Halloween season has officially hit Orlando, and while you may be most familiar with Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party in Disney World and Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando, there’s ANOTHER event you can’t miss this year.

Over at SeaWorld Orlando, you’ll find their Howl-O-Scream event back this season, and it’s full of more frights than you may have ever expected to see in this theme park! While this event has the lowest-priced tickets of all three events, is it truly worth the cost? We went on opening night, and in our opinion, the answer is YES!

SeaWorld Orlando’s Howl-O-Scream event offers five haunted houses, six scare zones, and four shows, with nine of those offerings being brand-new this year! Tickets range in price from $45.99 for single-night tickets to $99.99 for the Two Park Unlimited Scream Pass.

We started with the haunted houses and decided to go in order, because the houses are usually designed so that the exit of one is close to the entrance of the next. First up was a new house, The Collector’s Curse, which is all about a demented collector of antiques who lures helpless victims to his home by advertising an estate sale.

This house was beautifully designed, but it wasn’t necessarily terrifying. That’s something worth noting here: the scares at Howl-O-Scream don’t hit the same extreme level as other events. On one hand, that means extreme horror fans might find it more tame, but it also makes it accessible to people who are just stepping into the horror scene, or aren’t big fans of jump scares. We still screamed and jumped plenty, but the artistry and storytelling of this house is so campy, stylish, and fun that it all feels more “cool” than overwhelming.

The next house was called The Rave Yard, and it ended up being our favorite concept! It’s basically a rave where everyone is dead — it’s drenched in neon and blacklight, packed with young partiers trapped in a rave they can’t escape, and filled with undead ravers. We would have loved for the house to end in an actual dance party, but obviously, that’s not feasible from a crowds perspective.

This house was followed by two returning houses. The first was Water’s Edge Wellness Center, which is a spa-gone-wrong with a hydrotherapy room full of corpses. Receptionists, doctors, clients, everyone around you is dead, and they all want you to check in and stay.

Then it was time for Farm 51, which puts you in the middle of an alien invasion in a farmhouse! Everyone yells at you to get out, but the over-the-top alien effects and immersive farmhouse sets pull you deeper in. We can see why it’s returning this year — it’s a solid house.

The final house is The Widow’s Nest, which is new this year.  This seemed to have an orphanage theme, led by a crazed Miss Hannigan–style character (the orphanage caretaker from Annie) who kept shouting at us about why our parents didn’t want us anymore. It was weirdly hilarious and creepy all at once, and that balance — serious scares for thrill-seekers, but loads of camp, artistry, and humor for everyone else — again sets Howl-O-Scream apart.

We then headed into the scare zones, which overall felt less intense this year. Some of them were so understated we didn’t notice them, but then there were new ones like Ashes of the Forgotten, Woodrot Hollow, Trailer Park Tragedy, and Echoes in the Glass that made their mark. Our favorite was Trailer Park Tragedy, which leaned hard into humor, as it’s a run-down trailer park with scare actors in white tank tops and Southern accents, lugging tires around pickup trucks and broken trailers. It was absurd, hilarious, and totally worked!

However, what really sets this event apart is the entertainment! There’s a brand-new show this year called Throttle, which introduces a new icon, Havoc. According to the guide, he’s not here to haunt you — he’s here to rule you. He’s a skeleton-faced villain with glowing purple eyes and a lean, muscular build.

The show combines dirt bikes performing insane stunts on ramps and platforms with live heavy metal music, pyrotechnics so hot they had us worried our phone would overheat, and a cast of dancers. Havoc brings women up “from the audience” (however, they were clearly planted there, don’t worry, you’re not being pulled up on stage), dances with them, then kills them with a thrust and neck snap as the stunt riders circle and flames explode. We were blown away by the production value and the sheer audacity of it all, although we do definitely encourage that this show is ONLY for adults and older kids (we suggest 16+).

The fan-favorite show here is Monster Stomp at the Nautilus Theatre. This is a Victorian-era musical featuring Jack the Ripper, with incredible live vocals, choreography, costumes, and stagecraft. The percussion sequence where performers use knives as instruments was a major standout to us, as is the skeleton dance under blacklight.

The leads of the show — a male vocalist channeling Jekyll and Hyde x Jack the Ripper, and a female vocalist similar to a gothic Lucy — anchor the story beautifully, and we overall loved the version this year even more than the year prior!

We can’t forget about the merchandise and food at this event! Themed retail locations at the exit of Mako and the exit of the event itself feature 5th anniversary Howl-O-Scream merch. Food and drink stands are all around the park and have exclusive offerings you can’t get any other time.

At the Fanta-sponsored Fright House booth, we tried the Eerie Eyeball Mocktail, which is made with Fanta Orange and Minute Maid Lemonade with black edible glitter for $9.99. Ours came without the glitter, since the team member working the booth didn’t have all the ingredients on opening night, but that didn’t change the fact that it was delicious! It’s very sweet, though, like sipping a liquid Jolly Rancher, but we weren’t complaining.

Overall, to us, it feels like SeaWorld put more money into entertainment this year, maybe at the expense of the scare zones, but we think that’s a fair trade-off. The houses and shows were so strong that we didn’t miss the zones as much, and the zones that were standouts were well-executed and still immersive with solid lighting, fog, and plenty of energy. The design choices across the event lean into a very conscious sense of “cool.” Everything is over the top, campy, stylish, and self-aware — to us, it has the resources of a world-class theme park, but the spirit of a local community haunt, which we’re kinda obsessed with.

You can also ride four of SeaWorld’s most popular attractions during this event — Mako, Pipeline, Ice Breaker, and Infinity Falls! We personally rode Mako during our visit, and diving headfirst 200 feet down truly created such a thrill; it felt like it was part of the event itself!

We think this event is a great choice for those who are just entering the horror scene and want something entertaining, immersive, and spooky to start out with. Even if you’re usually a fan of more scary events, we still think this is a must-visit for all Halloween fiends in the area!

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Are you thinking of checking out Howl-O-Scream this year? Tell us in the comments!
Disclosure: In nearly all circumstances, Disney Food Blog writers and photographers pay full price for their own travel, hotel, food, beverage, and event tickets. We do this because it’s important to us as journalists to ensure not only that we give you unbiased opinions, but also that you can trust us to do so since we’re paying our own way. On rare occasions, when we are invited by a company to attend a preview as media, and when we choose to accept that invitation, we will always make you, our readers, aware of that situation. Today, we were invited by SeaWorld Orlando to attend their media preview of Howl-O-Scream. Note that when we attend events as media we are 1) Not required to review that event/food on any of our channels, and 2) Not required to review that event/food favorably. You can always count on DFB to give you a 100% unbiased and honest review of any event that we attend, food that we eat, or beverage that we drink. You can see more in our Disclosure Policy. Thank you for reading. — AJ