Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights is back in action. The 2025 edition of the after-hours fright fest remains intense and just may have gotten ickier.

Among the trends spotted on Friday, opening night, were a resurgence of puppetry, the returns of a lagoon show and chainsaw-driven walkaround characters, more in-house screen use than ever (mostly positive), plus splattering effects that we’ll continue to cope with by reassuring ourselves that was only water. It’s only make-believe. Repeat, repeat.

Thanks to an R.I.P. Tour provided by Universal Orlando, the Sentinel wandered through all 10 haunted house mazes on night one. Here are quick, not-too-spoilery impressions.

Dolls: Let’s Play Dead

What we saw: It’s the tried-and-true theme park scheme of being shrunken down to the size of deformed dolls. This is the handiwork of a creative/twisted young girl who may grow up to be a makeup artist. Oh, hey, was that Woody? (There are also buttons for visitors to push for extra effects.)

Why we screamed: That one big baby, that one big baby head and that one baby with three heads.

A gargoyle soars over the heads of Horror Nights visitors inside the El Artista: A Spanish Haunting house. (Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel)

El Artista: A Spanish Haunting

What we saw: The home and architectural splendor of (fictional) Spanish artist Sergio Navarro is pretty to look at and plays well into the conservatory through-line of this year’s HHN. There are scares high and low, including a flying gargoyle.

Why we screamed: One extremely well-camouflaged vine-based character, and we were faked out/afraid of some of the statues that weren’t really scare actors after all.

Fallout

What we saw: That retro futuristic feel of the “Fallout” video game and TV series. You know, bunkers, Earth and its surviving habitants in upheaval. It wasn’t very populated during our tour, which may have been due to a shift change of scare actors.

A Horror Nights scare actor reacts inside the “Fallout” house at Halloween Horror Nights, which runs through Nov. 2. (Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel)

Why we screamed: There was classic misdirection caused by robots, fork-the-eye makeup that prompted a simultaneous “OUCH” from our group and the prospects of an unnerving mirrored room.

Five Nights at Freddy’s

What we saw: The most in-demand house on opening night, based on posted wait times, features animatronic-inspired looks, and they lurk throughout the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza place. This was achieved by working with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. It’s not truly a comedy house, but it has funny situations.

Why we screamed: The 150-minute wait time, though not an all-time record, is scary enough.

Mythical beasts come to life in the Gálkn: Monsters of the North house during Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. (Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel)

Gálkn: Monsters of the North

What we saw: A cool, very un-Florida setting, the kind of northern village where you see fjords and Norse mythology. But there’s fire and ice, too, and a young girl in distress (not the first of the evening). They got momma and poppa, she cried. This space had multiple horned beings (Monsters? Demons? Both?) with impressive headpieces. Beastly ending also effective.

Why we screamed (and laughed hard): One scare actor got us good, three times, back-to-back-to-back. And then there was follow-up by others in a transition scene. (Co-worker: “I did my scared dance.”)

Grave of Flesh

What we saw: This is this year’s house with lots of skulls, skeletons and intestines. The space, not for the claustrophobic amongst us, is dirty and littered with decomposition punctuated by assorted underground creatures

Why we screamed: The creatures in the black-light stretch were effective, although members of our tour group placed this in the “interesting concept” category (Kind of odd for, you know, flesh eaters, but it was toward the end of the night.)

Hatchet and Chains: Demon Bounty Hunters

What we saw: More horned beings, but in an Old West setting where rootin’-tootin’ torture is common among the humans. There’s a wide variety of characters and settings, including a prison, bank and graveyard. Meanwhile, the portal known as Hell’s Well wins the HHN34 “fun to say” prize.

Why we screamed: That fireplace scene early on gave the icks.

Jason Voorhees is a frequent scary sight at Halloween Horror Nights. This year he pops up a lot inside the Jason Universe house. (Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel)

Jason Universe

What we saw: It’s the house of a jillion Jasons, presented rapid-fire with the trademark “Friday the 13th” slashing sound effect. Just when you get into the beat of the scares, you know, just strolling along through the woods near Camp Crystal Lake, the pace gets frantic. JU also has an unusual indoor-outdoor floor plan. Kills are largely implied and there’s less blood than one might expect (See Terrifier house below).

Why we screamed: Distracted by one fake Jason only to be jump-scared by live one just inches to the left.

