The pandemic year of 2020, in which Halloween Horror Nights Orlando was cancelled for the first and only time since it started up in 1991, helped to scramble the way that Universal handled the so-called announcement season of its premiere annual event. In the years leading up to covid-19, haunted-house reveals, starting with the headlining intellectual properties, would start dropping in March or April and continue in a steady monthly procession all the way up to the summer; in the span of time since the global shutdowns, the company has routinely pushed the start of this whole process back (well, with the sole exception of 2022, in which the very first haunt for the following year got announced on Halloween day of that year), opting to clump large numbers of press releases together, whether in small strings or giant dumps.

This new age of Horror Nights marketing itself got an interesting wrinkle in 2024, when a “spooky week” of original-house reveals were lined up in a neat row: from Friday, May 17 (that was when Slaughter Sinema 2 got unveiled, in case you were curious), to Friday the 24 (Triplets of Terror’s day in the PR sun), all six entries in the roster were rolled out. And, what’s more, just to kick everything off in grand style, that first announcement took place during a panel discussion at Spooky Empire, the mega-horror convention that descends on Orlando twice a year (and which we here at Horrors Untold were lucky enough to attend this year, with our HHN Orlando-centric book in tow).

It would seem that Universal – and its rabid Halloween fandom – viewed the development as a success, as it’s been repeated for this year, starting with another panel of creatives at Spooky Empire on Friday, June 20 (taking questions and, of course, disclosing the first original maze of 2025), and then continuing on to the week after, wrapping up on Friday, June 27 (but taking off Tuesday the 24th thanks to this year resorting back to the usual number of five non-IP haunted houses). The jury is still out as to whether or not this will become the name of the marketing game moving forward, since one repeat does not a trend make – and it’s still a giant unknown if the diehard community prefers this setup as opposed to the more traditional, spread-out one – but, regardless, it made for a fun week of excitement, engagement, and speculation.

It also served as something of a giant tease for the rest of Halloween Horror Nights 34, at least in terms of an overarching theme or aesthetic – all of which we tackle below.

Overview of the five original houses at Halloween Horror Nights 2025

1. El Artista: A Spanish Haunting

The first original maze to be unfurled for Horror Nights 2025 comes with the biggest amount of additional information, given its reveal at the Spooky Empire presentation, a venue which provides a lot of time to dive into the subject at hand – and a fair bit of this extra space was devoted to the fact that El Artista: A Spanish Haunting seems to be the key to the entire event, in ways both large and small.

That, however, is a subject for just a bit later; there is the story itself to be tackled first, and it is a doozy. In the 19th-century Spanish countryside, a tortured artist by the name of Sergio Navarro looks to get his career out of the nosedive it’s found itself in by relocating to the Creation House, an isolated country manor that has served as a source of inspiration for scores of creators over the years. Of course, it is these previous inhabitants who now prowl the grounds as restless spirits, desperate to find release – which Sergio and his artwork prove to be the perfect conduit for. Possessing the painter, they use his artwork as their entrypoint back to the land of the living, and they’re even joined by more poltergeist-esque spectral entities, who transform his canvases into tangible bodies for their very first time.

A key location in El Artista will be the conservatory, filled with vines, stained glass, and gargoyles – all the classic tropes of horror. It sounds like an absolutely beautiful environment, and we know it’ll be rendered even more gorgeously, thanks to the involvement of star scenic designer Dylan Kollath (who’s been responsible for such visual heavyhitters as Dead Man’s Pier: Winter’s Wake [from 2022] and Blood Moon: Dark Offerings [2023]); when combined with the spate of special effects that’ll depict the ghosts walking through walls or bursting through paintings, this haunt already seems to be the one to beat for this year.

2. Hatchet and Chains: Demon Bounty Hunters

When Slaughter Sinema 2 was deployed for HHN 2024, the designers teased that some of the eight B-horror flicks that comprised its experience could be spun off into haunted houses of their own, just as what happened with the original Slaughter Sinema (from 2018), which generated the various Yeti haunts we’ve received since (the last of which arrived in 2023). Even still, very few would have predicted that the turnaround would’ve been just a single year – or that the first fictitious movie to get the honors would’ve been the sole Spaghetti Western in the roster, Hatchet and Chains: The Demon Bounty Hunters.

