Singapore’s Most Haunted: ON AIR, HHN14’s scariest broadcast

The cameras never stopped rolling inside Singapore’s Most Haunted: On Air, an original haunted house retelling five of Singapore’s darkest urban legends, at Universal Studios Singapore’s Halloween Horror Nights 14.

Warning

This article contains spoilers. Photos from Halloween Horror Nights 14 are featured here in a special showcase.
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Overview and Thoughts

Singapore’s Most Haunted has told a different story every year, but it has never quite been one story. The Killings, set in an infamous red house, let its tragedies stay loosely scattered, more a house that had simply accumulated horror over the years than a single narrative. Season 2’s Build to Horror tightened that up, one curse, cast by the Demon Sinseh’s dark acupuncture needles, radiating out through a single housing estate.

On Air goes further still. Its five stories, each its own numbered studio, are fully delineated and deliberately told, bound together not by a single originating event but by an entity that keeps forcing them to be retold.

That’s the TV Ghost, and what you’re walking through is a retelling, not the real locations where these tragedies happened. My own take is that the retelling itself is the point. The studio once did ordinary journalism, reporters like Diana Saw went out, filmed, came back to break the news. The TV Ghost, already growing stronger on the stories being covered, finally overpowered Diana live on air, and from that moment the crew stopped going back out. They stayed, trapped, restaging the tragedies in-house instead, for an audience of one.

Another dimension to the TV Ghost is the scale of hauntings as you explore deeper. The studios get bigger as you go, a newsroom, a classroom, a colonial mansion, an outdoor campsite, a highway wreck, each one a size no in-studio reenactment should plausibly reach. If the ghost’s power is what’s forcing these retellings in the first place, then the growing size of each set is really a measure of how much stronger she’s become.

It’s worth setting this against Made in Hell: XL Robotics, because the two houses sit so close to each other, bookending New York at opposite ends of The Raveyard. Most guests end up comparing them anyway. Where XL Robotics plays out as a grounded, almost plausible sci-fi horror (in the distant future) with no ghosts required, On Air is supernatural through and through, the TV Ghost, the legends she’s feeding on, even the five stories themselves, all rooted in the kind of local folklore that hits differently for a Singapore audience.

Singapore’s Most Haunted: On Air haunted house walkthrough video

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Singapore’s Most Haunted: On Air Photo Tour: The Full Scoop

You’ve found your way onto the compound of the Bukit Siaran Broadcast Studio – a place that was mysteriously shut down. A security guard spots you almost immediately and orders you to leave. You wait him out, then slip past his post the moment his back is turned. The main doors are locked tight.

Off to the side, though, a van sits crashed into the building’s wall, and that looks like your way in.

It’s somehow still smoky inside the wreck of a news van. Pushing past the debris, you find video monitors replaying footage of the journalist reporting a story at the Yellow Tower.

Beyond the wreck is the editing suite, where Diana Saw’s final report was being cut. Banks of controls and monitors are still live and running, and a window looks straight through into the newsroom, where tragedy struck.

This is the newsroom itself, where Diana Saw was killed live on air.

A lighting rig lurches toward you, pushed by a doomed crew member, as a camera operator swings into view and the news desk itself comes alive.

The corridor beyond the newsroom leads you past a weathered signboard. Studio 2: Mati Camp. It’s a dead end.

Studio 4: The School is live, and it is restaging a story of students taking revenge on an abusive teacher, his fate marked by a gruesome sight at his neck.

A blackboard repeats the same written line until it breaks open to reveal the vengeful spirits themselves.

Further in, the corridor narrows again, leading you toward the next studio.

Studio 13 brings you to Istana Mati, a white mansion with a grand, decaying facade and a fountain running red… wait a minute, are you still at Bukit Siaran?

Inside, the family’s ghosts still haunt the house they died in. On the second level, the wife flails against a broken railing, locked in an endless loop of the same fall that never quite finishes.

Every so often, the husband pops out from the base of the curved staircase to mourn her, caught in the same endless loop she is.

You press on ahead, going into Studio 14, where the air starts to change…

The Yellow Tower opens into a full campsite, the structure itself standing over you.

Gangsters run out from the shadows, seeking their next victim.

You dash off, through the black curtains at the side.

Backstage, between soundstages, the crew who couldn’t escape the curse met a grim end here. Bodies hanging overhead as you pass through.

A sign marks Studio 666, a number that isn’t hiding what it’s referencing. Devil’s Bend awaits.

The road bends sharply here, and a flipped vehicle sits at the centre of the wreck. The driver leaps from nowhere and is yanked backward into the darkness.

Past the wreck, a storage room overflows with film reels in chaos, the cameras never having stopped recording under the TV ghost’s curse.

Victims are tangled somewhere inside the mess.

Every kind of camera lines this next room, all trained on you as you walk through. One, somewhere in here, is recording you for what comes next.

Screens of every size surround you, showing giant, watchful eyes.

Somewhere among them, hidden in the visual noise, the TV Ghost fades into view, waiting for you to look away.

Then, she steps free of the glass, crossing out of the screen and into the room with you, the line between broadcast and reality finally gone.

Every screen around you pulses in time with her, faster and faster, until the room floods with blinding white light.

The only way forward is through that glow. A coloured test pattern fills the wall ahead, marking the end of the road.

You step through the screen itself and into the TV ghost’s world, the one she’s been broadcasting from all along. The story began with you picking through the wreckage outside the studio. It ends with you, on air.

Halloween Horror Nights 14: Select Nights 25 Sep – 1 Nov

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