Universal Reveals Halloween Horror Nights Houses Based on Five Nights at Freddy’s and WWE’s The Wyatt Sicks

Oh look, they both have top hats. Cute.

By Garrett Martin | July 29, 2025 | 2:32pm

Images courtesy of Universal

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Universal Reveals Halloween Horror Nights Houses Based on Five Nights at Freddy’s and WWE’s The Wyatt Sicks

Halloween Horror Nights starts at Universal Orlando in exactly a month, with Hollywood’s version kicking off a few days later, and we now know what all haunted houses at both events will be this year. The final two were announced today, and both feature characters and concepts from two of the company’s longtime partners. One, a house based on 2023 Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, is the kind of project you expect from Halloween Horror Nights; it’s based on a film from Blumhouse, who Universal has been working with for years, and it’ll no doubt serve as promotion for the sequel coming out in December. The other house is a little more unusual, although it was spawned by a corporate relationship that dates back 40 years, and won’t be the first Halloween Horror Nights house to rise from that partnership. It’s a house devoted to the WWE pro wrestling stable The Wyatt Sicks.

WWE Presents: The Horrors of The Wyatt Sicks has been strongly rumored for months, and as weird as a wrestling-based haunted house might sound, it makes a good bit of sense. The Wyatt Sicks are a group of five wrestlers intentionally styled after horror movie villains. They’re named after Bray Wyatt, a character created by the wrestler Windham Rotunda, a wrestler who tragically passed away in 2023 at the age of 36. The Wyatt character started as a charismatic Southern cult leader and gradually grew more supernatural in nature, with Rotunda constructing a fairly elaborate (for wrestling) backstory full of creepy, horror-tinged lore. Wyatt’s last incarnation was as a demented children’s show host who would turn into a monstrous wrestler called The Fiend; his Firefly Funhouse vignettes were made to resemble a Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood style TV show, with a group of grotesque puppets as Wyatt’s costars. Rotunda made this all work better than it should have, although if you’re wondering what any of that has to do with pro wrestling, you wouldn’t be alone.

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Rotunda’s untimely passing brought an end to Bray Wyatt and his puppets, but the latter were destined to return in a new context. Before Wyatt’s death, his real-life brother Taylor Rotunda (better known as the wrestler Bo Dallas) started appearing as one of the characters central to Wyatt’s mythology: the bearded, top hat-wearing Uncle Howdy. In June 2024, roughly 10 months after Wyatt’s death, Howdy reappeared, this time leading a group of costumed wrestlers portraying real-life versions of the Firefly Funhouse puppets. Howdy and the wrestlers Erick Rowan, Dexter Lumis, Joe Gacy, and Nikki Cross (playing, respectively, Rambling Rabbit, Mercy the Buzzard, Huskus the Pig, and Abby the Witch) make up The Wyatt Sicks, whose punny name evokes Wyatt himself as a sixth member guiding them in spirit. They’re an overtly horror-themed stable whose infamous 2024 debut on Raw was shot as if it was a horror movie, complete with various WWE wrestlers and officials lying around the backstage area as if they were the Sicks’ victims.

Bray Wyatt obviously took a lot of inspiration from horror movies in crafting his character, and that’s continued with Uncle Howdy and The Wyatt Sicks. Now it’s circled back to inspire its own haunted house at the premier theme park horror event—honestly, a better home for this type of performance than a wrestling ring. Universal’s press release notes that the house “will honor the legacy of Bray Wyatt” and his characters, and given how far in advance Universal typically starts planning these houses—if the Wyatt Sicks house followed a typical timeline, it would’ve been in the earliest stages of development right around the time the stable first appeared on TV last year—it’s entirely possible Universal was working on this before the Wyatt Sicks even debuted. Each member of the Sicks will have its own separate part of the haunted house, and Wyatt’s own alter ego The Fiend will “stalk” guests throughout the house.

WWE’s been on a hot streak for about three years now, although there are indications it’s been slowing down a bit this year. A Halloween Horror Nights haunted house is the kind of mainstream-ish cross-promotion that WWE has always been good at, although I’ve got to think that The Wyatt Sicks will be among the least well-known of this year’s franchise-focused houses. Still, Universal and its TV network NBC have had a relationship with WWE that stretches back to 1985, with a few gaps here and there along the way; the two have been closer than ever over the last several years, though, with WWE’s streaming archives and monthly PPVs airing on Peacock, and the Saturday Night’s Main Event show returning as an occasional special on NBC. The Wyatt Sicks house is one more extension of that long partnership.

It also won’t be the first Halloween Horror Nights house based on WWE—or, as it used to be known, WWF. In 2000, right as the then-WWF was about to deliver the killing blow to its rival organization WCW, Universal Hollywood featured a Halloween Horror Nights house called The Undertaker: No Mercy. It starred wrestling’s most famous supernatural character, The Undertaker, and also shared its name with both a regular WWF pay-per-view and a beloved Nintendo 64 wrestling game that came out that same year. Maybe this is a new thing Universal is doing: every 25 years they’ll have a wrestling house at the Halloween event.

Five Nights at Freddy’s, meanwhile, is based on the massively popular video game series about a haunted Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurant whose robot band comes to life. They turned it into a movie and now a haunted house and hey: the kids seem to like it. Josh Hutcherson needs things to do, y’know. I totally thought Nicolas Cage was involved but apparently that was a different movie that was a parody? Crazy stuff.

Both houses will be coming to both of Universal’s American resorts, Universal Orlando Resort and Universal Studios Hollywood. Halloween Horror Nights runs in Orlando on select nights between August 29 and November 2, and in Hollywood from September 4 through November 2. Tickets are on sale now.