I know what you’re thinking: isn’t it a little late into the Halloween season to be writing a ranking of all of the houses that people have had access to for the last six weeks? Well, some of us were only just able to get to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood, so isn’t it better late than never? Don’t answer that! I’m going to rank the houses anyway!.
This is actually only my second year that I’ve been able to visit the houses on both coasts to see how they compare to one another, and while there are a number of similarities, I always appreciate how each house on each coast has its own charm. Some of these rankings are based on how they compare to their counterparts in Orlando (for better or worse), and some of the houses are unique to Hollywood.
Whether you are still planning your itinerary for this year or didn’t get to visit both coasts, here’s how the houses stack up!
8) Dead, Deader, Deadest
Something’s has to be last, and in this case, it’s Dead, Deader, Deadest. Since I didn’t do a ton of research on the houses ahead of time and I didn’t have a tour guide breaking down the premise for all the houses, I just had to piece together the storyline of this house on my own. My takeaway was that it was a funeral home where things got…evil?
After looking at the official website, the house explores what happens when “a miracle drug backfires, a century’s worth of corpses rise from their graves dead set on terrorizing the living. In this haunted house, stare death in its decaying face and unearth the dark secrets that lie within the Deville Family Funeral Home.” In other words, the house takes you through a morgue and funeral home and undead ghouls pop up.
It’s not that anything about this house was necessarily bad, it was more that there wasn’t much of a story, so it was just a variety of rooms where monsters jump out. I did appreciate how one room full of cadaver drawers allowed for scare actors to pop out from various levels, but outside of that, the house is largely unmemorable.
7) Stranger Things 5
Another Stranger Things house, another HHN ranking, another year where a Stranger Things house is ranked low. If you read my previous ranking of the Orlando Resort houses (or you want to do that right now), my overall reaction is that this largely feels like it was based solely on the very last episodes of the season as opposed to the entire final season. With the scale of the series being so massive by the time it wrapped up, there are a number of sequences the house could have pulled from to honor that scale.
Instead, all of the moments from the final season that this maze chose to highlight felt entirely random, either being too intimate and specific to work in this setting or the moments being so massive that they were hard to translate into an effective house. Still, I haven’t fully turned the corner into being a Stranger Things “hater,” though maybe I could use some time away from the series before fully appreciating tributes to it again.
6) Evil Dead Burn
While the Orlando version of this house effectively captured the intimate and claustrophobic vibe of the movie, this version of the house definitely felt like a downgrade. Moments in Orlando that featured scare actors instead had stoic figures in this version, and the various video screens used to replicate moments from the movie were of lesser quality.
What did work in this house’s favor, though, is that there didn’t feel like any specific finale moments, with all of the scare gags and vignettes being consistently engaging throughout. And, much like at the Orlando version, this house effectively replicated the overall color palette of the movie and all of its washed-out and sepia-toned glory.
5) Sinners
What made the Sinners house in Orlando so good was the scale of it all, especially when it built anticipation for the Club Juke musical sequence, which felt like you were walking into a grand ballroom. In Hollywood, this sequence is replicated in the line itself, as guests weave through stanchions on the dance floor. I appreciated getting something in line to look at that wasn’t just concrete, but this sequence was absent from the house itself, which was a disappointment.
Everything about this version of the house felt smaller and more condensed than what is in Orlando, though one thing Orlando doesn’t have that made this house special is the glowing red eyes of the vampire characters. Admittedly, this isn’t a game-changing twist to what I experienced in Orlando, though with various other houses needing scare actors to wear masks with glowing eyes to convey that effect, seeing how they pulled it off here did add an extra level of artistry to the whole event.
4) Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness
You hear Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” blasting out of this house before you even walk through the opening curtains, and it’s hard not to get pumped. Then, as soon as you part the curtains, the music gets even louder as you enter the station waiting for the Crazy Train, while a scare actor on stilts bursts into the room, throwing up devil horns and headbanging.
Is this the scariest house at this year’s event? Not even close. Did I throw up devil horns at every scare actor who popped out, only for them to throw them right back? Yes, yes I did. Whenever I rank these houses, one of the most significant components is how immersive it is, allowing you to forget you were just walking through the heat across an endless desert of concrete, and Prince of Darkness fully immersed me. The sets at the Orlando house might have been a bit more impressive, yet the placement of all the scare actors made this house a blast.
3) Killceañera: Music by Slash
Like Dead, Deader, Deadest, this was an original house that I had no preface for and had to piece the storyline together myself. Thanks to the set design, overall flow of the house, and design of the scare actors, what makes the house work is that…it works! The house is about a girl who was bullied and, on her quinceañera, uses magic to summon monsters to get revenge on her bullies. I figured this all out on my own!
I should be used to it by now, but every time a Halloween Horror Nights house takes inspiration from Latin American folklore, the result is something thrilling. The house itself had an organic storyline that was easy to deduce, which is always a plus, and the ghouls punctuating the terror had a grotesque yet gorgeous design to them. Regardless of how good the music created by Slash actually was, like the Ozzy Osbourne house, whenever an attraction puts extra emphasis on the audio components, everything feels elevated to a new level, and the same can be said of Killceañera.
2) Hellraiser
One of my favorite houses in Orlando was Hellraiser, so I’m excited to say that there is consistency among the houses for Clive Barker! This house touches on a lot of the same beats as in Orlando; you walk through important environments and settings from the first three movies in the franchise, there are lots of chains, and lots of disfigured bodies and corpses. This house even had the dead body of Camcorder Head!
There are two major components of the Hellraiser house in Hollywood that help set it apart from Orlando. The first is that, maybe due to budgetary constraints or maybe it was just a creative decision, but there are fewer Cenobites popping out of the walls, which makes each one more effective. In the Orlando house, we got regular appearances from Pinhead, while this house had what felt like half as many Cenobites, which makes any Pinhead appearance all that more significant.
The other element that made this Hellraiser house more effective is a subtle yet effective change of perspective. While in the Orlando house, we were walking through a winding maze with columns and brutalist architecture that allowed us to see further into the house than we normally do. This made for a disorienting effect, which was successful, while this house had far more walls in places that I’d previously experienced as open. Given that the original movie unfolds almost entirely in one house, it made for a more claustrophobic experience and one that more closely resembled what we see in that original movie. Both houses are good, though this one might be better.
1) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
I’m a simple man: I like walking into a circus tent and pushing cotton candy coccoons out of my way while the theme to Killer Klowns from Outer Space blasts from speakers. I know that this house might not be the most revolutionary, and some might even say it’s “bad” because there have been Killer Klowns houses before, but I didn’t get to go those years, so it was all new to me!
When you approach the house, you’ll see the iconic circus tent that the Killer Klowns arrive in when the movie starts, and while it might seem like this environment would have been saved for the finale, this allows the experience to replicate the narrative of the film itself. The tent is only where the fun starts, as you then get to walk through the nearby town’s streets and see all the chaos the Klowns are causing, only to then visit a certain bathroom infested with Klown monsters and the nearby police station.
Luckily, much like the movie itself, we get to return to the intergalactic big top for the final confrontation. This is not the scariest house of the event by far, but it’s easily the most fun. When Klowns jump out, they aren’t trying to terrify you, they are there to entertain you, and when the strobe effects dim, they still stand there doing funny dances, because why not? Even as someone who didn’t become much of a Killer Klowns fan until later in life, this house was the most fun I had at the event and that makes it the must-see house of the whole celebration.
