Which Halloween Horror Nights wins, Hollywood or Orlando?

You need to love horror movies to love immersive haunted houses, like The Weeknd: After Hours Nightmare, at Halloween Horror Nights. The annual Halloween event at Universal Studios is so intense that it comes with a warning not to bring anyone under 13 into its macabre mazes. Think of it as the polar opposite of Disneyland’s Oogie Boogie Bash: It’s not kid-friendly, it’s not going to softball any of its grotesqueries, and it’s almost definitely not going to let you sleep well the night you go.

It is, without exaggeration, the thing I most look forward to all year.

Halloween Horror Nights happens at Universal Orlando and Universal Hollywood, and this year, I was invited to opening nights of the events on both coasts. If, that is, I survived the first one — which, to be honest, was touch-and-go at points. 

People ask me frequently which of the two Halloween Horror Nights events is better, but picking a favorite is like picking a favorite child. Universal Orlando is a bigger park, and has more space to fill with monsters. This year, HHN Orlando has 10 haunted houses and five scare zones, some of which are based on classic horror movies like “Halloween” and “The Mummy,” while others are based on original concepts by Universal’s creative team. For the first time, a musician has inspired an entire house: the music videos for The Weeknd’s “After Hours” album, and his creepy performance art of showing up at red carpets with bloody face bandages and no explanation for why he was choosing to wear them. 

At HHN Hollywood, there are eight haunted houses and the Terror Tram, which turns the Studio Tour into a walk-through nightmare of killer clowns and demented trick-or-treaters, plus a Jordan Peele-inspired section in the new “Nope” area of the tour that includes the tethered from “Us.” 

While the Hollywood park is smaller, the terror is more concentrated. In Orlando, there are plenty of spaces you can go to instead, if you need a break from the undead chasing you through a cemetery or demonic scarecrows looking for a human sacrifice. In Hollywood, there’s hardly a spot to stop where a scareactor wearing a mutilated pig face or threatening you with a chain saw isn’t waiting. 

The haunted houses at Halloween Horror Nights 

A handful of houses in Orlando and Hollywood have overlapping concepts, but the houses themselves are very different. The “Halloween” houses, for example, follow the same story line but show different scenes from the movie. 

The Universal Monsters houses do something similar: there’s one story line, involving the Wolf Man, the Mummy and Dracula. In Orlando, the house is set in Egypt, where you’re inside a pyramid filled with reanimated mummies. In Hollywood, the house is in Victorian London, where the Mummy is trying to get back what’s rightfully his and lady vampires are attacking you from all sides. 

Because there are more houses in Orlando, the creative team is able to have more variety. Some houses are more atmospheric than frightening. Bugs: Eaten Alive is a throwback to campy 1950s creature features, where the “technology of the future” mutates bugs to human size. 

Dead Man’s Pier: Winter’s Wake is a sad and beautiful story about a woman whose husband dies at sea, and her following him into the afterlife. In that maze, they’ve created an entire fishing village, complete with boats, homes, even smells. It’s the only haunted house I’ve ever experienced at HHN where, instead of screaming and running through, I saw people stopping to take in the gorgeous scenery and heard them saying “woooooooow” in awed tones. Don’t get me wrong: There were still nightmare fishermen trying to kill you. But the house was a lot more artistic than scary. 

In Hollywood, even the houses that are supposed to be funny, like Killer Klowns from Outer Space, are still intensely frightening. In that one, there’s an evil clown using a dead man as a grisly marionette, and the should-be-silly neon monsters jumping out at you are purely awful. 

Universal Hollywood is much more of a locals’ park, and they’ve used that to their advantage this year, especially in Universal Horror Hotel. In that house, an old Hollywood hotel is full of murderers and murderees, and you descend from beautifully appointed art deco hotel rooms to hellish catacombs filled with monsters. If it feels like a story you’ve heard about old Hollywood before, it’s because you have: they’ve taken elements of notorious LA murders and urban legends and combined them into one excellent, spine-chilling story line. 

Which event is scarier, at Universal Orlando or Universal Hollywood?

If you’re the kind of person who leaves a regular Halloween haunted house wishing it were scarier, you’re going to love HHN no matter which coast you go to. There are a lot more ways to be scared in Orlando: there’s a lot more creepy food to eat, a lot more places to be immersed in the frights, and a lot more scareactors chasing you. 

But this year, Hollywood was scarier for me (and not just because of my lifelong terror of clowns). The scareactors are more physical. In Orlando, you know the guy with the chain saw is going to stop before he gets too close. In Hollywood, he’s not going to stop. I had what felt like 100% more scareactors in haunted houses jump in front of me and stop me from walking by. Once, three killer clowns on the Terror Tram cornered my friend and he truly couldn’t find a path out from their trap. While I stood by and laughed, one crept up on me and put his face inches from mine. (I know, I deserved it.) 

I had scareactors brandish knives and pipes so close to my face I felt the whoosh of air as they flew by. Once, an j8-foot-tall monster on stilts ran and jumped in front of me as I was walking, scaring me so much that I almost fell down. Mainly, I think the difference is the Hollywood cast is all aspiring actors, many of whom have had combat training, so they can safely do all of these what-feel-like-insane things.

And for the first time ever, HHN incorporated The Wizarding World of Harry Potter into the event. All through Hogsmeade, there are Death Eaters leveling unforgivable curses at you, as the Dark Arts at Hogwarts projections play on the castle overhead. 

My main deciding factor for which event is better this year, though, is the scariest house on either coast. This year, it’s La Llorona: The Weeping Woman at HHN Hollywood. In Latin American folklore, La Llorona is the ghost of a woman who haunts the waterfront, mourning the children she drowned, and pulling sleeping children from their beds to join her. 

This house was absolutely gruesome in the best possible way. It started with an eerie church scene, filled with mourners and the dead, and only got worse from there. There were mutilated horse heads, enormous monsters, and a truly shocking version of the weeping woman trying not just to steal kids from their beds, but to eat them. It’s so disturbing you get to see it twice. And at the exit, as you think you’re leaving the terror behind, you’re dropped directly into a scare zone full of fog and blinding lights, so you can’t see the murderous mariachis coming at you. 

Whether that’s better or worse, though, depends on your appetite for terror.