Halloween Horror Nights is constantly pushing expectations. But this latest effort will leave diehard fans even more Obsessed. 

Earlier this month, the L.A. park’s HHN Creative Director and executive producer John Murdy dropped a surprise announcement revealing the presence of Obsession’s Nikki as part of the 2026 event. Now, Murdy is sharing more details on what to expect at Universal Destinations & Experiences’ popular after-hours event for that appearance — something he says came together “very late in the game for us in terms of our development.”

During that Aug. 8 panel, Murdy had teased the version of Nikki fans would see, noting it would be based on her final look in the Curry Barker film, which is (spoiler alert!) a climactic sequence that features both a Nikki (Inde Navarrette) whose agency and autonomy are corrupted by Bear’s (Michael Johnston) twisted wish and the real young woman trapped inside her own body as a result of the curse. For the event, Murdy confirms fans will interact with the version of Nikki before the “wish” is undone. 

At the time, Murdy described Nikki’s appearance as being like an interactive “Where’s Waldo?” allowing fans to engage with the character at various points throughout the park. HHN fans quickly connected the experience to the roaming Art the Clown as part of the 2025 event’s Terrifier collaboration. 

“It’s similar to Art last year, where we created this thing to activate areas of the theme park you would never expect to see a performer in. That included our retail store,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We’ve identified a number of different locations where she can appear. You never know where you might encounter her.”

Unlike Art, who was performed by a team of “scare actors” for the first time in the event’s history, Nikki will be cast with traditional actors. Using dialogue scripted by Murdy and pulled “straight from Curry’s” film, these performers will also pick guests to engage with. “Normally, our scare actors don’t speak,” Murdy explains. “But it seemed really important to give Nikki the authentic voice Curry gave her in the film. So I took all of the dialogue from the film, and put together a creative treatment that I sent to Curry.”

If guests want to engage Nikki, they’ll need to check out USH’s social media, including its Instagram Story where a password will be shared that will trigger interactions with the performer. “It encourages our guests to find Nikki, and if they give her the password, they might get something,” he says.

That will include the One Wish Willow phone number Bear calls to attempt a modification of his wish. “I love the scene where Bear tries to call the customer service department, and when I was reading about the making of the film, I realized that Curry did that voice,” he says. “I’ve asked him to record a special message for our fans as if he were the customer service rep from One Wish Willow. So it’ll have a phone number on it, and they can call the number and get an exclusive message from Curry.”

As part of the park’s standard protocols with day and night characters, Nikki will have a production assistant working as her handler while she moves about, ensuring the safety of the performers and guests. Murdy has also used some of the movie’s lines in ways that allow the character and performer to control interactions with attendees. “Curry’s dialogue can be used to engage or disengage a guest,” Murdy says. “She has so many great lines like, ‘No, no, no, no’ from that dinner sequence, or she can say, ‘I thought we were having a nice time,’ and just turn and leave.” 

HHN Hollywood’s creative director says this last-minute event addition was initially inspired by a fan who sent him “a video of an interview that Curry did about how the Halloween season was coming, and how Nikki would be the No. 1 costume.” 

The conversation between Barker and the journalist would eventually gravitate to Halloween Horror Nights, whose mazes for many horror TV creators and filmmakers have become badges of honor, and markers of pop cultural relevance. So when Barker revealed he goes every year, Murdy thought, “We’ve got to do something.” After ringing Focus Features, they set up a call with Barker where Murdy pitched an idea based on something the breakout filmmaker had shared in that interview. 

“He expressed a desire to see her in the event this year, and I combined it with what we used to do with the password to create a new activation for our fanbase,” he says. “He was very much in favor of the idea, and that’s what we’re in the middle of developing.”

Earlier this summer, Navarrette, who was recently announced as part of the cast for Marvel’s upcoming X-Men movie following her breakout role in Obsession, also hoped to see Nikki at HHN. In that interview, the actress shared her desire to come dressed as the character — something other actors, like Us star Lupita Nyong’o, have done as an official part of the event. 

