Successful Hollywood HHN 2024 Run: Full Review, Strategy, and Rankings!
Just did my first HHN run of the season yesterday (9/12), and wanted to share my thoughts with everyone. Overall, I did like the event, and I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t super crowded compared to previous years. The houses were pretty well-rounded imo, and all the other activities surrounding the event were good as usual. I was able to easily complete all the mazes without express, only using early entry.
Got to the park by 4 PM, I ate at Citywalk and then lined up for early entry. I was able to take advantage of early entry way better this year, I kinda liked what they did when choosing EE houses. I started off my night by rope dropping Insidious and only waited 5 minutes. Then I did Ghostbusters and waited only 10 minutes. Rushed down to lower lot and got Weeknd and TCM done, waited 30 minutes for each of those. So I got all 4 of those houses knocked out by 7 which was fantastic.
Waited 30 mins for Bloodlines then 40 mins for Dead Exposure before heading back up to upper lot. Waited 20 mins for Terror Tram, 10 mins for Monstruos, and 20 mins for Quiet Place. I finished all the houses before 11 PM which was amazing. I did a rerun of Monstruos because I felt like my first run was bad, but I was pretty content with the others, so I didn’t rerun any of those. I watched the Chucky show before heading out, which was somehow a 50 minute wait despite being listed as 20, somehow the worst wait of the night and it wasn’t even that good of a show.
In case anyone cares, here are my maze rankings after tonight from best to worst. Keep in mind that this is just based on my personal preference. I am generally biased towards scary and gorey mazes with great sets, preferably based on IPs that I am familiar with.
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Legacy of Leatherface - I absolutely loved the set design in this maze, it was so gorey and detailed. The strong smells accentuated all the violence that was portrayed, and the jumpscares were extremely effective as well. This house was a great representation of the IP and easily my favorite house within the event.
- Dead Exposure: Death Valley - Not gonna lie, I didn’t have super high expectations for this one, but it was easily sleeper hit of the year. It’s incredibly well-paced with fantastic sets and super effective jump scares. Not a single moment is wasted in this house, so even though it’s on the shorter side, it gets huge props from me.
- A Quiet Place - This house is a perfect adaptation of the source material. The sets felt like they were ripped straight out of the movie, and the animatronics were incredibly lifelike. I understand that it won’t satisfy everyone because it’s not really scary, but it is an artistic masterpiece, and as someone who really enjoyed the movie, I adored it.
- Universal Monsters: Eternal Bloodlines - Universal just doesn’t miss with these monsters houses, every year they’re so solid, and this year was no different. What I liked about this house was how good it was at storytelling, all the scenes and scares meshed together to form a cohesive story.
- The Weeknd: Nightmare Trilogy - This is a fun maze, it does a little bit of everything and has a unique identity. It’s trippy, gorey, creative, and obviously musical. I would say the biggest flaw of this maze is that it has way too much filler space, there were a lot of black walls. I also didn’t find it to be super scary.
- Insidious: The Further - If you just want to get the bejeezus scared out of you, this is the best maze for that. It’s very long and has a TON of great jumpscares. However, that is basically the only thing this maze does. The set design is incredibly lazy and is mostly just black walls with a couple rooms in between.
- Monstruos 2: The Monsters of Latin America - This will likely be my most controversial take, but I was not the biggest fan of this maze. It’s disappointing to me because I loved Monstruos last year, but this maze felt like a giant downgrade. The sense of immersion was great and the sets were decent enough, but they seemed to be way too over reliant on animatronics this year, and most of the animatronics weren’t even good. There are a couple of good scare attempts from actors, but they were also super predictable and poorly timed, which made it less fun. I gave it two chances as well, so I know it wasn’t a fluke.
- Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - I’m just gonna say it, this house sucks. Some of the sets are decent enough, but others are not as great. The main problem with this house is that it barely even tries to scare you, and I wouldn’t call it “fun” either, so it feels like it has no purpose. Also why is it called frozen empire if the house is hot as hell? Can someone explain that to me?
- Terror Tram: Enter the Blumhouse - This was a good showcase of the Blumhouse IPs and I had some fun with it. However, as it is with every other year, the Terror Tram just cannot deliver any scares given the conditions it has to work with.
The top 4 mazes this year were practically flawless imo and each did a great job of what they were made for. TCM is the perfect gore maze, Dead Exposure is a flawless fast-paced scare machine, AQP is an artistic masterpiece, and Bloodlines is a masterclass in storytelling. Despite my criticisms of them, the 3 mazes after that also served their purpose: Weeknd is just pure fun, Insidious is very scary, and Monstruos is immersive. The only real dud this year was Ghostbusters, what a shame. I’d love to go back again and get some reruns, it was a lot of fun.