At Universal Horror Unleashed, monsters don’t simply clock in. They are built. A little foam latex here. A little airbrush work there. Add a costume, a performer who knows exactly how to move inside it, and suddenly the person you might have passed in the hallway an hour ago is nowhere to be found.
And in their place?
Jack the Clown. Scarecrow. Something significantly less interested in personal space. That transformation is part of the daily magic happening behind the scenes at Universal Horror Unleashed, where entertainment Team Members turn performers into the characters guests meet throughout the venue. And because the scares here happen year-round, this isn’t a seasonal sprint. It’s an ongoing monster-making operation.
The Monster Kid Origin Story
For Brody Cantrill, makeup supervisor at Universal Horror Unleashed, getting to bring monsters to life every day is pretty much the dream.
“I knew that I wanted to make monster movies, but to do that, you need monsters,” Brody says. Honestly, solid logic.
Long before Brody was supervising makeup at Universal Horror Unleashed, he was a kid buying books by legendary special-effects artists and teaching himself how to build creatures step by step. He started creating his first monster makeups around age 12 or 13.
Brody’s professional path really took shape in the haunt world. He spent nearly a decade working in the makeup department at a nationally ranked haunted attraction in Tennessee. He started as an intern spraying performers with blood, then moved through the ranks from junior artist to artist, senior artist and eventually assistant makeup manager.
Then Universal Horror Unleashed entered the picture. When opportunities for the new Las Vegas experience appeared, Brody applied broadly. He remembers thinking he would take just about any job if it meant getting his foot in the door.
He was out getting ice cream with his family in the Knoxville, Tennessee area when he got the call that he’d been hired as UHU’s first lead makeup artist. He’d never even been to Las Vegas before, but the family started selling furniture and packing everything up into two cars to make it happen.
Seven days later he was there for new hire orientation. His first day ever setting foot in Las Vegas was also the day he arrived to begin the job.
Year-Round Monster Business
The unusual part of Universal Horror Unleashed isn’t simply the scale of the makeup. It’s the frequency. Special effects makeup work can be seasonal or production-based. Here, it keeps going.
“My artists come from film and TV,” Brody says. “Some come from theater, some come from haunt houses, like I did. Those of us that come from haunt houses and that know that haunter world, it’s awesome that we’re like, ‘Wow, we get to live in this year-round.’”
That mix of backgrounds matters because Universal Horror Unleashed does something a little different from a traditional haunted attraction. Brody calls it a “makeup show.”
Since becoming supervisor in January of 2026, Brody has looked for opportunities to move additional characters from masks into prosthetics or illusion-style airbrush looks when doing so can strengthen a scare or make a show moment more impactful. That means characters that guests might assume are wearing masks can actually be wearing full-face makeup.
Translation: If a monster looks disturbingly alive from six inches away, somebody probably spent a lot of time making sure of it.
And at Universal Horror Unleashed, six inches away is not an unreasonable possibility.
Bonus fact: Brody and his team designed and built the prosthetic and mask lab, and everything is made in-house at Universal Horror Unleashed. OK, OK. We see you!
When the Person Disappears
There’s another ingredient in the transformation that no makeup kit can supply: the performer.
Brody says one of the strangest and most satisfying parts of his job happens when everything finally clicks. Makeup, prosthetics, costume and performance stack on top of one another until the person underneath seems to disappear completely. “You can stare at them as long as you want, but you cannot see that [human] underneath that,” he says. “It’s just really awesome to see the way the character comes to life through all of those elements.”
That might mean working with a performer who has never worn prosthetics before and walking them through the process. Or it might mean watching somebody Brody knows casually become completely unrecognizable once the makeup is finished, the costume goes on and the performance takes over. Brody oversees a team of up to a dozen SFX makeup and prosthetics artists, all working together to get scores of performers ready each night.
This is where costuming and makeup stop feeling like separate pieces. A prosthetic can change a face. A costume can change a silhouette. The performer changes the movement. And together, they make the monster.
Jack Attack
Of all the transformations Brody has worked on at Universal Horror Unleashed, one hits differently: Jack the Clown.
For Brody, who describes himself as a Halloween Horror Nights (HHN) superfan, applying Jack’s makeup isn’t just another assignment. During his time as a lead artist, Jack was his primary character. Brody estimates he applied the makeup around 240 times, using more than 1,000 prosthetic pieces during that stretch. And somehow, seeing Jack come to life never got old.
“The fact that I’m able to do Jack the Clown’s makeup is so surreal for someone as big of a fan as I am,” he says.
Brody is the kind of HHN fan who can walk through Universal Horror Unleashed’s collection of past props and masks and tell you which house something came from and what year it appeared. So yes, getting handed one of the most recognizable faces in Halloween Horror Nights history carries some emotional weight.
It is also a reminder that the work in Las Vegas belongs to a much bigger Universal horror lineage. Artists inherit characters and techniques from the people who came before them, then help carry that work somewhere new. No pressure!
Read more about how Universal Horror Unleashed fits into Universal’s horror history here.
From Sketch to Scare
Sometimes, of course, the team gets to create something new. Brody points to Vincent and Vera, the Deception and Manipulation characters, as one project that captures that collaboration. Created specifically for Universal Horror Unleashed, the duo appear as part of a themed story act in the scare zone near the Premiere House toward the back of the experience. The characters were imagined as Vegas icons with an old-school magician flavor, designed with their home city in mind.
Brody worked with Costume Supervisor Tommy Hernandez as the pair took shape, hashing out ideas while makeup and costuming developed together. Brody created the makeup designs, taking the characters from early sketches toward their first full test.
Then the makeup and costumes came together on the performers. Suddenly, the drawings weren’t drawings anymore.
Brody remembers the finished characters looking like they had stepped directly off the design pages he had drawn roughly a month earlier. That’s probably the closest a grown adult can get to opening a sketchbook and having the thing inside climb out. At Universal Horror Unleashed, that is apparently a workplace success story.
The Goal: “That Cannot Be Real”
For all the prosthetics, airbrush work, costumes, sketches and technical skill happening backstage, Brody’s end goal is surprisingly simple: Disbelief. He wants guests to get close to a character and have their brains briefly reject what their eyes are seeing.
“I want them to see the makeup, the costume and performance, and think ‘What I’m looking at cannot possibly exist in our world, but it’s right here in front of me, and it’s scaring the daylights out of me,’” he says.
That could be Jack the Clown looming nearby. Or a brand-new character walking out after conversations, sketches, design work and testing. Guests see the finished monster. Behind it is an entire team making hundreds of tiny choices so, for a few seconds, you forget there was ever a person underneath.
And if they do their jobs right? Well, you’ll be a little too busy screaming to think about any of that.
Which Universal Horror Unleashed character transformation has made you stop and think, “Okay, how did they DO that?” Let us know in the comments!
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