When the event kicks off on Sept. 3, HHN aficionados will see how the Nikki experience also harkens back to the 2011 collaboration for “Eli Roth’s Hostel: Hunting Season” maze. “I was doing Hostel with Eli Roth, and Eli really wanted the girls that lured the guys into the ‘art show’ — which is just a torture chamber in Hostel — as part of the house. I’m like, ‘Well, they really need something to do, something interactive with the guests.’ Eli kept everything from Hostel, so he had all the business cards for Elite Hunting, which was the secret society in the film.” 

To generate the interactive elements, Murdy devised the password system, sharing it over X (then Twitter). “It was this Easter-eggy underground thing for the real big fans,” he tells THR. “I just started tweeting passwords every night and saying, ‘If you give the password to the girls in front of Hostel, you could get something in exchange.’” 

He would do it again in various forms over the years as part of collaborations tied to IP like Ghostbusters and Insidious. While he shelved it several years ago, eager event fans have frequently questioned when it would come back. The developing experience is part of a larger effort by HHN to stay on the rapidly expanding — and evolving — pulse of what’s happening in horror. And right now, says Murdy, what’s happening is a 24-year-old filmmaker who just turned his $750,000 budget indie film into a record-breaking box office hit. 

“It’s like New Hollywood in the late ’60s into the early ’70s, but now it’s the YouTube kids stepping into the arena,” Murdy says, while discussing the re-rise of horror the after-hours event has been able to capitalize on over the last decade. “I think it started with Get Out. That was the first moment where everybody was like, ‘Whoa.’ Sinners falls into that big time, but then there’s the double whammy of Obsession and Backrooms, which feel [tonally] different from Sinners and Get Out.”

For Murdy, tapping into the nuances, shifts, and trends within the genre is part of how the bicoastal event continues to expand and stay fresh. Alongside Nikkie, HHN 2026 will feature the Evil Dead Burn house, which will include an animatronic talking head for the first time. Inside the “Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness” maze — a tribute house to the late rocker’s life and discography — fans will experience a “Crazy Train” and giant bat that bites the head off the Black Sabbath frontman. 

The Hellraiser queue will feature a giant puzzle box “like a pastiche painting with all the different levels of hell” and a center circle that “disappears while you’re waiting in line and electrifies, before you see Pinhead in a circle doing lines from the film,” according to Murdy. And for the first time, the Sinners house is turning to Water World stunt performers for a floating air stunt, which will use a flying rig to drop the Irish vampire Remick in long enough to hover as he delivers his now iconic “Sammie” line. 

Nikk, then, is just the latest way Halloween Horror Nights — also kicking off its 35th anniversary at Universal Orlando Resort in Florida on Aug. 28 — is “always pushing to see where we can take the brand next,” says Murdy. 

The problem with Finding Emily is not that no one in it acts like a real and reasonable human being, although no one does — not its exhaustingly lovelorn hero (Spike Fearn‘s Owen), nor its acridly skeptical heroine (Angourie Rice‘s Emily), nor any of the screeching over-reactors and thoughtless under-reactors surrounding them. Absurd behavior is, after all, a cornerstone of the rom-com genre; if you didn’t want to believe in a world where the path to true love cuts through harebrained fake dating schemes or HR-nightmare jobs that require getting dumped, you’d watch something else.

No, the problem with Finding Emily is that it’s so busy reassuring you how delightful it is that none of its characters act like real and reasonable human beings that it forgets to conjure the necessary magic to make you love them anyway. Lacking not just in sense but charm and chemistry to boot, this would-be defense of rom-com tropes against our jaded age ends up, instead, far more cynical than any of the criticisms it’s supposedly fighting against.

Director Alicia MacDonald and screenwriter Rachel Hirons’ self-awareness is apparent from the opening scene, an utterly classic meet-cute. At a party one night, struggling musician Owen strikes a connection with a young woman (Sadie Soverall) that feels downright magical — she’s even dressed as a fairy, emphasizing the dreaminess of the moment. In the cold light of day, however, Owen discovers his happy ending is further away than he might have hoped. The number she’s left him with is one digit short, making a follow-up text impossible.

But Owen, a romantic so starry-eyed that Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother would have advised him to chill, is not so easily deterred. Knowing nothing about his fantasy woman beyond her first name (Emily) and her school (Manchester City University, where he works as a sound engineer), he mounts a no-holds-barred campaign to track her down, pestering the school secretary for contact information and then papering the entire campus with wanted posters when that fails.

