Halloween Horror Nights Review (2026)

As a theme park, Universal Studios Hollywood has their parking and queue elements down to a science, and although there were thousands of people surrounding us at any given moment, the staff kept everything moving at a steady clip. Nowadays, an event on a scale this large is not likely to require a great deal of customer service: we were at the event for nearly nine hours, and the only employees we interacted with (other than actors) were the parking attendants, the security personnel at the entrance to the Universal Citywalk, the staff who scanned our tickets, and the bartender who sold us an Ozzy Osbourne bat-themed cake at the Ozzy’s bar pop-up.

We had no problems during any of these interactions. Staff members were courteous, and they worked hard to ensure we got into the event quickly. Everything else was handled online: it is easy to locate the event, it is expensive but not difficult to park nearby, and the ticketing is handled entirely by the Universal Studios app.

There’s something for everyone here, and even during the longest lines, an effort is made to keep the audience entertained. Although Universal does not employ queue actors to perform for the audience as they wait, they frequently do make use of electronic elements to keep you interested as you wait in line (such as Ozzy songs before his maze and tongue-in-cheek Terrifier trivia before the tram tour).

Universal Studios Hollywood isn’t exactly the most walkable park, so for those who need to sit down for a while, the Purge: Dangerous Waters stunt show is a great way to take a twenty-minute break from walking and standing in line. Regulars should take note of the fact, however, that it is very similar to the long-running Waterworld stunt show, only with more lasers. In general, Universal does seem to do a lot of recycling, and if you’ve been before, you’ll likely notice a lot of familiar things, even in ostensibly “new” attractions. Still, the entertainment value holds after multiple visits, for the most part.

As mentioned above, this event is incredibly popular, and attendees are often packed shoulder-to-shoulder in mazes. Sadly, this popularity has caused the immersion to suffer greatly: while the entire selling point of the event is to put you in the middle of your favorite films and shows, you rarely get a moment to truly appreciate the experience because you are constantly being hurried along by the people behind you. The fact that the actors make no effort to acknowledge you (other than perhaps pausing slightly to allow you to take their pictures) also harms the immersion factor.

This element is most egregious during the Terror Tram part of the event. Attendees are packed onto a tram and driven to a separate area of the park, where they are stalked by Art the Clown, the Little Pale Girl, and the possessed Vicky Heyes from the Terrifier franchise. This is a fun walkthrough, and there is a lot to see and take in, but the staff who have been tasked with keeping the crowds moving also have the effect of utterly ruining the immersive element of the experience.

Frequently, we were trying to watch an effect or witness a scare, only to be completely distracted by a staff member yelling, “Let’s keep it moving! This way, people!” This constant pressure to keep going was deeply obnoxious, because the creators had obviously worked hard to create a fun effect that they presumably hoped we (the audience) would want to look at. The park, however, not only spoiled our absorption into the world of the park; it essentially made us feel bad for moving too slowly past these carefully realized set pieces, a fact that was extremely disappointing for us.

As with costumes, this is an element where HHN is at the top of their game, at least most of the time. Actually, this was an element where the members of our team didn’t entirely agree, because we have slightly different ideas as to what makes for peak effects. Alyssa deducted several points due to minimal sensory effects: while there were some fun moments in the Killer Klowns maze involving water squirted at the audience, and a moment in Sinners where master vampire Remmick flew into the air, typically the mazes made little effort to effectively utilize their space, at least not as fully as the 3D space should actually allow.

My wife’s complaint didn’t bother me as much, because I was too busy enjoying the beautifully realized technical elements of the event: incredible animatronics, such as a talking severed head that greeted us as we entered the Evil Dead Burn maze, and an actual Crazy Train – complete with Randy Rhodes’ legendarily operatic guitar riffs-  in the Ozzy Osbourne one, were highlights.

Actors also had clever hiding spots for jump scares, such as a Pinhead that burst forth from the Pillar of Souls in a great reference to the third film in the series. Gigantic monsters also appeared, including some very disturbing body horror in the original Dead, Deader, Deadest maze, and some exciting lasers and fog during the Purge stunt show.