Terrifier

What we saw: Two words — bloody and stinky. Or maybe wet and dry. This place was dripping in it, and, fans say, true to the three films featuring Art the Clown, who also shows up unannounced in the HHN street program this year. There are, indeed, two options at the end, one dry, one wet and, in story, bloody. (There are signs to guide, but they’re kind of high. Know before you go). People have posted that they got “pretty wet,” but our party thought it was no biggie. The dry route was lonely and scary in that way. Both routes quickly arrive up at the same exit.

Art the Clown of ‘Terrifier’ fame can be spotted inside a haunted house and on the streets of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights this year. (Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel)

Why we screamed: Universal is selling ponchos in the queue.

WWE Presents: The Horrors of the Wyatt Sicks

What we saw: It’s a long and winding house featuring menacing wrestlers in the flesh and on screens. There’s Uncle Howdy and a lot of Huskus the Pig, it seemed, and others. Wrestling fans probably spot Easter eggs, but all can watch for the signature lantern of Bray Wyatt, who died (real life alert) in 2023.

Why we screamed: There’s a startle on the stoop, but then we were lulled early, only to be “got” by one of the loud drop-down windows and later by the just-after-relaxing finale that causes fists to rise in the air.

Halloween Horror Nights runs at Universal Studios theme parks on select nights through Nov. 2. It requires a separate ticket from regular theme park admission. For more information, go to universalorlando.com.

Email me at dbevil@orlandosentinel.com. BlueSky: @themeparksdb. Threads account: @dbevil. X account: @themeparks. Subscribe to the Theme Park Rangers newsletter at orlandosentinel.com/newsletters.

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — West Nile virus infections are intense so far this year, with case counts running 40% higher than normal, health officials say.

More than 770 cases, including about 490 severe cases, were reported as of early September, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted this week. About 550 cases — 350 of them severe — are usually reported by this time of year.

Health officials are ramping up warnings to the public, because most cases of the mosquito-borne disease are reported in August and September.

“West Nile virus can be a very serious disease and its presence in mosquitoes remains high right now in Massachusetts,” said the state’s public health commissioner, Dr. Robbie Goldstein, in a statement last week.

People can protect themselves by wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants when possible, and using an EPA-registered insect repellent when spending time outdoors, health officials say.

West Nile virus was first reported in the United States in 1999 in New York, and then gradually spread across the country. It peaked in 2003, when nearly 10,000 cases were reported.

Scientists say many people — perhaps tens of thousands each year — are infected but don’t know it because they have no symptoms, or only mild ones such as headaches, body aches, joint pain, vomiting, diarrhea and rashes.

In severe cases, damage to the central nervous system causes inflammation of the brain or spinal cord, and even death.

In the last decade, health officials have fielded reports of 2,000 cases annually on average, including 1,200 life-threatening neurological illnesses and approximately 120 deaths. Deaths are on pace to be higher this year, CDC officials said, but they declined to discuss specifics, saying mortality statistics are too preliminary.

Related Articles

Barry Sanders advocates for people to know their cholesterol numbers a year after his heart attack

Strokes can cause debilitating damage. Two UConn researchers have found a way to limit it

When hospitals and insurers fight, patients get caught in the middle

Mayo closing 6 clinics in southern Minnesota, curtailing Albert Lea services

He built Michigan’s Medicaid work requirement system. Now he’s warning other states

The problem is not that there are more mosquitoes this year, but rather that a higher proportion of the bugs are carrying the virus, CDC officials said. Mosquito infection rates can be affected by such factors as temperature, rainfall, the amount of insect control going on, and how many nearby birds are infected.

Colorado, which tends to see more West Nile virus, has reported about 150 of the nation’s cases — more than double what other states are reporting.

Fort Collins is a hot spot. Monitoring last month in an area in the southwest part of the city found that 35 out of every 1,000 female mosquitoes were infected — far higher than the 8 per 1,000 that would be expected for that time of year — said Roxanne Connelly, a CDC entomologist who lives there.

It’s not clear why, but she noted it’s been a wet and warm year.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A shelter-in-place order has been lifted for South St. Paul residents after an early morning shooting and homicide investigation.

“While we believe there to be no ongoing threat to public safety at this time and have lifted the shelter in place, we remain in the area searching for evidence,” the South St. Paul Police Department announced on social media later on Friday morning.

Here is what authorities report happened:

At about 3:45 a.m. on Friday, officers of the South St. Paul Police Department responded to a reported medical event inside a residence in the 300 block of Second Avenue South.

Upon arrival, responding officers learned a shooting had taken place and discovered two adult males inside the residence suffering from apparent gunshot wounds. One of the victims was pronounced dead on scene and the other was transported to an area hospital with life-threatening injuries.

