It’s Always Fright Night at Universal Horror Unleashed

By Garrett Martin | November 10, 2025 | 3:07pm

Photos courtesy of Universal

Theme Parks Features universal horror unleashed

It’s Always Fright Night at Universal Horror Unleashed

Margaret manages this place. With her overalls, tied up hair, and antiquated way of speaking, she looks and sounds more than a bit like Rosie the Riveter. And if that decades-old reference didn’t give it away, her ashen complexion and dust-grey hair make it obvious that Margaret is not necessarily of this time. She’s the ghostly overseer in charge of the comings and goings of the cursed movie props stored in Universal’s Warehouse 25, the setting for Universal Horror Unleashed, a new interactive show in Las Vegas that’s essentially a permanent, year-round home for Halloween Horror Nights houses; and after talking to us for five minutes, she’s not impressed. She’s downright suspicious. Margaret writes our names down in her manifest, threatening to keep an eye on us so we don’t cause any trouble.

Margaret’s one of a handful of characters that haunt Horror Unleashed’s warehouse, and our interaction sums up the main difference between this exhibit and the annual Halloween event at Universal’s theme parks: There’s time here. You can have a conversation. Horror Unleashed gives guests space, which provides opportunities to engage and interact with their surroundings that simply aren’t possible at Universal Studios.

Surprisingly, this extends to the four houses (or mazes, if you’d prefer) at Horror Unleashed. Structurally there’s no real difference between them and the ones you’d see at Horror Nights. They’re a sequence of themed hallways with big set pieces sprinkled in, with actors in elaborate makeup and costumes trying to scare guests as they stumble through the dark. If there’s a corner up ahead, or a blank space on the wall that could potentially drop away in a shocking reveal, you can rest assured there will be a fearsome beast there to scream at you. (Don’t worry, though: there’s no touching. There’s never any touching.)

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The difference, again, comes in the amount of time you have to explore these houses. On a recent Friday night they didn’t feed guests through in a constant human conveyor belt like they do at the parks. They held each party at the entrance until the previous group had left the first room, giving them a more private and personal experience.

In one chamber in the Universal Monsters house we had a back-and-forth conversation with Dr. Frankenstein that lasted probably 30 seconds or so, longer than you’re usually in any single room in a Horror Nights house. It was all build-up to a jump scare featuring his monster, who had laid quietly in the doctor’s contraption until that moment, but the connection with the scare actor playing the doctor made this feel personal in a way you can’t really get in the theme parks.

Universal Horror Unleashed

As is typical with the theme park event, the best house here is the one based on an original idea devised by Universal Creative. Scarecrow: The Reaping, a concept that’s inspired a couple of mazes at the parks, takes place at a 1930s haunted farmhouse where the land has risen up to destroy humanity. The ending stretch, a gauntlet through the cornfields with various demonic scarecrows waiting to pop out from all angles, is both frightening and beautiful—it’s a surprisingly lyrical image that you wouldn’t expect to see in a haunted house, unless you’ve been to Halloween Horror Nights before and already know how great Universal is at creating these experiences.

Even a bum movie can inspire a great house. The Exorcist: Believer, based not on Friedkin’s classic but the 2023 legacy sequel by David Gordon Green (who has had perhaps the weirdest career of any modern director), is a devilish delight that condenses the story down to its most striking images and horrifying moments. And unlike in the similar house that ran at Universal Studios two seasons ago, here the possessed girls can follow you around the room, essentially stalking you until you move on to the next scene.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre house is based on the original film, complete with a screen projecting the film’s opening text crawl at the start of the maze. If I saw the barbecue restaurant in this house in real life, I would absolutely stop to eat there. In one set piece you see Grandpa sitting in his wheelchair at the head of a dinner table, with only a corpse for company; what happens next is predictable but still effective, and was yet another example of the kind of patience these scare actors have to have that would never be possible in Orlando or Hollywood. The house even has an ending as bleak and abrupt as the movie.

It’s also interesting how Horror Unleashed recreates, revises, and recontextualizes ideas from Halloween Horror Nights houses. The Universal Monsters house is basically just a sequence of these iconic characters appearing in their most trademark locales—Quasimodo in the bell tower, Dracula descending the stairs inside his castle, the mummy in his tomb. It’s something we’ve seen, in some cases, multiple times at Halloween Horror Nights at this point. But the shift in timing again makes a crucial difference; these scenes have more space to really make an impression.

Revisiting these concepts shows how the same inspiration can lead to different experiences. It also all points to how malleable and open-ended these concepts can be. Universal has discovered more than one way to build a haunted house: the fast-paced onslaught of Halloween Horror Nights, and the slower, more patient stroll of Horror Unleashed.

During our conversation with Margaret we asked her about The Juggler. She did not want to talk about The Juggler. One of a coterie of clowns who perform periodically throughout the day at the Jack’s Alley bar, The Juggler peppers his impressive juggling display with some genuinely (and intentionally) rotten humor, largely about the ex-wife he chopped up. Of course he juggles with her disembodied limbs. There’s more entertainment to be found throughout this warehouse, including appearances by M3GAN and The Grabber (I will never get over the fact that his name is literally The Grabber) in the Blumhouse-themed Premiere House sitdown restaurant, but The Juggler was the highlight on a recent Friday afternoon.

Dripping with sleaze and with jokes moldier (and less funny) than Henny Youngman’s, The Juggler is a perfect act for Horror Unleashed. Like Universal’s haunted houses, he’s gruesome fun in a kitschy package, but knows how to turn it on when it really matters. The Juggler can truly juggle, at one point keeping three arms (instead of pins) in the air while balancing on a board on top of a wheel. He constantly winks at you with one eye while keeping the other on doing his job as best as he can do—much like the artists at Universal Creative, who have mastered making spaces that can be gleeful one minute and deadly serious the next. Horror Unleashed’s houses are earthy, lived-in spaces that turn fantastic—and fantastically scary—when the unexpected punctures their reality. If you’re enamored by the power and possibilities of themed spaces and immersive experiences, it’ll leave you excited to see what other wonders Universal has to unleash.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.