Carnage Once Starred In A Haunted House (Marvel Reportedly Hated)

This weekend sees the release of the much-anticipated new movie Venom: Let There Be Carnage, in which Tom Hardy reprising his role as Eddie Brock, who this time does battle against the evil Carnage, yet another symbiotic alien goo monster with a tongue that looks like Gene Simmons suffering from a shellfish allergy. 

Of course, Carnage has been around since the early ‘90s, popping up in comic books, Saturday morning cartoons, video games, and even a novel. But one appearance that doesn’t get talked about all that much is the time Carnage was the star of his own amusement park haunted house. In 2002, Universal Studios Orlando revamped their Marvel Super Hero Island for the annual Halloween Horror Nights event. The result? A Maximum Carnage-themed attraction set in a disturbing alternate timeline in which Carnage and an assortment of other villains, like Xorn, Scream, Mephisto, and random henchmen, had defeated all the Marvel heroes and taken over the city of New York -- seemingly by wielding chainsaws that could never actually come close to touching anyone, lest they get sued. 

Also around for the fun was Carnage himself -- AKA a gyrating actor clad in spandex.

As for the actual haunted house, it was supposed to be Carnage’s hideout, an abandoned factory that, for some reason, leads you straight towards a “nuclear reactor,” which was just a room with a strobe light.

Since this one production, Universal never again used the Marvel characters for any subsequent Halloween events. While no one knows for sure why that is, there are persistent rumors that Marvel was pretty pissed off about the attraction. According to yet more unproven rumors, this was because Carnage’s lair featured the “bloodied corpses of superheroes such as Captain America and Wolverine.” Some people even claim to have seen a decapitated Spider-Man -- but again, there’s no actual proof of that. Although even if it were true, these horrifying displays would still be far less upsetting than Universal’s other early 2000s franchise-based Halloween attraction: Bill and Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure … *shudder*

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Top Image: Sony