This might come as a surprise to you, but there’s not much of anything about Las Vegas that appeals to me. Its default setting is hot and loud, and given how many tourists travel here to experience the gambling, performances, and general debauchery the city has to offer, these aren’t the kinds of people I typically want to see or hear or be around. In this sense, when I heard that Universal Horror Unleashed, a year-round horror attraction that aimed to capture the spirit of Halloween Horror Nights, would be opening in Las Vegas, I’d be lying if I said I was hopeful. It’s not that I didn’t trust Universal to make something badass, it’s that I thought it would be catering to tourists more than die-hard horror fans, and with the underlying campiness permeating all corners of Vegas, I assumed all the best parts of Haunted Horror Nights would be toned down. Now, having personally attended Universal Horror Unleashed, I can confirm that I was wrong — DEAD WRONG!
Before breaking down the houses and ranking them, it’s worth giving some extra insight into what you’ll experience at Universal Horror Unleashed and how, in some ways, it offers an experience even better than anything you can get at any Halloween Horror Nights location.
With the experience being nestled in Las Vegas’s AREA15 campus, which includes things like Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart and the John Wick Experience, you’ll enter into a seemingly innocuous warehouse. Once inside, there’s terror around every corner, as the entire space is filled with creepy accouterments to amplify the ambiance. The four themed areas — Kill Vault, Prop Graveyard, Dead Storage, and Jack’s Alley — are similar to the Scare Zones found at Halloween Horror Nights, though rather than spread out through large chunks of a park, they’re a bit more contained, so while they aren’t as expansive, you also don’t have to walk past unrelated sections of a Universal Studios park to enjoy them. Additionally, it cannot be overstated how much better of an experience it is to walk around Horror Unleashed in a climate-controlled building as opposed to the miserable heat and humidity of Universal Studios’ Orlando or Hollywood locations. These areas don’t, however, feature the requisite Halloween theming of Horror Nights, so the Jack-o’-lanterns and crunchy leaves are traded for blood and guts.
Not only do we get these themed areas, but even the bars and food service embrace the spirit of horror, which truly makes all of Horror Unleashed feel entirely immersive as soon as you walk through the doors. Where Halloween Horror Nights often sees you trying to get from one house to another as quickly as possible, preferably on a path that takes you through Scare Zones, Horror Unleashed has a great vibe even when you’re not in transit to one of the houses, much like the atmosphere of Epic Universe’s Dark Universe, specifically its Das Stakehaus restaurant.
If themed areas, food, and drink aren’t enough to amplify the ambiance, there’s also a stage that features live dancers and performers, which honors the legacy of Las Vegas as being a hotbed of entertainment. These shows might not necessarily be the most horrifying aspect of Horror Unleashed, but if you’re hanging out in a creepy warehouse and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” starts blasting from the speakers, it does elevate your overall excitement.
As someone who has attended Halloween Horror Nights for years and had a cynical outlook on how the Horror Unleashed houses would compare to that event, I can confirm that the Horror Unleashed houses are just as thrilling and lovingly executed as what you get at Horror Nights proper. Horror Unleashed also has at least three logistical changes that serve as major improvements on what you’ll get at any Halloween Horror Nights house.
The first change is that, rather than guests slowly, constantly shambling through each house at an awkward, shuffling pace, only one group of guests is admitted at a time, with roughly 30-60 seconds passing before the next group goes in. The drawback to this system is that the wait times to get into the houses are longer, but once you’re inside, everything about the experience is better. Each group — or, in this case, me by myself — gets to move at their own pace and enjoy each house to its full potential. You don’t feel pressured to move faster than you want because there’s no parade of people behind you shuffling you along, and you also don’t have to settle for seeing a really cool monster jump out and scare someone in front of you, spoiling the surprise, or have the timing of the scare be messed up so you pass by it entirely. Given that I was literally by myself in each house, Horror Unleashed might have caused more genuine fear and anxiety in each of the houses than anything I’ve experienced at any Horror Nights. With the number of doors, windows, alcoves, and shadowy corners, without having the scares spoiled ahead of time, longtime Horror Nights guests will be kept on their toes as they anticipate where a scare might come from.
Another improvement is that, since each group goes in alone, you don’t have to worry about bumping into any employees who are tucked into corners to monitor what’s going on in the houses or requesting that you keep moving. I fully understand the importance of having these people inside the houses at Horror Nights, but since they aren’t as necessary at Horror Unleashed, it’s yet another factor that allows you to truly appreciate everything each house has to offer, with no distractions.
The third major logistical change has to do with the layout of each house and what each guest will experience. Those familiar with Horror Nights know that houses of any theme will have a set number of tableaus, which are the more impressive environments that often have more of the story-related elements, and these tableaus are connected by the requisite hallways. For example, let’s say that a Horror Nights house takes roughly five minutes to walk through and that it has 8-10 such tableaus. Horror Unleashed has fewer hallways and more tableaus, all of which you get to experience at your own pace, due to there not being guests pushing you forward. What really takes the experience to a new level is that, for specific tableaus, the path forward will be blocked until the Scareactors complete their performance. Whether you are forced to witness an exorcism or watch Leatherface chopping someone’s head off, anyone with muscle memory of walking through a house (or running if you get scared) will immediately start to panic or get anxious knowing that you can’t just keep walking. Multiple times, I didn’t know if I was in the right place or if I had gone the wrong way, which heightened the sense of unease and amplified the effectiveness of each brief performance.
