Universal Studios: Halloween Horror Nights 2021

By: Brianna Madison

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ On October 7th, 2021 I got to go to my third year of Universal Studios Orlando´s Halloween Horror Nights for their 30th year anniversary. From September 3rd to October 31st, both the Orlando and Hollywood Universal Studios locations close their parks at 5 pm so that they can transform it into a horror theme park filled with haunted houses, scare zones, and different shows. Typically they reopen at 6:30pm, but early admission guests enter as early as 6pm and they don´t close the park until 2am. There are several different ways to do horror nights, but my personal favorite is the RIP Tour where you have a guide who leads you through the park and you get to skip lines and go into the houses immediately, go through all of the scare zones multiple times, and even watch all of the shows. As an added bonus - you get free food and drinks on your tour. Cost for these tours range from $300-$350. Now I know that it can get a little pricey, so if you do not want to do the RIP Tour you can either buy a regular HHN ticket for roughly $80 or you can get the fast pass one for around $140.

This year, there were 10 houses and 5 different scare zones. The houses were HHN Icons: Captured, The Haunting of Hill House, Puppet Theater: Captive Audience, Wicked Growth: Realm of the Pumpkin, Universal Monsters: The Bride of Frankenstein Lives, Revenge of the Tooth Fairy, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Beetlejuice, Case Files Unearthed: Legendary Truth, and Welcome to SCarey: Horror in the Heartland. My personal favorite house this year was either Beetlejuice, because I absolutely adore Beetlejuice in general and the house had loads of scenes from the movie, or The Haunting of Hill House because it was absolutely terrifying and they got you when you least expected it.

The different scare zones they had this year were 30 Years, 30 Fears, Lights, Camera, Hacktion: Eddie´s Revenge, Gorewood Forest, Seek and Destroy, and Crypt TV. In these scare zones they have scare actors walking around who jump at you, chase you with things like chainsaws, and walk on stilts. The live shows they had were Marathon of Mayhem: Carnage factory, which is a water show, and Halloween Nightmare Fuel, which was a performance with people who do crazy acrobatics and spin fire.

In previous years they have done things like the Purge, Saw, Stranger Things, and Ghostbusters. I personally think that they need to bring back the Purge. Overall, HHN really outdid themselves this year and they just keep getting better and better. If you love everything and anything horror I would highly recommend going to the Halloween Horror Nights.