There is no shortage of actors working this event: each maze must have at least ten or more, and the total number of scare actors working at any given moment has to be in the hundreds, most of whom are tasked with the Herculean responsibility of recreating legendary characters from film and television. Some actors resemble their onscreen counterparts more closely than others, but it’s fun to have real live people creating atmosphere by portraying well-known heroes and villains.

It is, however, often difficult to tell how well the actors in the mazes are doing at their task, because for the most part, their only job is to pop out at attendees, swipe once, and disappear behind a curtain or other object.

The only exception to this was the performer portraying Art the Clown, who wandered the park taking photos: he would (silently) riff with attendees before posing for selfies (something that gets you killed in the actual Terrifier films).

In the mazes, there is nearly no interaction with the audience at all: no one will approach you to riff with you, and you will never feel like you are anything other than a detached observer during the experience.

Obviously, this is not the fault of the actors themselves, as they are simply doing their jobs as instructed. However, as one of the Scare Factor’s criteria in this category is interactivity, our team was forced to deduct points from the cast’s overall score for this aspect.

As far as costuming, this is one area where HHN is essentially unsurpassed: being performed in Hollywood, sometimes on real film sets, the props and costumes are designed by industry professionals, and they are beautifully crafted, meticulously detailed, and incredibly faithful to the IPs they are based upon. A highlight for us this year was a feature of the vampires in the Sinners maze: LEDs had somehow been attached to the actors’ faces, causing them to appear to have glowing red eyes, the better to hunt us in the dark.

Equally impressive were the detailed full-body suits on the multiple actors portraying Stranger Things’ final boss Vecna, as well as a beautiful skeleton mariachi band in the original Killceañera maze. At times, it was nearly impossible to tell if we were looking at an actor or a detailed animatronic, so carefully detailed were some of the costumes. Of course, this is also due to the fact that the actual actors’ audience interaction was frequently minimal, so some of them may as well have been robots (once again, not the fault of the performers themselves but simply due to the way the event is designed).

Halloween Horror Nights, at its best, is a wonderfully entertaining and gloriously executed event. However, there is one thing that it never really is: it is not scary. Not because of any failure in the costumes, acting, effects, or props, but because the method of generating scares is so utterly predictable that once you have been through one maze, you will have entirely decoded the formula and be able to anticipate every jump scare in every other maze, with mechanical precision, for the rest of the time you are there.

Unlike in other haunted attractions, actors do not select victims based upon how nervous, or how engaged, they may appear. They simply pop out by rote, always making the same motion, as in an overchoreographed dance number, leaving little room for scares to develop organically or for any surprises to happen.

In fact, the scares seem to occur based on a straight rhythm which can be memorized: basically, quiet-quiet-SCARE-quiet-quiet-SCARE, ad infinitum. Not only is this predictable, it means that if you are off the “scare rhythm,” you can easily end up missing every single jump scare in an entire maze. We did the Hellraiser maze twice, and I am glad we did, because the first time we went through it I missed literally everything because I was off beat.

We gave some points back because the Fortnightmares scarezone, of all things, ended up bringing in some of the chaos we so value in these haunted attractions. Fortnite characters, and their buddy Art the Clown, roamed the streets with chainsaws in a loud and intimidating battle royale. Still, it wasn’t enough to redeem the scare factor in the event for us, because it was the only time we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen next.

As far as value, our team gave middling scores to the event in this regard. To visit on a Saturday night, we each paid $92, plus the aforementioned $35 early entry add-on, for a total of $127 per person. Parking was around $36, or $12 each for the three of us, bringing the total up to $139 each. There are eight houses, one of which we did twice, plus the tram tour and the stunt show, so that’s a total of 11 activities, meaning we paid an average of around $12.63 per maze. When you look at it that way, it’s not a bad value at all, but it’s still a very expensive up-front cost, and not everyone is crazy enough to do as much as we did.