Now that you’re a bit more aware of how, at a fundamental level, the logistics of Horror Unleashed offer major improvements on the haunted house experience, let’s rank the effectiveness of each house.
4) Universal Monsters
The nature of any ranking means that something has to land at the bottom, even if it’s a lot of fun, so while the Universal Monsters house might be the least scary, it’s still a delight to walk through. Whereas other haunted houses at Halloween Horror Nights throughout the years have had to come up with complex and oftentimes convoluted narratives to justify new ways of blending the Universal Monsters together, this house doesn’t have any delusions of grandeur.
From Dracula to the Mummy to the Wolf Man (no, not me), all of your favorite monsters are accounted for in this house, which also features areas honoring unsung heroes like The Creature from The Black Lagoon‘s Gill-man and The Hunchback of Notre Dame‘s Quasimodo. Even though fans get to experience their favorite monsters, one thing that holds the house back is that space restrictions mean that there’s only so much space each tableau can occupy. With the various castles and other ghoulish scenarios so prevalent in the source material, these environments don’t translate quite as well to the spatial restrictions of Horror Unleashed. The other thing that holds back Universal Monsters is that, all things considered, it’s not all that scary. There’s, of course, some solid startles to be found throughout the experience, it’s just that you’re transported from one environment to the next so quickly that there’s no real rising tension.
Still, there’s undeniable delight to experience in the Universal Monsters house, which comes from the iconic and timeless legacy of the monsters themselves.
3) Blumhouse’s The Exorcist: Believer
I’m not going to sugarcoat it: The Exorcist: Believer, as a movie, was doodoo. While I appreciate what filmmaker David Gordon Green did with his Halloween trilogy, Believer was just a boring, generic possession movie that not only wasn’t good enough to honor the legacy of The Exorcist franchise, but it also shoehorned in arbitrary elements of that series that only highlighted how dull the movie itself was. The Exorcist: Believer haunted house, on the other hand, is scary as hell.
Back in 2023, Halloween Horror Nights debuted a house in honor of Believer, but with the movie not yet having been released, the house held back on some of the elements of the movie as not to spoil them ahead of time. This version, while similar to the previous house, instead gets to depict everything about that movie from start to finish. With much of the house taking place in contained settings, whether they be hospital rooms or bedrooms, the scares are in your face. Even though the characters themselves aren’t particularly innovative, wandering through a normal-looking home with dozens of doors while demons jump out at you and you constantly hear screaming and monstrous growls, along with hearing violent banging behind every door you walk past, makes this house exponentially more frightening than the source material.
2) Scarecrow: The Reaping
While Scarecrow: The Reaping is an entirely original house, there’s really nothing all that original about the premise. You walk through a farmhouse, a barn, and spooky, desolate crops, all of which are filled with scarecrow-looking ghouls illuminated by the moonlight.
Even with an uninspired premise, The Reaping is the closest Horror Unleashed has to offer in the way of Halloween theming, which automatically makes it a blast. Given that all of the other houses are just outright “horror,” getting to wander through decrepit, woodland environments and through outdoor tableaus, which are pulled off reasonably well, makes The Reaping a major standout. Add to that the fact that some tableaus feature the use of fog and the incorporation of cornstalks in ways that at least somewhat make you feel like you’re outside and Scarecrow: The Reaping will delight Halloween fanatics.
1) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
As someone who largely enjoys the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre yet would never put it on a list of their favorite movies, I can confirm that this house is not only the most accurate replication of the source material, but also the most terrifying thing at Horror Unleashed.
Much like the Believer house, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre house takes you through all the plot points of the original movie, despite spelling it “Chainsaw” instead of the accurate “Chain Saw.” You pass through a gas station on your way to the Sawyer house, as the house introduces you to the Hitchhiker, the Cook, Grandpa, and Leatherface.
Part of what makes the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre so effective is how visceral the movie is; you can almost smell the rotting flesh and feel chicken feathers flying through the air while characters walk past furniture made of human remains. This house will make you truly feel like you’ve been transported right into the house from the movie, even though the actual abode is in Texas.
I’m not a particularly claustrophobic person, but as I went deeper into the Sawyer house and saw all of the infamous rooms from the original movie, it felt like the walls were closing in around me, as both the tableaus and hallways all felt like they were getting tighter and tighter. The further you get, the tighter it feels, which also means the Scareactors feel like they’re getting close as they start to pop up in a higher frequency. There’s a point where I walked through a passageway and into Leatherface’s bedroom that feels so authentic and unsettling that my immediate reaction was that I genuinely was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.
Thanks to the increasingly anxiety-inducing nature of the house, combined with the authentic replication of the nightmarish environments and instinctive terror caused by a chainsaw-wielding maniac, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre house is not just the best haunted house at Universal Horror Unleased, but one of the best I’ve ever experienced.
Universal Horror Unleashed is now open in Las Vegas.
The Wolfman Cometh 