Information from the investigation led responding officers to believe the party responsible for the shooting fled the scene on foot. A search of the immediate area was conducted and, at approximately 5:45 a.m., a suspect was located in the 500 block of First Avenue South.

The suspect was taken into custody without incident.

Investigators with the South St. Paul Police Department, assisted by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, are currently working to determine the circumstances that led to the shooting and to collect any evidence that could help determine what happened.

An autopsy to determine the exact cause of death and identification of the deceased will be conducted by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office.

South St. Paul police were assisted by Inver Grove Heights, Hastings, Lakeville, Mendota Heights, St. Paul and the West St. Paul police departments, along with Dakota, Ramsey and Washington County sheriff’s offices.

Anyone with information related to this incident is encouraged to contact the South St. Paul Police Department at 651-413-8300 or tips@sspmn.org.

Related Articles

Suspect in Charlie Kirk’s killing had become ‘more political,’ authorities say

Fergus Falls raceway official fatally struck while crossing track in an ATV

Charges upgraded against South St. Paul man accused of fatally shooting his 72-year-old roommate

Jury convicts St. Paul man in fatal shooting of Rice Street bar customer

Condition of the last hospitalized Annunciation Church shooting victim has improved

Jennifer Givhan, a Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist, grew up in Southern California. She holds a Master’s degree from California State University, Fullerton, and a Master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College, and she’s been the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices, among others. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, and more. “Salt Bones” is her latest book.

Q. Please tell readers about your new book, “Salt Bones.”

One afternoon, I went to pick up my daughter from junior high school, but she didn’t come out when the bell rang. I panicked. After several minutes, I found out that her teacher had kept the class late without telling me, but in those moments, I was ready to set the world on fire to find her.

That was the spark.

Over the next several years, “Salt Bones” became an ecological swansong for disappearing girls on a vanishing sea.

My work has always been about singing the stories of girls and women, too often othered or erased. While crime novels often focus on the killer or the puzzle at the expense of the missing or murdered girls and women, I write for the unseen and ignored.

Malamar, my protagonist, is an imperfect Mexican and Indigenous mother because no mother is perfect, nor should she be. She’s not a trope. She’s flesh and blood, with a complicated past and conflicting desires.

For readers unfamiliar with life on the borderlands, I offer stories beyond the stereotypes. And for my Latine readers, I hope my book feels like home.

“Salt Bones: A Novel,” by Jennifer Givhan. (Little, Brown and Company/TNS)

Q. The Salton Sea plays a role in the novel. What drew you to that location?

In the ’90s, I grew up near the Salton Sea, an ancient saline basin that has filled and emptied over millennia in the Southern California desert. In the early 1900s, it was unintentionally recreated after two floods and a broken dam channeled irrigation water from the Colorado River. But when I was a kid, 90 years after its re-creation, my mama warned us about how poisonous it was; we kids could smell for ourselves how it killed fish in massive die-offs and stank to high heaven for weeks from toxic algal blooms.

After I left for college, got married and had kids, I returned to my hometown to visit my best friend, who told me that the Salton Sea was drying up and releasing toxic chemicals like arsenic, residue from decades of pesticide runoff, which had sunk into the lakebed, aerosolized, and wafted into the lungs of everyone still breathing throughout the community. The whole Valley would become a ghost town if nothing was done.

I started researching, and over the next decade I became increasingly concerned about the fate of the place that raised me, which had been featured in shows like “Abandoned America,” though the mostly Mexican community was still thriving, even as the farm-owning elite brought in billions in agricultural revenue each year, all while the so-called accidental lake poisoned the air. I knew I had to tell this story, despite lawmakers who had actually been recorded as justifying their apathy with remarks like, “No one lives there anyway.” I also knew that my soapbox was slippery, but that people tend to love murder mysteries. So I wrapped my heart in one.

Q. What are you reading now?

I’m reading several books, as is my way. I keep books all over the house, in every room, in my purse and car. Right now, I’m in the middle of “You’ve Awoken Her” by Ana Dávila Cardinal, “Bad Cree” by Jessica Johns, “Vanishing Daughters” by Cynthia Pelayo, and “Bochica” by Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro. I gravitate toward books that straddle genre, that bleed through the borderlands and liminal spaces. I want to be gutted and rebuilt by stories, and I love strong literary thrillers that examine society alongside the human heart.

Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?

I’ve been reading everything I could get my hands on since I was a very young girl, so early on I loved “A Wrinkle In Time” and other magical happenings. I also read my mom’s books, including thrillers by authors like Mary Higgins Clark.

