with, to one degree or another (well, minus the jump scares, unless you wanted to recruit some of your family and friends to help out in the endeavor).

To accomplish this, we felt that we needed to create our own original narrative that held the same amount of suspense and menace hanging in the ether, one that would provide just the right context in which to experience everything within Horrors Untold’s covers – what better way, after all, to read about the history or mythology of HHN Orlando than when you can imagine hearing the dissonant clanging of bells off in the distance or seeing hooded figures emerge out of the suddenly arrived fog? (And the tackling of the various riddles that have been sprinkled all throughout the book becomes that much more engrossing – and, indeed, that much more immersive – when you’re already on edge and primed for more.)

As for what this story contains, above and beyond those brief-but-evocative examples just given, well, we still want to remain on the coy side for now, but what we can say at this juncture is this: a string of strange incidents have been descending upon Central Florida, resulting in rolling power outages, mysterious sigils being left all over Orlando, and a glut of new – and not-very-seasonal – haunted attractions popping up, which may or may not be connected with everything else. Think of the phantom-clown craze that gripped the nation back in 2016, with vaguely sinister individuals creeping up and down streets and in people’s backyards, and the Krampus traditions of certain swaths of Europe that still hold true to this day, wherein troupes of the demonic Christmas figure can appear in small, sleepy, snowbound towns without warning and wreak a little mischief; either way, we wanted to make it feel as if all of the City Beautiful were being transformed into one giant scare zone. (There’s also a whole slew of historical – and, indeed, bizarre, at least to our modern American sensibilities – Yuletide traditions, rituals, and beliefs that we wanted to invoke, but we’ll get into those soon enough.)

The exact premise, the set-up that serves as the launching pad into all of Horrors Untold’s experiential proceedings, is something that can be dived fully into right now, and it revolves around Hunter Spivey, the author behind the popular HauntHunter blog (both of which are fictitious, of course). As he decides to turn his full attention to Florida’s Horror Nights, devoting his very first book to the popular subject, he becomes inexorably mired in these strange goings-on; it’s not long before he sees connections between the two, fears a vast conspiracy underriding them both, and, finally, goes missing just when he feels he’s on the cusp of some major breakthroughs – and revelations to the public. An unknown individual of mysterious intent, who we internally refer to as Writer 1, swoops in to nominally finish Hunter’s work, release his book, and help get the “truth” out behind his disappearance.

The whole effort is sabotaged, however, by yet another enigmatic figure, Writer 2, who intercepts the package, rips out entire sections of the book, and replaces them with materials that are designed, she purports, to disclose the real truth behind it all. This introduces a complementary character to Hunter: Marjorie Holden, a disgraced former folklorist and professor, who has come to many of the same paranoid conclusions as the ill-fated haunt blogger but by way of studying the history of Christmas and its evolution into modern-day Halloween (hence the references to Krampus and all the other unusual end-of-year legends that you find throughout). With this elaborate, suspenseful stage set, now you’re more than ready to face the challenges of our mindbending puzzles and the frights of Halloween Horror Nights, including an authoritative breakdown and analysis of its history, its 30-plus-year lore, its evolution into a worldwide phenomenon, and its six biggest intellectual properties that helped fuel this never-ending expansion (not to mention a rundown of some of the event’s more elusive highlights from throughout its run, such as a walkthrough of its first-ever haunted house, Dungeon of Terror, and an exploration of the short-lived Eternal Rest Package, which has since become the stuff of HHN legend).

Now, this is all well and good, but it still leaves that second question from before: how did all this come about? The answer, in short, is Dan Hatfield, the individual who created Orlando Informer 13 years ago and who hired me just a few months later, first as a freelancer and then, eventually, as an editor. I lost touch with him after he sold the company in 2015, but when I also departed for bluer skies, we got back in touch and quickly realized that we had the opportunity to do something new in the theme-park space, something that would be fun and rewarding for fans and would allow us to not only use all that huge assortment of Universal Orlando knowledge that we had wedged in our minds over the years, but which would also allow us to flex our creative muscles, something that the journalism beat never afforded us the possibility to do. Dan kept pushing and pushing for something innovative and exciting, and after a few years of exploring many possibilities and sketching out what forms these new initiatives could take, we landed on Horrors Untold. (You can hear me go a little bit more in-depth on this very subject over on the wonderful Fear and Beer podcast, if you’re so inclined.)

We’ll get into everything about this special, bizarre, and utterly rewarding project in this space – what went into it, the wonderful connections we made in order to bring it to fruition, some of the missteps we made along the way, and, of course, just what Halloween Horror Nights content you can expect to fall in love with – in the days and weeks ahead. Until then, you can read samples and place your order for our little book here.

This is part one of an ongoing series about Horrors Untold, the HHN guidebook/immersive horror mystery. You can jump back to the table of contents here.