A look at Soundstage 44

Soundstage 44 is the old herc/xena building, located adjacent to Mels Drive in. This year, for the first time since 2004, and just the second time ever, Universal announced a Halloween Horror nights house will be located inside this building. I investigated the building as part of my trip to Universal last night to look further for possible house entrances, as well as where the queue for the line will be located, and how normal traffic flow for the even may be affected by having a haunt in this building. First well take a look at the west side of the building.

As you can see in the picture there are doors located on this side that would be easily accessible as an entrance to the HHN house. However, some problems arise, the street that this side of the building comes out to is Shrek Alley, pictured here.

If the entrance to the house is located on this side, the queue would have to take up most of Shrek Alley, but Shrek Alley usually hosts a scare zone inside of it. I do not believe Universal will scrap a scare zone in this location this year in favor of a queue line, especially since Shrek Alley may be the best scarezone location in the park, so this possibility is out, or at least hard to work around. Moving over to the other side of the house, I took a close up pic of the door which I speculated will be the entrance a couple of days ago.

I still believe this is where the entrance to the house will be, but a problem still arises, the street you come out to on this side is pictured here.

This is a heavy foot traffic area, especially during Halloween Horror Nights, without this street, you would have to got all the way around to production central to get from one side of the park to the other. So I dont think The queue will be placed here. I believe the queue will be placed on this street.

This is the lest busiest streey in the whole park, during the daytime, and during HHN, but the side of the building this street faces is this side.

There is no tangible house entrance I can see on this side of the building, so this means my guess is the queue line and the house entrance will be on different sides of the building. It should be interesting to see how Universal works around amity construction for HHN this year. Some feel the even will be to cramped and it feel it should have been a two park event this year. I feel there will be less dead space, no pun intended, at the event this year, which is a problem it has struggled with the last three years or so. The speculation will only intensify from here. 119 days until Halloween Horror Nights 2012 begins.