Guitar ace Slash rose to prominence with an unmistakable look because the anchor of Weapons N’ Roses. A real rock ’n’ roll persona, the artist was as soon as not often seen with out a drooping cigarette and a high hat, the latter of which might barely comprise his face-engulfing curly hair.
Now, as of this week, he’s a theme park character at Common Studios Hollywood.
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Slash, or, quite, a skeletal facsimile of him performed by an actor, shall be accessible for picture alternatives and meet and greets at Common’s Halloween Horror Nights, which runs most evenings by means of Nov. 2. For the musician, born Saul Hudson, it’s a dream fulfilled. A lifelong devotee of theme parks and coasters, Slash has been carefully aligned with Halloween Horror Nights since 2014, when he first started scoring music for its haunted homes.
And the character, he says, was partly his thought.
“I went to them and mentioned, ‘Hey, can we’ve got a kind of stilt walkers?’” says Slash, referring to the larger-than-life lurkers who hang-out visitors through the festivities. “That might be actually cool. In order that they got here up with one and he seems to be fairly menacing.”
Slash enjoys the thought of being a towering, typically intimidating presence. That’s clear when he’s on stage because the attention-demanding cornerstone of quite a few bands. And he likes to scare, as evidenced by his personal horror-focused movie manufacturing firm, BerserkerGang. However get Slash one-on-one, and he actually simply needs to geek out on his favourite theme park rides.
Common Studios has launched a second vinyl compilation of music Slash has composed for Halloween Horror Nights over time.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Occasions)
We talked to Slash a few week earlier than Halloween Horror Nights opened from Orlando, Fla., the place he was holed up recording an album together with his band the Conspirators. That work, he says, shall be launched in 2027 as a result of deliberate 2026 touring obligations with Weapons N’ Roses. He lamented that he wouldn’t have time to go to Walt Disney World and Common’s new Epic Universe. The latter Florida park is house to a monsters-themed land that Slash mentioned he was wanting to see.
His love of theme parks runs deep, and is, in fact, nonpartisan.
“I’m an actual Disney head,” he says, joking that such a declaration might not make his Common companions joyful. He says he first visited Disneyland within the early Nineteen Seventies. “I actually can’t put into phrases what makes it so magical, however there’s a particular factor there that you simply really feel if you’re really there. I’ve cherished it since I used to be slightly child.”
“However I really like theme parks typically,” he continues. “I really like curler coasters. I really like that carnival power happening. I really like arcades. I really like all the pieces about that festive out of doors factor, and I’ve by no means grown out of it.”
Arguably, he’s grown into it.
Halloween season means it’s time for Universa’s Halloween Horror Nights, which runs by means of early November on the theme park.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Occasions)
Slash has a deep fascination with Common Studios, made clear by his data of how the park’s backlot tram trek — formally designated because the World-Well-known Studio Tour — has shifted over time. And as a lifelong horror fan who speaks nostalgically of watching Nineteen Seventies movies similar to “The Wicker Man,” “The Omen” and “The Exorcist” together with his mother and father, Halloween Horror Nights is very pricey to Slash’s coronary heart.
Slash was first drawn to the occasion in 2013 as a result of a haunted home themed across the music and pictures of Black Sabbath. The artist was given a tour of Horror Nights by John Murdy, who has lengthy overseen the West Coast version of the festivities.
“I used to be so blown away,” Slash says. “I used to be elated. I keep in mind bodily making giddy sounds. The entire thing, from the stilt walkers to the invisible bush figures who would cover within the bushes and have been camouflaged, it was unbelievable. I wished to be concerned.”
Murdy was open to the thought. “The primary time I walked into his private recording studio, the very first thing I seen was an enormous print of ‘Bride of Frankenstein,’ our 1935 basic, hanging on the wall. And I used to be like, ‘Oh, we’ve got one thing in widespread.’”
Halloween Horror Nights is crammed with haunted homes and scare actors.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Occasions)
Slash would go on to jot down the music for six Halloween Horror Nights homes centered round Common’s basic monster characters. This yr, he’s returned to Horror Nights with a rating set to a relaunch of an unique, Despair-era set maze, “Scarecrow.” Musically, it’s a departure for the artist. “Scarecrow” features a Slash-composed cowl of conventional people quantity “O Dying.”
“We began speaking ‘Scarecrow,’ and as pure coincidence, he mentioned, ‘Oh, I simply discovered the banjo and the dobro,’” Murdy says. “He was studying all these conventional Appalachian devices, and I mentioned, ‘That’s superior as a result of my home is ready within the Mud Bowl.’”
That Slash has been dipping into extra Americana-influenced music isn’t an entire shock. His 2024 solo effort, “Orgy of the Damned,” leans blues as an illustration, together with a blistering, rootsy tackle early Fleetwood Mac rocker “Oh Nicely” with nation star Chris Stapleton. Alternatives from Slash’s Halloween Horror Nights work, minus the brand new “Scarecrow” music, will once more be accessible on a limited-run vinyl offered at Common Studios throughout Halloween Horror Nights.
Slash is featured this yr as a “character” at Halloween Horror Nights, a skeletal, stilt-walking interpretation of the artist.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Occasions)
“As quickly as they gave me the idea, my mind went into that realm — I might pull out my pedal metal, and do an Americana-type method, versus the goth, sort of pseudo-metal factor I used to be doing for all of the Common Monsters,” Slash says.
Slash has change into such a Halloween Horror Nights fixture that this yr will characteristic a bar centered across the artist, one full with a mini high hat as a dessert. When requested how he feels to be immortalized as a sculpted sponge cake with coconut lime mousse, he doesn’t flinch.
“I want I might clarify in phrases how a lot I really like that sort of stuff,” Slash says.
He’s, in any case, a theme park common, though his favourite rides are discovered just a few miles from Common Studios in Anaheim. “I really like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. That and Pirates of the Caribbean will all the time be my two favourite rides,” he says. “The eye to element and the inventive component and all the pieces that is happening with these previous Disney rides continues to be, to today, second to none.”
Halloween Horror Nights at Common Studios
The mark of any true theme park aficionado is an appreciation of slow-moving, old-school darkish rides, points of interest which can be set in darkened present buildings and infrequently crammed with an assortment of vignettes. Slash singles out Common’s “The Secret Lifetime of Pets: Off the Leash” as one other spotlight.
“I went with my stepdaughter and we went on that experience and it’s nice,” Slash says. “The ‘Pets’ one is actually candy. I’m an enormous animal man. We love our cats, in order that was a number of enjoyable.”
Crowds lined as much as enter “Scarecrow,” a haunted home at Halloween Horror Nights featuing music by Slash.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Occasions)
And earlier than Slash can end his subsequent thought, he begins gushing a few current journey to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the place he visited Ferrari World, house to numerous celebrated curler coasters.
“I can speak about these items all day,” he says.
