Universal Reveals Halloween Horror Nights Houses Based on Five Nights at Freddy's and WWE's The Wyatt Sicks
Oh look, they both have top hats. Cute.
Images courtesy of Universal
Halloween Horror Nights starts at Universal Orlando in exactly a month, with Hollywood’s version kicking off a few days later, and we now know what all haunted houses at both events will be this year. The final two were announced today, and both feature characters and concepts from two of the company’s longtime partners. One, a house based on 2023 Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, is the kind of project you expect from Halloween Horror Nights; it’s based on a film from Blumhouse, who Universal has been working with for years, and it’ll no doubt serve as promotion for the sequel coming out in December. The other house is a little more unusual, although it was spawned by a corporate relationship that dates back 40 years, and won’t be the first Halloween Horror Nights house to rise from that partnership. It’s a house devoted to the WWE pro wrestling stable The Wyatt Sicks.
WWE Presents: The Horrors of The Wyatt Sicks has been strongly rumored for months, and as weird as a wrestling-based haunted house might sound, it makes a good bit of sense. The Wyatt Sicks are a group of five wrestlers intentionally styled after horror movie villains. They’re named after Bray Wyatt, a character created by the wrestler Windham Rotunda, a wrestler who tragically passed away in 2023 at the age of 36. The Wyatt character started as a charismatic Southern cult leader and gradually grew more supernatural in nature, with Rotunda constructing a fairly elaborate (for wrestling) backstory full of creepy, horror-tinged lore. Wyatt’s last incarnation was as a demented children’s show host who would turn into a monstrous wrestler called The Fiend; his Firefly Funhouse vignettes were made to resemble a Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood style TV show, with a group of grotesque puppets as Wyatt’s costars. Rotunda made this all work better than it should have, although if you’re wondering what any of that has to do with pro wrestling, you wouldn’t be alone.
Rotunda’s untimely passing brought an end to Bray Wyatt and his puppets, but the latter were destined to return in a new context. Before Wyatt’s death, his real-life brother Taylor Rotunda (better known as the wrestler Bo Dallas) started appearing as one of the characters central to Wyatt’s mythology: the bearded, top hat-wearing Uncle Howdy. In June 2024, roughly 10 months after Wyatt’s death, Howdy reappeared, this time leading a group of costumed wrestlers portraying real-life versions of the Firefly Funhouse puppets. Howdy and the wrestlers Erick Rowan, Dexter Lumis, Joe Gacy, and Nikki Cross (playing, respectively, Rambling Rabbit, Mercy the Buzzard, Huskus the Pig, and Abby the Witch) make up The Wyatt Sicks, whose punny name evokes Wyatt himself as a sixth member guiding them in spirit. They’re an overtly horror-themed stable whose infamous 2024 debut on Raw was shot as if it was a horror movie, complete with various WWE wrestlers and officials lying around the backstage area as if they were the Sicks’ victims.
