Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights knows how to scare you

Universal Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights

At Halloween Horror Nights (HHN), I couldn’t stop thinking about one scene.

I saw fang-toothed monsters, gross-out mutilations and scare actors with impeccable timing for getting an impressive two jumps out of me.

But what lingered the most was an empty, bloody carriage in the haunted house themed around Latin America monsters.

One performer played a distraught mother, her face in her hands. It was a psychological fear — and Universal knows how to scare you.

The fan-favorite HHN is back for its 33rd year and runs on select nights through Nov. 3 with 10 haunted houses, including “A Quiet Place” and “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.” HHN also features the Nightmare Fuel Nocturnal Circus show, five scare zones and a new HHN tribute store.

“There are so many ways we can scare our guests from the bloody gory to the just plain gross to the psychological and twisted. … A good scare is one that is hidden well, comes from nowhere, and happens often,” said Lora Sauls, the Assistant Director of Creative Development and Show Direction.

“Every year our Entertainment teams come up with new concepts to keep the Halloween Horror Nights event unique year after year. Our teams take pride in creating new original stories for haunted houses and scare zones, as well the live shows and overall thematic.”

Universal Orlando is up to the task every Halloween season. The HHN planning process for this year started in Fall 2023. The behind-the-scenes team includes show directors, character designers, graphic designers, décor specialists and those in the charge of the set, all working together.

“This year the Show Director and Designer of the ‘Insidious: The Further’ haunted house did an incredible job in creating a unique design. In this IP haunted house, you will feel like we have added additional scare actors, but it’s the design of the haunted house that makes you feel this way. Each scare actor has two or more opportunities to scare our guests as they weave their way through,” Sauls said. “The scare actors bring the haunted houses to life. They are the backbone of the event.”

Many HHN hardcore fans recognize the scare actors’ importance too.

A loud rumble of applause broke out on a recent Saturday night as a group of scare actors switching shifts walked by the crowd in the queues. It sounded like celebrities were strolling by.

The event that transforms Universal Studios into a spooky, atmospheric place where you feel on edge raises a good question for the weak-hearted: Why? Why am I doing this?

“Why do we spend money to scare ourselves?” said Frank McAndrew, a psychology professor at Knox College, whose focus studying creepiness puts him in high demand every October.

“It’s a pretty perverse thing, right? You spend money to go and do something that in real life you would avoid at all costs. Why would we be drawn to things that scare us?”

Some HHN-goers just love the adrenaline of getting scared, he said. Others are dragged there by their significant other or friends under pressure and want to just make it through HHN as painlessly as possible.

“Some people don’t mind the blood and gore, but they get absolutely creeped out by ghosts and supernatural things,” McAndrew said. “I study creepiness. Creepiness is about uncertainty. … Horror is the next stage when you move from being creeped out to realizing there is some kind of danger.”

Maybe deep down, haunted houses and horror movies reveal to us what it would be like to be thrown into a scary situation in real life so we can better mentally prepare ourselves, he said. Take serial killers, for example.

“You learn what you can handle and what you can’t handle,” he said. “You learn about your own emotional reactions to things, and this also sort of makes you better prepared to cope.”