Every 2025 Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights Maze Ranked

Every horror fan owes it to themselves to make a pilgrimage to Halloween Horror Nights. Every year, the Universal Studios theme parks transform into a celebration of everything spooky and scary, utilizing state-of-the-art technology, brilliant production design, and dedicated actors to immerse visitors in world-class haunted mazes that raise the bar for the entire industry. Combining concepts based on popular existing franchises and wholly original ideas, each line-up has a little something for horror fans of all tastes, from those favoring "scary but not too scary" ("Five Nights at Freddy's") to those hoping to have their buttons pushed hard enough that vomiting starts to feel like a good idea ("Terrifier"). 

Halloween Horror Nights 34 at Universal Studios Florida at the Universal Orlando Resort offers 10 brand new mazes for the 2025 season, and just about all of them represent the brilliant possibilities of haunted house design as a full-fledged artistic medium (yes, I'm going there, please follow me). While the event also offers exceptional live entertainment, bizarre exclusive food, and interactive "scare zones" that let guests interact with armies of scare actors, the mazes themselves remain the main draw.

And since this is the internet, and we're all dorks here, that leaves us with one thing to do: I'm going to rank every maze at Halloween Horror Nights 34.

(Editorial note: /Film experienced Halloween Horror Nights 34 as invited guests of the Universal Orlando Resort as part of a media event.)

It's a testament the overall strength of Halloween Horror Nights 34 that there's only a single dud in the line-up. Unfortunately, that dud is a doozy: the maze based on Prime Video's massively popular "Fallout" television series, which was inspired by the beloved video game franchise of the same name. Strictly based on the first season of the show, with elements, locations, and characters beyond those episodes seemingly off limits, the maze doesn't have access to the larger universe's deep well of monsters, creatures, and villains and must instead retell the events of the first season in chronological order — just on extreme fast forward.

The result is a house that'll disappoint fans who were hoping for something fresh and baffle newcomers who will have no idea what the heck is going in a given moment. The usual Universal production values are on full display, but the sense of narrative momentum and storytelling that drives the best haunted houses simply isn't here. You know something is wrong when most of the scares are provided by heroic characters arriving suddenly rather than villains menacing everyone wandering through the maze. "Fallout" could and should make for a killer Halloween Horror Nights maze, and I sincerely hope the event's creatives get a second shot to do justice to one of the strangest and scariest science fiction worlds out there. Sadly, this is the lone misfire in an otherwise killer year.

The Jason Un1v3rse maze is a strange beast. With the film rights to the "Friday the 13th" film series tied up in an ongoing legal quagmire for the time being, this maze seemingly only has access to a slim cross-section of the legendary horror franchise — tellingly, no printed text or spoken words about this maze mention the actual name of the film series, simply referring to hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees and not the movies in which he racks up a body count of horny teens and anyone who gets in the way of him and said horny teens. And despite the wide-ranging implication of the maze's title, the focus is squarely on the earliest days of the franchise, before Jason was a zombie, before he took Manhattan, before he went to space, and so on.

But most folks won't notice the unspoken legalese keeping this maze on a very specific route, because it largely gets the job done. This is a maze built around Jason appearing early and often, offering horror fans seemingly dozens of chances to get up and close with the greatest of the '80s slasher icons. As you wander through detailed recreations of Camp Crystal Lake, the maze essentially tasks you with surviving a gauntlet, or even a parade, of Jasons as they lurch and lunge from every corner (an alternate title for this one: "Too Many Jasons!"). It's no the most elegant or creative maze in the Halloween Horror Nights line-up, but it's a meat-and-potatoes creation that serves up more pure jump scares than anything else in the park. And for many fans, that's going to be more than enough.

The ambitions of El Artista: A Spanish Haunting cannot be denied. Here's an original house, with original characters and original monsters that serves as the thematic cornerstone of everything seen at Halloween Horror Nights 34. For the more obsessive fans who want to piece together the lore of each edition of the event, this is a key building block. And for a haunted maze full of monsters who leap out to scare you at regular intervals, there's more tragedy, sadness, and thematic richness than you'd expect lurking around the edges.

The downside is that I don't think all of those little details play as clearly during the actual experience as they should, and unless you spend the time to delve into the details before you walk through the entrance (invited press at Universal's media event were given the whole backstory), the average visitor may not fully appreciate that tale of a tortured artist whose work invites monsters into his home, fueling his inspiration but literally tearing him and his family apart. There's a richness to it all, with a style that blends the beautiful and the grotesque in a manner that suggests Universal could (and should) pull off a Guillermo del Toro-inspired maze in the future. That alone makes the El Artista a trip worth taking, even as other mazes with slightly more coherent narratives edge it out on this list.

