Who’s Afraid of the Weeknd?
Nowadays, everyone from Jimmy Fallon to Janelle Monáe to Shaq has a haunt. But the most auteur horror experience of the 2024 Halloween season comes from the twisted mind that brought you The Idol: Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. the Weeknd. The Weeknd’s maze at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights has an unsettling cocaine-freak-out energy that is a welcome counterbalance to mazes’ sepia tones and textbook monsters. The Weeknd: Nightmare Trilogy feels uniquely tailored to display Tesfaye’s specific anxieties. It fully delivers where Fallon’s Tonightmares falls flat. That maze promises a peek inside the mind of Fallon, but gives us only generic alien/werewolf/murderous-hill-folk scenarios. It’s well done but could be anyone’s fears. The Weeknd’s Nightmare Trilogy could only come from The Weeknd.
While trying to figure out the beauty behind the madhouse of our spooky Starboy, I made it my mission to find out what exactly Tesfaye’s fears reveal about the person behind the persona. And there are Easter eggs about his upcoming (final?) album, all the better. For instance, there is a scene in which he’s being sawed in half. Does that mean we’re getting a double album, or is it just a manifestation of Tesfaye’s fear of … being sawed in half?
Scare spoilers for The Weeknd: Nightmare Trilogy follow.
Preshow: The Nightmare Bar
The Weeknd also has a themed bar at Halloween Horror Nights at my beloved Jurassic Patio. Yet another Weeknd greets you there and serves as DJ. He likes Weeknd songs — go figure. The bar offers three drinks all named after Weeknd songs: “Too Late,” “Is There Someone Else?,” and “How Do I Make You Love Me?” Ordering them feels like a twisted version of the affirmations of Cafe Gratitude. Instead of telling your waiter “I Am Thriving” in order to get the soup of the day, you say “Is There Someone Else?” in order to get their version of an Adios, Motherfucker. It comes with a gummy eyeball that bursts like a Gusher with sweet, vitreous fluid.
The Three Faces of Abel
There are three Weeknds that populate the Halloween Horror Nights maze: Super Bowl Weeknd, Old-Man Weeknd, and Baby Weeknd. Old-Man Weeknd first appeared in the “Out of Time” video. And BB Weeknd’s coming has been foretold in the teaser for Hurry Up Tomorrow. It gives a sense of inevitability to everything that happens throughout the haunt. We see the Weeknd’s whole life — and possibly even rebirth. There’s a part I can only describe as “Weeknd mpreg C-section delivery,” which definitely rivaled Breaking Dawn Part 1 in birthing trauma. That scene is followed by a puppet that melds all three Weeknds with a big scary bug — possibly a cockroach or a bedbug; the strobing makes it impossible to tell. It feels as though Tesfaye is really ready to abandon the Weeknd persona. This guy has already done it all.
Standing With Chappell
Tesfaye clearly finds fame monstrous. The haunt’s first big set piece is a paparazzi walk, where flashbulbs explode in your face and mess with your depth perception. Then the scare actors come out and you find that these paparazzi are literal leeches. Get it?
Surveillance and spectacle are themes that run throughout the Nightmare Trilogy. You’ve got the paparazzi as well as a Body Double–esque room with a telescope. We’re in a high-rise apartment with glass on all sides. We can look out, but people can also look in at us. Also, there are sexy Beholder babes that pop out to scare you. The chance to be perceived is thus a double-edged sword. Fame gives you things like fancy apartments and time with hotties but at the cost of always being watched and compelled to watch others. Scopophilia is the only -philia on the menu.
Tired of Sex
The After Hours maze had a lot of scary plastic-surgery victims and extremely fuck-y energy. Every other scene was populated with spooky babes — babes with scary faces but babes nonetheless. Nightmare Trilogy seems much less focused on sex and more on the self. The babes are gone, consigned to The Idol and its gratuitous sex scenes. Instead, everywhere you turn there’s at least one Weeknd watching you watch him. If the previous maze had an implicit fear of intimacy, Nightmare Trilogy can think of nothing scarier to Tesfaye than the persona he (and the music industry) created.
Evil Dentists
There was also a Weeknd who seemed to be addicted to nitrous oxide. Could this be a Kanye allusion? The nitrous scene takes place in a room with dollar-bill wallpaper. Now that we know fame is bad, he takes it up a notch: Once you reach a certain level of popularity, people stop looking out for you as a person. You become a business and a resource to exploit. Evil dentists and ketamine queens lurk in the shadows, ready to jump-scare you.
Sam Levinson?
As previously mentioned, there’s a scene in which a Weeknd gets sawed in half. This, to me, represents how Tesfaye has had to bifurcate himself in order to produce music and star in and completely rewrite The Idol. One of the few non-Weeknd victims in the haunt immediately follows, tied to an X-cross. Is this Sam Levinson? Maybe if you shaved him. Being trapped in your own oversexualized gimmick would be a fun, ironic punishment.
After the guy on the X-cross is a Super Bowl Weeknd being disemboweled. We then walk through curtains made of his entrails. It’s a very “Rock DJ” music video — artists sacrifice themselves for our entertainment at a very heavy cost to their bodies and souls.
Club Death
The Weeknd: Nightmare Trilogy is set in the purgatory of Tesfaye’s 2022 album, Dawn FM. It uses the Jim Carrey skits in many of its transitional tunnels. We are guided by Carrey toward bright lights to accept our death. These lights are extremely effective in ruining one’s low-light vision, thus making the scares even more startling. It’s ingenious. But the catharsis promised by Carrey’s narration never comes. Rather than make our way toward the light to our eventual afterlife, we are consigned to dying again and again in increasingly bizarre ways. If fame is a curse for the Weeknd, it’s a Drag Me to Hell–style curse you can never escape. There is no Heaven or hell, just death and purgatory, over and over again. It’s a cycle that even the next album doesn’t seem ready to give up — “Dancing in the Flames” seems to show the Weeknd dying in a car crash and winding up in purgatory. Maybe he’ll finally escape the karmic wheel after Hurry Up Tomorrow’s world tour.
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