This is, to put it plainly, kinda creepy behavior, and initially it seems to be to the film’s credit that it recognizes this. Finding Emily presents itself as a rom-com that doubles as a thought exercise in how genre tropes like nice guys and manic pixie dream girls play in the era of Obsession and Companion, Couch Guy and West Elm Caleb, think pieces about incels and rape culture and toxic masculinity. But much like its own female lead, it can’t seem to resist pressing its thumb on the scale.

Because as hopeless as Owen’s dreamy idealism might be (“Oh no, not again” groans his brother, played by Jack Riddiford, when he hears about the mystery girl), he’s not the really the off-putting one here. That would be Rice’s Emily Raine, the psych student he rudely pulls out of class while looking for his One True Emily.

This Emily does not believe in romance at all, and in fact is working on a thesis paper “proving” that love is just a useless self-sabotaging state of psychosis. In Owen, she sees the perfect case study, or as she puts it, “my very own Stanford prison experiment.” And as with the actual Stanford prison experiment, questions of ethics and scientific validity are sidelined in favor of getting splashy results by any means necessary. Forging Owen’s signature on consent forms and posing as just a helpful bystander, she encourages him to keep looking when he’s ready to quit and manipulates him into more and more extreme efforts, culminating in an un-BCCed email blast sent to all 318 Emilys enrolled at the school.

Does this sound like the foundation for a true and lasting love? Or does it sound like an unforgivable breach of trust, as well as a hopelessly sloppy project that Emily’s professor (an amusingly grumpy Prassana Puwanarajah) should have nipped in the bud? I found it to be the latter, but Finding Emily stakes its bet on the former, and keeps doubling down even as the consequences pile up for Owen.

Once the email goes viral, Owen becomes a TikTok trending topic, a subject of clickbaity internet explainers (“Creep, criminal, or just cringe?”), an urgent campus security issue, a catalyst for student protests against predators. Even a winsome serenade to the Mystery Emily during an otherwise disastrous podcast interview only goes so far in turning the tide; while some onlookers are swayed to his side, others just expand their repertoire of insults from “rapist virgin” to “toxic incel true-crime Ed Sheeran.”

But if the fallout for Owen has a distinctly modern flavor, complete with trendy buzzwords getting thrown around social media, Finding Emily‘s take on his journey is stubbornly old-fashioned. “I’ve burned my bra, I’ve done the work,” snaps a dean (Minnie Driver tepidly channeling Allison Janney in 10 Things I Hate About You) who has no interest in listening to strident feminist activists like Emily Thewlis (Kat Rooney) complain about how Owen’s grand email gesture was sexual harassment or whatever.

And why would the dean be? Finding Emily has stacked the deck insurmountably in favor of Owen, whom we know to be utterly harmless and unimpeachably pure of heart. By making him the sole lighting rod for all these issues, it raises valid concerns around consent, boundaries and male entitlement only to dismiss them as hysterical. Besides, we know who’s really to blame for this whole mess — it’s not this would-be lover boy but the ruthless woman who exploited his genuine sentiment for her own careerist ends.

What’s especially exasperating about Finding Emily’s sour fixation on fending off imaginary haters is that there are moments when it betrays just enough sweetness to make you want to want these characters to make it work. I found Emily Raine too devious to like, and yet Rice plays her with enough brightness that she’s hard to completely hate. Fearn’s choice to play Owen as a mumbling, fidgeting ball of heart-on-sleeve emotion makes him feel natural and authentic, even as the circumstances surrounding him grow ever more contrived.

The two share the shaggy, laid-back ease of fast friends more than the burning desire of lovers-to-be. (My kingdom for romances to actually start casting for palpable heat again.) But there are small gestures — like when Owen defends Emily’s disgusting chip shop order before an ex (Timothy Innes) making fun of it — when it’s possible to understand how even a heart as firmly closed as Emily’s might crack open for a guy this unapologetically sincere. Maybe there could have been something there, in the unforced affection between the two stars. It’s a shame the rest of the movie — the unhinged plot, the one-sided debates, the smug self-referentiality — makes this couple impossible to root for.