Easily the most in-demand maze at Halloween Horror Nights 34, the walkthrough based on "Five Nights at Freddy's" is the kind of franchise-based attraction that absolutely nails what it sets out to accomplish. Newcomers will get the gist quickly and appreciate the scares and the designs. Longtime fans will get the live the dream/nightmare of actually walking through Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria and barely escaping the clutches of haunted animatronics. Other houses provide more visceral scares, but this one features some of the most impressive effects and show-stopping set pieces of the entire event, proving to be a more successful adaptation of the franchise than the massively successful 2023 film.

Credit where credit is due: Universal teamed up with the Jim Henson Creature Shop (who also lent their talents to the film) to create the various monsters, which are brought to life with a clever blend of full-size robots and clever puppetry. Knowing that these are characters with a dedicated fanbase, the maze wisely gives every member of the animatronic line-up at least two killer close-up encounters, guaranteeing that everyone who braves the line will get to experience the entire ensemble. But for my money, the most effective scare involves a hole in the wall and a single furry arm, proving that a "less is more" scare in the middle of an otherwise lavish maze can deliver some serious goods.

Grave of Flesh has an S-tier, wholly original premise that reveals the sly truth about Universal's Halloween Horror Nights events: the houses based on the popular shows and movies may get people through the front gate, but it's the mazes entirely crafted in-house that often prove just how clever these folks really are. In this case, this maze begins with your death. Literally. You enter through a graveyard, step into your tomb, and discover what really happens to you after you die. Specifically, you are hunted through a grimy, claustrophobic, and eventually architecturally impossible afterlife by flesh-eating ghouls. If cosmic dread is your preferred flavor of terror, Grave of Flesh delivers.

Seasoned horror fans will find shades of H.P. Lovecraft on display, with a dash of Stephen King's "Revival," but you don't need to know anything to appreciate the well-crafted scares, gooey monsters, and profound sense of sticky unease that awaits you around every corner. A lot of haunted house attractions feel like a horror movie premise retrofitted for a walkthrough experience. Grave of Flesh feels like the kind of premise that can really only exist as a haunted maze — further evidence that we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the possibilities of the stories that can be told in the haunted attraction medium. In short: good stuff.

What little I know about the world of professional wrestling comes from my obsessive fan friends who let the finer details occasionally leak down to me when we're talking about other things. So when I say that The Horrors of the Wyatt Sicks is one of the most successful mazes at Halloween Horror Nights 34, know that I say that as someone with no attachment to these characters or to the larger WWE universe. However, I will say that as a lifelong horror fan, this grisly and strange maze may be the single greatest advertisement for professional wrestling I have ever encountered. Knowing that these characters exist in that strange world has made me more curious than ever to surrender and finally listen to my smart mark friends and check it all out.

In a nutshell, The Horrors of the Wyatt Sicks is based on a horror-themed wrestling collective formed in tribute to the late Bray Wyatt, whose grisly ring persona ran the gamut from cult leader to supernatural masked killer (and maybe also a creepy children's show host?). Naturally, you don't need to know that to get the basic gist of the house, which features the masked and murderous Wyatt Sicks team rampaging through the backstage areas of a WWE show, tearing anything and everyone limb-from-limb without mercy. Much of the credit here is due to the actors taking on each member of the crew, who vanish into their characters with a specific ferocity that's not always seen in haunted house actors. Performing with the outrageous panache of proper professional wrestlers, they deliver the scares with the necessary ferocity but also a ring-ready sensationalism. They scare you and then then they preen and pose. It's the kind of energy that you hope to see in every single Halloween Horror Nights maze.

If you're like me and feel a little worn out by "evil doll" horror stories, don't sleep on Dolls: Let's Play Dead. This isn't another story of demonic dolls hunting you through darkened rooms — it's far creepier, far more disturbing, and tells a story where the dolls aren't the villain, but the victim. The setting: the attic of a house, where you are the size of a doll and everything around you is an oversized human object or a toy that's just the right size for you. The premise: the young girl who calls this house home uses this attic as her own personal torture chamber, where she dissects, vivisects, destroys, and eventually "reassembles" all of her toys into unsettling monstrosities. And each one of them lurks around each corner, driven mad by their owner's sadistic abuse.