While we don’t know whether or not the standalone Hatchet and Chains: Demon Bounty Hunters maze (notice the missing “the” from the subtitle) will, indeed, be the comedy entry for this upcoming Horror Nights, its expanded story sounds right in keeping with the kitschy, somewhat-silly nature of its originating Slaughter Sinema incubator: a troupe of red-hot lava demons have come straight out of “Hell’s Well,” as playful a title for the subterranean netherworld as we’ve ever heard, and have invaded a nondescript “Old West town,” attempting to possess all of its denizens while melting everything else in their path down. As one might expect, the story will have us parading from one timeless (some might use the word “cliche”) Old West setting to another as we attempt to flee from our demonic pursuers, starting at the post office before heading off to the bank, prison, and, of course, the graveyard; the result, we assume, will be the feeling that you’ve just lived any number of classic Western films, though one with a decidedly supernatural (and light-hearted) bent.

What’ll be most interesting to see is just how heavily the titular characters of Hatchet and Chains will be implemented throughout the proceedings; given the nature of Slaughter Sinema 2, only two rooms could be devoted to the pair, and if your timing in the house was off, you’d completely miss the big tugging-at-a-demon-with-a-giant-chain gag. We expect at least a few further scenes of this nature – after all, only their “arsenal of mystical weapons” can save us from our otherworldly attackers, dispatching them back to Hell’s Well.

3. Dolls: Let’s Play Dead

We’re now moving from a haunt that has authorized origins to one whose inspiration feels markedly less official (or direct) – Dolls: Let’s Play Dead reads an awful lot like a twisted take on Pixar’s cherished Toy Story franchise, from the titular toys to the very premise itself.

First, though, there is the maze’s central conceit, which has us guests being shrunk down to the size of – what else? – a doll, putting us on a level playing field with our plaything attackers. Actually, it’s worth pausing for just a moment on this part of the experience, as it is rife with opportunities for oversize set pieces and other forced-perspective tricks – elements that almost always prove to be a good time within a haunt setting (our hope is to have at least one moment that replicates the encounters with the giant from last year’s Goblin’s Feast; when the timing was right and that bit landed, it was quite effective).

Now, then, back to the toys themselves: these poor items have been “unnaturally” marred by their owner, who Universal names only as a “twisted little girl.” Their specific descriptions, actually, are nothing short of spectacular, potentially allowing for some terrific costume design (to go along with the possibly terrific set design) – and for some quality scares, as well, of course.

The breakdown of these aggressors, and the settings they’ll populate, are as follows:

• In the first unknown location (which is presumably just the little girl’s house, though the company does use the phrase “toybox of terror” at one point in the summary, possibly hinting at a literal application here), we’ll be hunted by “fashion dolls [the girl’s] melded and burned.”
• Under her bed, we’ll be stalked by toys that she’s “stitched together.”
• Finally, in a “creepy” Victorian dollhouse, our assailants take the form of “undead horrors.”

That final undead bit is truly intriguing, as, perhaps, Let’s Play Dead’s designers want to furnish their big climax by dabbling in more supernatural waters – might zombified dolls be in order?

4. Grave of Flesh

One would be forgiven for getting the impression that this year’s event has a distinctly classic-horror feel to it, like the designers and storytellers wanted to return to more traditional, hallowed ground after last year’s showing (which received much in the way of mixed reactions from critics and fans alike). Surveying the elements that have already been covered in these original haunted mazes really brings the point home: conservatories, dilapidated manors, demon hunters, possessed dolls.

And, now, we get to add to that procession yet another timeless trope – a graveyard. In Grave of Flesh, we guests have died as we set foot inside the house, entering our graves in its very first scene, and from there transitioning into the underworld itself; once we’ve passed through its gates, we will encounter one kind or another of flesh-eating creatures who, unsurprisingly, “feed on the dead” and who will “hunt [us] mercilessly for all eternity.” Rather than adapting a well-worn staple from one particular folklore, however, it seems more like this is simply a general premise for the HHN creators to have a free-for-all with monster design – and, presumably, with the many “cavernous” sets of the afterlife, which just may, after all, play off of (or otherwise pay homage to) the various world mythologies that place the land of the dead underground (and not just the punitive ones, as we see in, for example, Christianity; think more along the lines of the ancient Greeks’ Hades or the ancient Egyptians’ Duat).

All of this still leaves us with a question, however: what, exactly, is the titular grave of flesh? If taken literally, it’s a prison made out of biological walls – perhaps trapping us in our bodies for all of eternity, which patently sounds like a classic Horror Nights twist (and one which we peppered into our own work, Horrors Untold, as well). On the other immortal hand, it could be a figurative moniker, which might mean it’s a play on the antagonistic flesh eaters – or something else entirely.

5. Gálkn: Monsters of the North

From time to time, Universal likes to dip its haunted-house toes in folkloric waters, drawing from those mythological wells in order to inspire and otherwise inform a particular experience; in recent years, for instance, there’s been the Latin-leaning Fiesta de Chupacabras (from 2022) and Monstruos: The Monsters of Latin America (2024), an import from Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood.

