By Kenna Jenkins, October 28, 2025
The time for amusement park scares has begun, and Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights delivered on scares and in-maze set designs again.
This year’s maze lineup is the best I’ve seen since starting my yearly tradition of attending in 2022. I ended up doing every maze but “Terrifier” and the “Terror Tram: Enter the Blumhouse.” Here are my ranks of the best Halloween Horror Night mazes:
1. Monstrous 3: The Ghosts of Latin America
The maze featured three ghosts from Latin American folklore: La Llorona, La Muelona and La Siguanaba.
La Muelona and La Siguanaba make up the first half of the maze, with them each having a room with a couple of respective scares by scare actors dressed as the characters. While both characters wear tattered, bloodied dress, La Muelona’s scare actors donned masks of a woman with a large mouth full of large, sharp teeth and La Siguanaba’s mask modeled a rotting horse head.
La Llorona’s, who wears a dirty, tattered white dress and a white lace veil, section is the longest of the three, beginning with the drowning of her two children and shows a few scenes of her eating children in their bedrooms. Her last victim is you as you exit her portion.
While the scare actors in La Muelona and La Siguanaba were sparse, the set design, costuming, makeup and overall atmosphere make up for it.
There were some cool illusions at the end of the maze, showing all three characters before a light flashes, returning to an empty graveyard.
The line lasted approximately 40 minutes and is located in the upper lot.
2. “Poltergeist”
The maze drops you into the house of the Freeling family and the story of their lives as entities that haunt parents, Steven and Diane, and their three kids Dana, Robbie and Carol Anne.
While the exterior of the maze was a well done, scaled down, replica of the façade of the Freeling’s home, inside is where the maze really shines. The first room had a recreation of
Carol Anne talking to static television screen, with audio of her whispers to the other side being played on speakers.
The maze shows scenes of chairs stacking by themselves in the kitchen in and children getting attacked by clown dolls in their bedroom.
It smelled surprisingly sweet in the maze, which was different from the generic mold and mildew smells that are usually pumped in.
Sofia Tatone, who’s been a scare actor at Halloween Horror Nights since 2023, said the “Poltergeist” mazes stood out to her for its scares and its ability to capture the environment of the 1982 film.
“I remember walking through and there was one room where I got scared once and then I walked like two steps, got scared again and it was just relentless,” Tatone said. “I would really recommend ‘Poltergeist’ as the most scary house.”
A walk through the Wizarding World leads to the “Poltergeist” maze in the upper lot, which was about a 34-minute wait against the 45-minute estimate.
3. “Fallout”
“Fallout” is based on the 2024 Amazon Prime series and inspired by the video games series of the same name. The show follows Lucy MacLean, a Vault 33 dweller, in the search for her missing father and Maximus, a squire of the Brotherhood of the Steel, as he and his troop search for a scientist with dangerous technology in a world destroyed by nuclear fallout.
There scare actors of ghouls, who are humans deform by radiation, soldiers from the Brotherhood of the Steel, a religious military organization, and people who lived in the vaults, which were built to protect parts of the human population from the nuclear apocalypse, where littered all around the maze and ready to jump out at you at any moment.
The wait was only 20 minutes in comparison to its estimated 30 minutes and is located in the upper lot.
4. Scarecrow: Music by Slash
The first thing I noticed was the smell which, according to the website, takes place in an “abandoned Depression-era farm.” It had a very pungent musty hay smell. The jump scares were unpredictable and numerous, which could be a nice balance in comparison with the human dummies who seemed to have been killed by very sharp cobs of corn.
“Scarecrow: Music by Slash” was the shortest line of the night at under 10 minutes, even with the estimated 35 minutes.
5. Jason Universe
Jason Universe is based off the character Jason Voorhees from the “Friday the 13th” movies, a character best known for terrorizing campers since his, adult, debut in “Friday the 13th Part 2.”
The maze was fine, but for a maze called “Jason Universe: Evil Doesn’t Stay Dead,” it sure did seem like Jason was in fact dead with how little I saw him.
