The best haunted houses in Los Angeles for Halloween scares

Confront familiar foes at Universal Studios’ annual Halloween festivities, where big-budget scares meet iconic horror movie characters. You’ll be able to navigate multiple scare zones and mazes, including ones based on The Last of Us, Stranger Things, Evil Dead Rise, The Purge, The Exorcist: Believer, Chucky and more. Go early in the season to cut down on wait times, or—if you can afford it—consider an express pass.

Its past installments have found attendees stealthing their way through a Victorian home and embarking on a Blade Runner-esque bounty hunt. And now this event—part interactive theater, part narrative-based haunted house—heads back a nearly 150-year-old mansion in Pomona for an anthology of tales centered around the Author, a mysterious figure who made all previous Delusion installments a reality—and though he’s gone missing, his ghastly creations haven’t. You can also float between rooms of the mansion, and even get a peek behind the scenes with a VIP ticket.

Encounter free-roaming monsters, terrifying mazes—spanning themes like a twisted carnival and an alien-inhabited space station—a “boo-fet” dinner and all sorts of other haunted houses and attractions at the OC theme park.

Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group hosts a chilling series of vignettes. Armed with a shoddy flashlight to illuminate their path, guests navigate a labyrinth of terror before enduring a series of shocking scenes (over the course of roughly 35 minutes) that will unsettle even the most stoic of horror fans.

Far from those kid-friendly rides through a pumpkin patch, this hayride unleashes all sorts of demons and bogeys on Griffith Park. Like so many pop culture horror experiences recently, this year’s Haunted Hayride once again rewinds the action to the mid-’80s in the ficticious town of Midnight Falls. The event—which this year promises new wagons and scenes and updated effects—will be centered around the jack-o’-lantern–filled Midnight Falls Town Square, with a creaky old funeral parlor set up in the Midnight Mortuary Haunted House as well as axe throwing, water balloon-based paintball and the Hellbilly Halloween maze.

He’s a Lakers legend, an NBA commentator, a rapper, a DJ and a mid-’90s movie genie, and now you can add haunted house MC to that list: Shaquille O’Neal will once again attach his name to this family-friendly carnival and assembly of haunted houses on the grounds of the Queen Mary. We’ve specifically added it to this list now that the oceanliner is open again; as a result, this year’s event will include a search for spirits in the belly of the ship (à la the former Dark Harbor).