// KOTAKU — GAMING
Sinners, Hellraiser, and Ozzy Osbourne: Ranking All 10 Haunted Houses at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights 2026
Halloweenhalloween horror nightstheme parksUniversal Studios
Season creep is a real problem. You’ve no doubt already seen holiday decorations for sale three months before the actual holiday arrives and felt a little mystified. One of the two big annual sources of retail season creep is, well, creepy season: Halloween starts in the summer now, to the point where “summerween” is some new thing we apparently have to know about. The only real benefit to this is that it lets us experience the best annual theme park special event a little bit earlier every year. Universal’s annual horror extravaganza, Halloween Horror Nights, routinely starts in August now, and hey, what feels more like the traditional Autumn harvest than the 90-degree nights of Orlando in late summer?
This year’s Halloween Horror Nights is the 35th at Universal Studios Florida. What started as a three-night event in 1991 is now a 50-date haul that runs from late August up to the first day of November, with 10 haunted houses, two shows, multiple open-air “scare zones,” an immersive “tribute” store, and a random assortment of other pop-up experiences throughout the park. Its brand of horror leans heavily on shock tactics and jump scares—the easiest aspects of horror films to recreate in a theme park—but what makes its best haunted houses special is the theming and design work. A good Halloween Horror Nights house is like visiting another world for a few minutes—one where almost everybody exists solely to scream at you, but also one that shows you things you’ll otherwise never see (or feel) in person. Like theme parks in general, there’s a bit of overlap with video games and how they strive to immerse you in an otherworldly environment. And this year’s Halloween Horror Nights took the game connection further than ever before with Fortnitemares, a scare zone based on Epic’s cornerstone, where actors in horror-tinged Fortnite skins scared passersby in a stretch of park lightly themed to the game.
The haunted houses are the true draws, though. These indoor, maze-like spaces let Universal Creative unleash its multidisciplinary skills in service of frightening the hell out of eager guests. There’s typically an even split between houses based on movies or other intellectual property and houses based on original ideas created by Universal’s theme park designers. You can usually expect a couple of iconic big-name horror franchises alongside recent hits, and usually one outlier IP based on a musician or video game. (Last year’s event had a house based on the deceased professional wrestler Bray Wyatt.) As a true believer in the theme park as a unique, still-developing art form of its own, I usually find the original houses to be more impressive than the IP-based ones; Universal Creative clearly relishes the opportunity to play with horror convention and jump across genres, exploring what’s artistically possible within the framework of a haunted house. That’s still true in 2026, with the three least memorable houses all being adaptations. This year’s most vibrant and artistically unified house is based on IP, though—or, to be more accurate, the work of one of the most important rock musicians of all time. That speaks to the quality of this year’s music house, but also underlines how this year’s event is just a little bit lacking compared to those of the last few years. Most years feature at least one original house that is legitimately jaw-dropping (I don’t use that term lightly; I’m talking actual moments of mouth-agape “how the hell did they do this” surprise or beauty), but none of this year’s offerings hit that level. My favorite house of 2026 would rank high any year, but it wouldn’t come in at number one in any other year of the last decade.
This might be a bit of a down year, but it’s still Halloween Horror Nights. It still rocks. (And you’ll still probably want to book two nights and spring for the express pass; the lines get obscene for these things.) If you’re a ho