Maybe it was the timing of the scare actors coming out from behind their curtains, but I felt I saw more bloodied mannequins with axes and golf clubs shoved in their bodies than I did Jason. This felt like a loss, considering some of his more insane acts from the films, like when he roasted a girl in a sleeping bag in the 2009 remake.
The maze did smell like barbeque for the latter half, courtesy of the guy being electrocuted by a breaker box, which helped elevate this maze’s ranking.
“Jason Universe,” is one of three in the lower lot. The line was estimated at 60 minutes but ended up being a little under 40 minutes.
6. “Five Nights at Freddy’s”
The “Five Nights at Freddy’s” maze, based around the 2023 film, which follows Mike Schmidt as he starts his job as the night guard at an abandoned pizzeria where he’s stalked by four animatronic possessed by the ghost of murdered children.
While not my favorite of the night or the scariest, the maze was fun as someone who’s loved the games since the 2014 release of original point-and-click horror game and the release of the hilariously glitchy “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach” in 2021. I hatewatched the movie two years ago, knowing I wouldn’t like it based on the differences in the story and tone in comparison to the earlier games in the series.
The sets were pulled right out of the movie including the classic checkered floors, the security office and paper-cut-out pizzeria decorations. The animatronic looked great, when you weren’t seeing the arms of the puppeteers working them.
The scare actors were a little repetitive, with all the ones I saw dressed as the red-headed child from the movie, who in his orange shirt represents Foxy. Foxy is a fox animatronic dressed as a pirate from the original 2014 game and is known for being the most aggressive out of the original cast of antagonists. The maze smelled faintly of old wood and hay, which wasn’t the worst smell of the night.
As a fan of the video game series, Tatone said the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” maze was her favorite due to the attention to detail, from the set to the size of the animatronics.
This was the longest line by far at 180 minutes. We had a little confusion on where the general admission line was due to the placement of the signage.
While the large signs usually indicating the start of the line and show the estimated wait time were on the left of the “TRANSFORMERS: The Ride-3D,” we were directed to the right after some confusion. That confusion led to us standing in what we thought was the start of the line but was in fact the bend of the line which started much further back.
Luckily, the line moved quickly, snaking us around through the queue area for the Transformers ride before spitting us out on the left entrance where the line continued and led to sound stage 15. In the end, the wait was around 76 minutes, which was much better than the estimated 180.
7. “The Horror of the Wyatt Sicks”
“The Horror of the Wyatt Sicks” is a tribute to WWE wrestler Bray Wyatt, real name Windham Rotunda, who died August 2023 of a heart attack at age 36.
According to the Discover Universal Blog no one incorporated horror in wrestling like Bray Wyatt, something his did with his brother Taylor Rotunda, known as Bo Dallas.
While I lack knowledge in WWE lore, the scare actors were constantly popping out of corner and through doors, creating some truly memorable scares.
But none of that makes up for the horrible smell that hit me about a quarter through the maze. While mazes like “Scarecrow: Music by Slash” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s” had notable smells I didn’t like, those fell leagues behind the vomit-inducing odor “The Horror of the Wyatt Sicks” gave off.
I spent the rest of the maze with my right hand clutching my friend, in fear of the scare actors, and with my left pinching my nose closed.
The maze was located in the lower lot with the line was only 15 minutes.
Horror fans would be remiss to miss the stellar lineup Universal Studios Hollywood put together this year, which is available until Nov. 2. General admission tickets start at $77 but is more expensive for Fridays and Saturdays, which are the busiest days, as the event reaches its end and around Halloween.
There are other tickets such as Halloween Horror Nights Express, which starts at $259, and Halloween Horror Nights R.I.P. Tour, which starts at $499, as well as two ticket options of differing price that allow multiple visits, the Frequent Fear Pass and the Ultimate Fear Pass.
With early admission which costs an addition $20, gates open at 5 p.m. and four mazes become available. This year includes “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “Jason Universe” in the lower lot of the park and “Poltergeist” and “Terrifier” in the upper lot.