So, in short, it's the Sid sequences from "Toy Story" but approximately 500% more hellish. I'm normally not the biggest fan of haunted attractions where the biggest scares come from "victim reveals," but Dolls: Let's Play Dead nails it by ensuring that each toy victim you encounter is utterly traumatizing, ranging from pathetic beings begging for death to action figures who have been driven mad by the torture they've endured. Lurking through it all is their young tormenter, a little girl with a dark future ahead of her, seen only in quick glimpses as she looms over rooms like a giant. If stuffing was guts, this would be the goriest house at Halloween Horror Nights 34. As it stands, it's certainly the most clever.

I'm a sucker for a haunted house that tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and boy, Hatchet and Chains: Demon Bounty Hunters has the clearest and easily most delicious narrative of any maze at Halloween Horror Nights 34. Expanded from a "segment" featured in a previous Slaughter Cinema maze (a collection of brief horror premises strung together into a single attraction), Hatchet and Chains is the kind of experience so detailed and rich with personality that it practically begs for a movie adaptation. It's not the scariest house at this year's event, but it's certainly the one that left me with the biggest smile on my face.

The premise is simple: an old woman living near a small town in the American wild west curses the community with demons, which take over the local populace. It's up to the two titular heroes, a reformed demon and a seasoned gunslinger, to contain the demonic outbreak before it can ride the rails to proper civilization and end the world as we know it. The blend of monsters, over-the-top splatter, and outrageous personality recalls the early work of filmmakers like Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson — unapologetically silly, gory, and very, very funny. Bonus points for the fact that there are several demonic horse animatronics, and let's face it: any haunted house that has the time for more than one demonic horse animatronic is a haunted house that deserves your undivided attention. Anyone with a fondness for "weird west" stories or horror comedy will find plenty to treasure here. If you like both, welcome to your new heaven.

The Halloween Horror Nights crew understood the assignment with this one. I've already written an entire separate article about the maze based on the "Terrifier" film franchise, and like with that article, I really cannot describe anything about what actually goes on inside this attraction because I'd get put on some kind of list (and my boss would probably need to pull me into a chat with an HR representative). Damien Leon's transgressive slasher series, which has risen from niche object to unlikely mainstream smash over the past few years, is one of the most violent, cruel, and nasty things to happen to horror in a long time. Any kind of haunted house adaptation that pulls its punches would be mocked by horror aficionados. I can promise you this: no one will be mocking this one.

The "Terrifier" maze is the single most violent haunted house experience I have ever encountered, and Universal is not kidding when they brag about there being more corpses strewn throughout this house than anything they have every done in the past. There isn't a story here, but the sheer visceral presentation of it all, and the way each room steadily ups the ante in terms of pure disgust and depravity, makes this some kind of profound accomplishment. Between the sickening visuals, the smells (yes, the smells), and the optional wet zone (you won't get soaked, but you will get very wet), it's hard to imagine anyone stumbling through the exit and not feeling like they've just survived some kind of gauntlet. Like the films that inspired it, I cannot in good conscience recommend the "Terrifier" maze for many people. And that's exactly why every horror fan should experience it anyway.

The best house at Halloween Horror Nights 34 is a bit of a dark horse — it's not one of the high profile mazes based on a popular franchise. However, like Hatchet and Chains: Demon Bounty Hunters, it's the kind of experience that demands to get made into a movie of its own. Galkn: Monsters of the North is icy Nordic horror, telling the gruesome story of an angry spirit that turns against the village it was initially sworn to protect, unleashing monsters and violence upon the populace against a backdrop of snowy desolation. Like some of my favorite houses on this list, it tells a clear story that can be totally appreciated in a vacuum while delivering on the scares, the set pieces, and the shocking moments of violence. The gore-soaked grand finale, which I will not spoil here, may be the most devious and clever conclusion to any maze at this year's event.

Your mileage may vary here, as my love of period piece horror and in-maze storytelling pushed this one over the edge for me. There are shades of "The Wicker Man" and "The Witch" here, but this isn't an experience that feels entirely indebted to a specific movie or even horror subgenre. It's its own special thing, clearly a passion project from a team that really wanted to break away from any kind of norm. Original houses like this are the beating heart of Halloween Horror Nights, and while I'll always derive thrills from the headliners, it's the mazes like these that shake me to my core and leave me buzzing.