Well, back from my little trip, and I have to say the horror night was disappointing. We went on to the night on the 28th, which was the second to last evening, and also went with the express pass option as we had heard lots of stories about the excessive queue times.
We got to Universal just after 5pm, the horror night opens at 6. Had to go through security checks which took about 15 minutes (metal detectors and padding down by security, bit excessive but I can see why they do this). Then stood around in a relatively small space for about 30 minutes waiting for them to open the gates. The space between security and the gates filled up quickly and they had to stop letting people through about 5:45, until the park had opened.
The park eventually opened to a big cheer, and we were greeted by about half a dozen actors dressed up as grim reapers. The park itself wasn't decorated at all, nothing halloweeny about it as far as I could tell. A little further in, and occasionally dotted around the park were girls selling jello shots at a dollar a time, lots of silly Americans crowding round for those pretty quickly.
We ended up doing every horror maze except the Penn and Teller one, which we completely missed - they were all ok, Silent Hill was probably the best as triangle head picked on my other half for a while which made her scream and me laugh
Alice Coopers was bizarre. Not really sure how nasty looking strippers is scary. Walking Dead was a bit of a disappointment. They all got a bit old as it was generally the same thing over and over. Queue times for us never got over 20 minutes with the express pass. The Walking Dead standard queue when we did it before leaving was over 100 minutes, so the express was certainly worth it.
We ended up leaving about 11pm, the actors had by that point vanished, and we had only seen maybe 20 or so around the entire park. Only one chainsaw wielding one. The park stayed open till 2am but we had had more than enough of drunk Americans by this point. Apparently if you stay till the end the actors chase you out of the park, but not seen any proof of this. The only decoration or Halloween changes we saw other than the occasional actor were a couple of smoke machines lurking about. Even Magic Kingdom on Thursday had more going on during the day, pumpkins all over the place and Halloween characters running around.
