Alice Cooper inspires Universal Studios attraction

[August 04, 2011]  LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Alice Cooper is inviting theme park visitors into his nightmares this Halloween season.

Universal Studios Hollywood announced plans Tuesday to construct an attraction based on the macabre rocker's album "Welcome to My Nightmare," and its upcoming sequel "Welcome 2 My Nightmare."

"We'll be creating this living horror movie within screaming distance of the sound stages where horror movies first began, so there's no place more appropriate to offer a preview of the new `Welcome 2 My Nightmare,'" Cooper said in a statement. "This will be a nightmare that will haunt visitors' dreams for a long time to come."

The maze will feature Cooper's music as well as "guillotine decapitations, electric chairs, a sadistic insane asylum, predatory snake and giant black widow spiders."

"If you're lucky, you just might make it out alive," Cooper teased in an online video posted Monday. "But I doubt it."

The walk-through experience will be part of the theme park's annual "Halloween Horror Nights" event, which begins Sept. 23 and continues on select nights through Oct. 31. Other attractions planned for this year's event include mazes based on director Eli Roth's "Hostel" horror movies and Universal's upcoming prequel to director John Carpenter's "The Thing."

Cooper, best known the songs "School's Out" and "No More Mr. Nice Guy," was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year. The shock rocker and his original band -- guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, drummer Neal Smith and late guitarist Glen Buxton -- pioneered the use of theatrics in rock.

___

Online:

http://www.halloweenhorrornights.com/hollywood/

[Associated Press]

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.