And then, when I was in high school and taking an extra AP English class through Stanford University online from my small-town borderland borrowed computer, I read Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” and it changed me. I mean, it wove itself into my marrow.

I’d already experienced trauma, and this novel showed me how to write a ghost story, reckoning, lullaby, and testimony all at once. It would be a decade before I had a baby girl of my own and sat down to write my girlhood trauma into my first novel, “Jubilee,” but Morrison had taught me early on that story can be a time machine. She says the whole story’s in the first line and hopes readers stay for the language. I return often for a dose of courage, music, and bone-deep truth. I’ll keep writing until I’ve built my own time machine. I hope “Salt Bones” comes close.

It wasn’t until undergrad that my brother told me Sandra Cisneros was reading at the Santa Ana Public Library nearby where we lived, and when I heard her read and speak, I knew I was home in Chicana literature. She discussed how her Antepasados or Ancestors, guide her writing, and finally I understood my own Ancestral call, the voices speaking through me since I was very young. I started polishing my poems immediately and sending them out when my son was born. He’s now 18, and I mark the start of my writing career by his birthday. Both my firstborn and writing career have grown up and are adults now.

Q. Do you have a favorite bookstore or bookstore experience?

I’ve had many amazing events at my local bookstore in Albuquerque, Books on the Bosque. Most recently, I launched “Salt Bones” there, and it was incredibly supportive. Over a hundred people packed into the store—family, friends, former students from the University of New Mexico MFA program—and so many readers brought all four of my novels, telling me how much my body of work has meant to them.

One of my dear friends and booksellers surprised me with a “Salt Bones” book cover cake, which was so sweet and unexpected (and I highly recommend Howdy Cakes, a Native-owned gem in Albuquerque)!

What moved me most was that I didn’t need to contextualize everything. I was speaking to my community, people who already understood my goals: to write stories that include and center us.

My incredible colleague, Ramona Emerson—a Diné writer and filmmaker whose “Shutter” series blew me away and was a finalist for the National Book Award—joined me in conversation. Her questions made me feel deeply seen and understood. We laughed, we cried, and I felt truly at home.

Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?

I’ve been writing since I was a little girl growing up on the Mexicali border, putting on backyard plays with the neighbor kids, handwritten scripts, but at the time, I didn’t know any other writers who came from the border. There were no readings, workshops, or visible literary community back then.

For my senior project in high school, I wrote a children’s book, but my teachers didn’t know any local writers (this was before we had much internet know-how down in El Valle), so I walked into a small bookstore in El Centro and asked the bookseller if she’d mentor me.

(This summer, I’ll give a “Salt Bones” talk in El Centro at a new indie bookstore called After-Hours Books, and I’m beyond thrilled for the shop, the book club, and my hometown finally having a literary home)!

Back when I was growing up as a young escritora, it was my big brother, Paul Gonzales, who opened the literary door for me. He’d gone to Los Angeles ahead of me and paved the way, gifting me Destiny’s Child’s album “Survivor” and assuring me I was one. He also told me about Sandra Cisneros reading at the Santa Ana Public Library, and when La Maestra spoke about her Antepasados helping her write, a dam inside me broke open. She’d put my experience into words. I knew how to listen not only to my living familia’s chisme and historia, but I could tune into the dead. That changed everything for me.

Later, it was Ana Castillo, Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, and all the mujeres whose words lit my path. At Cal State Fullerton, I wrote my Master’s thesis while raising a newborn, and this became “Landscape with Headless Mama,” the book that taught me how to mother on the page and claim my Chicana and Indigenous identity in the act of creation. Every novel I’ve written since then, including this newest one, echoes what I first put to the page in that unpublished poetry manuscript.

Balancing motherhood with writing has been the central challenge of my life, but also the deep heart of my work. My books are survival guides. Testimonios. Love letters. For the girls from the border dreaming in the dark and bringing our voices to the light.

Now I’m writing the books I needed, flashing Spanglish and sweat and salt and reminding us that we’re not alone, that we belong.

Q. If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?

The prologue to “Salt Bones” ends: “If anyone were out here but the night animals, the stars, they’ve shut their eyes. They haven’t seen a thing. They haven’t said a damn word to anyone.”

It’s meant to show how we’re all culpable for the lack of attention Latine and Indigenous women and girls who disappear in a vanishing community receive.

So my question is, will you say a word to anyone?

For more about the author, go to jennifergivhan.com