Halloween Horror NIghts Haunted Tales, an anthology mini-series on the Discover Universal podcast, dives deeper into the rich sounds and storytelling of our incredible Haunted Houses and Scarezones at Halloween Horror Nights, the nations premiere horror event. Our objectives were as follows:
Discover Universal podcast launched in February 2022 with a focus on content to help guests plan their vacation before coming to the parks. After creating most of our planning content targeting first-timers, we knew we also had an audience of rabid fans craving deeper storytelling, especially content about Halloween Horror Nights. Through guest surveys, we were able to identify a real demand for deeper storytelling in our Original Content houses, ensuring that there would be an audience for this series. With Haunted Tales, we set out to create something unique that guests could enjoy before entering a Haunted House or afterward and further immerse them into that experience. We worked in partnership with our incredibly talented Entertainment team who wrote out deeper narrative stories for this miniseries and our audio engineer turned it up a notch with an moody music and SFX audio experience.
We started Haunted Tales in August 2022, releasing an episode every Friday leading up to the event start date. We learned a few things along the way and when we launched this year, we made sure to do it earlier and launched Halloween Horror Nights Haunted Tales - Dr. Oddfellow's Collection of Horror the night after our full reveal. This became the most downloaded podcast episode we've ever had, with that episode still our top episode today.