For this year’s event, the designers are keeping the tradition going by casting their eye to the Norse world, using it to “call forth a legion of terrors” for Galkn: Monsters of the North. Although what specific otherworldly creatures will be borrowed is unknown, the company did specify “icy, horned, winged, and wolfish” varieties, which pretty much covers nearly the whole gamut of Nordic legends (and could even include the draugr, reanimated corpses from these regional sagas, which were featured prominently in the Vikings Undead scare zone from 2019, the last time that Universal flirted with the subject matter). What’s even better, however, is the vague promise that all these fiends will eventually somehow “merge into one giant horror,” which opens all sorts of doors for various narrative (and scare) scenarios; then again, this could simply be a metaphorical statement for dramatic effect, suggesting a culmination of all the horrors that attendees will have to endure through the entire haunted house (even in this alternate scenario, however, having some sort of grand climax that manages to put a bow on the entire story sounds quite promising).

There’s one final juicy morsel to devour here: Universal tantalizingly promises that, at the end of the experience, we’ll need to “escape the belly of the beast,” which, one would assume, has to do with this assembled amalgamated monstrosity. Or perhaps it has to do with being pursued by the “wicked being” who rose from the dead and summoned this host of “monsters and demons from the fjords” in the first place (which he did in order to terrorize a remote northern village) – if so, this would be another statement of poetic effect. Either way, we should be in for a wild, frigid time, which invariably is some of the best to be had at Halloween Horror Nights.

Overview of Halloween Horror Nights 2025’s overriding theme

Remember that tidbit about how El Artista: A Spanish Haunting, our first original haunted house for 2025, could potentially hold the key to all of Halloween Horror Nights 34? The key to that, it turns out, resides within its hotbed of supernatural activity, the conservatory.

At the Spooky Empire panel, the designers talked a bit about their creative process, and how they first settled on a general, overarching feel, a basic way to approach this year’s event: the classic, archetypal horror elements of stained glass, gargoyles, and vines. When even more creative personnel were brought into the loop, it was decided that these central “textures” would specifically reside within a conservatory, and that this location, even more specifically, would be one of the main environments for one of their mazes – helping birth El Artista. This, in turn, created something of a reciprocal process, with the decision next being made to have the haunted manor feed back into all the rest of the event, essentially meaning that HHN 34 would collectively reside within the narrative environment of A Spanish Haunting; the assembled employees up on stage gave vague-but-enticing promises of having these vintage gothic tones permeate all of Universal Studios Florida, from the turnstiles up to the Music Plaza stage and onward from there.

What are the precise mechanics they’ll use to pull this off? Beyond the more concrete scenario of seeing Sergio Navarro’s haunted artwork pop up in certain places throughout the park, it was left more to conjecture than actual explanation, but it’s easy to sketch out a few more instances of our own: it’s perhaps almost a given that at least one scare zone will somehow invoke either the imagery or the thematic motifs (if not both) of El Artista; it’s similarly plausible that at least one of the live shows will reside at least partially within the conservatory (especially if the lagoon show does, indeed, return after its two-year absence – just imagine seeing projection-mapped vines stretching across the New York backlot!); the Tribute Store would seem to be prime territory for more of these gothic aesthetics to be explored or otherwise amplified, particularly within the realm of merchandise; it’s much the same story for the park-wide music loop, which is one area that could arguably most stand to improve from this potential crossover; and, finally, we have very little doubt that at least one food-and-drink booth will be given over to the abandoned Spanish mansion, boasting, say, vine-covered hot dogs and stained-glass-colored cocktails.

While all of these are wholly within the realm of possibility, to what extent they end up actually being implemented, despite the grandiose promises of the HHN creators, will come down to how much of a true, dyed-in-the-wool theme this ends up being; don’t forget that past recent events featured more catch-all themes rather than die-cast premises, such as 2019’s ‘80s shtick or 2022’s loose convocation of classic Halloween tropes. Not to demean either those instances or what that could mean for 2025’s showing – on the contrary, an effective Horror Nights can still easily be had with such a similar setup.

It’s just that the Spooky Empire panel last month promised us the moon, and being the eager horror fans that we are, a once-in-a-decade Halloween Horror Nights sounds absolutely amazing to us.

The HHN 2025 original houses – El Artista: A Spanish Haunting, Hatchet and Chains: Demon Bounty Hunters, Dolls: Let’s Play Dead, Grave of Flesh, and Galkn: Monsters of the North – join Terrifier, Jason Universe, Fallout, and Five Nights at Freddy’s at Halloween Horror Nights 34, which runs for 48 event nights, from August 29 through November 2.

For even more in-depth historical analysis like this, be sure to check out Horrors Untold, the unofficial, comprehensive guide to HHN Orlando.

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