Hollywood: Halloween Horror Nights 2025 (HHN) is upon us and with it comes eight fully themed and realized haunted houses full of scares and surprises at Universal Studios Hollywood near Los Angeles, Calif. Here are a full rundown of the houses and my personal rankings. It’s always good to keep in mind everyone’s experience can vary widely, as each walk through a haunted house can be quite different simply based on timing.
6 comments:
In a few weeks I’m going with a group of people to the Kennywood Halloween nights. I have been intrigued by Halloween houses for a long time and am so excited to experience it for the first time so soon. In the mean-time I have been researching other amusement parks Halloween Nights. This article was one of the most informative I have read regarding opinions on Haunted houses. I really enjoyed that the author gave a description before their opinion, followed by a video of the house. The only thing that gives me pause in regards to all of these houses is how many of them are themed on existing material. If you are not familiar with the material than the experience could be lessened. However, I do see the appeal for some movie themed houses as it is always so good to step into the world of a piece of media that you love. I am conflicted on the topic.
I love haunted house designs. I think it would be so cool to be able to work on Halloween Horror Nights at Universal. I like reading reviews of them because I have yet to be able to go. I like that they were rated based on immersion. Some points I didn’t think about were the use of masks being a barrier to suspended belief. I agree things with masks are not as scary as faces that have prosthetics and make up on. The Specters and Horror classes I’m in also drew me to this article as we all in groups have to make a haunted house for the final. I am very excited and definitely took away some notes such as making the entrance interesting to prepare or purposely misdirect guest’s impressions of what is in store. Haunted houses are very theatrical and I think that is what I love the most about them; they are theatre but it’s experiential and spikes the blood pressure.
As someone very invested in theme parks, seeing what HHN creative cooks up every year this event is in short incredible. It’s amazing what they develop for this event, and while yes they have returning fan favorites, they make brand new concepts from the start to the end. HHN will never be the same year after year, they always will have brand new houses, and those new houses constantly rank among the best haunt attractions and draw in major crowds. Each one of their several houses tells a well rounded story, its not just jump scares for no reason, each have very impressive technical elements including lighting and sound, and have some special features like terrifiers water feature. It’s very impressive what universal is able to pull off just after a year of development for all the new houses. They prove you can do a lot with little time, and not a ton of budget for each house, and really show innovation each year they do something new, which is incredible and amazing to watch each year!
Reading that ranking of the 2025 haunted houses just made me want to go to HHN so bad. The way they described each house honestly made it feel like I was already walking through it. I liked how they said timing changes everything because that’s so real, sometimes you hit every scare in the perfect spot and it’s crazy and other times you miss them all and it feels like a totally different house. The IP versus original house thing made sense too, like if you know the movie already it feels way more intense but originals can surprise you in a different way. I thought it was cool how they mentioned tech stuff like prosthetics versus masks or how the lighting sets you up to get scared. Im a huge wimp when it comes to scary things but I totally wanna go to see what its like, the experience seems insane.
I absolutely LOVE haunted houses. Personally when I am in an environment like that where i'm expecting to be scared I don't really get scared but I love going through and seeing the incredible worlds that people have come up with. The idea of a WWE haunted house is so funny to me, and not something I had ever considered. I also think we need to be creating haunted houses with themes that are less traditionally scary. Like ghosts, zombies, and nuclear accidents are cool but every single haunted house ever is themed around those 3 things. I want something new and exciting. We need to add some whimsy and creativity to the haunted house themes. I think that in a less traditional haunted house you have the ability to scare people far more successfully because they are in an environment different from when they have typically experienced haunted houses.
I have been to a haunted house once in my life. And it wasn’t even a house, it was more of a corn maze and I remember it so clearly. I do not like being scared, I do not like scary things, I will avoid them at all costs. However, I am going to Kenny Wood with a big group here in a couple of weeks. I was watching videos of it the other night and I can tell you it is not going to go well. However, I have noticed that because I work in the performing arts and have a deeper understanding of how it is all made it is much less scary. I noticed when I went to high school that I spent a lot of time looking at the makeup and the lighting which helped. I think designing them would be a lot of fun and performing in them even more so. I think that being able to disconnect myself helps. I do not know if I could handle a park this large though.
Post a Comment