Shrink to the Size of a Toy in Dolls: Let’s Play Dead House at Halloween Horror Nights 2025

Dolls: Let’s Play Dead is an original concept house at Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights 2025. While creepy dolls is something of a horror cliche, does this house bring something new to the event? Let’s find out!

House

Backstory
Review
Rating
Know Before You Go
- Location
- Fun Facts

Backstory

Blue house facade with a round window; mural reads "Dolls Let's Play Dead" with mutilated dolls and creepy illustrations.

You’re about to become doll-sized and witness the unnatural creations of a twisted little girl. You’ll be hunted by burnt fashion dolls, toys she’s melded together and undead horrors in her dollhouse.

Lyla is a little girl who doesn’t play nice with her dolls. Unfortunately, we’re her dolls. As we enter her dollhouses, our fates are sealed as she discovers new and progressively inventive ways to play. From gruesome makeovers to a journey through an Easy Bake Oven (off brand, though), we watch as Lyla grows from a disturbed child through the years to a malevolent future serial killer.

Review

Blue-lit spooky house with round window, Dolls’ shadows inside, and a "Let’s Play Dead" sign evoke HHN 2025 chills.

When we saw this house on the Unmasking tour, it was clear it was either going to be a total failure or a huge success. The overall rating was going to be entirely dependent on the characters and costumes.

A shadow with raised arms haunts a blue-lit window—like a scene from Let’s Play Dead at HHN 2025.

They knocked it out of the park.

The larger than life design does a lot of the leg work for making you doll-sized, but as theme park goers, that’s not a new concept and can easily feel gimmicky. Two things really make this work: Lyla peering in the dollhouse windows — and only a portion of her face can be seen due to how “small” we are; and the other toys.

White table with polka dots, cartoon clowns in colorful outfits, and mutilated dolls scattered among people in the background.

The costumes are perfect. The scareactors look like dolls — not in an unsettling way, though. They aren’t scaring us, and they aren’t meant to evoke uncanny valley. Instead, they look like realistic dolls and toys. None of them are antagonistic. They’re crying for help. One doll with a melting face near the oven scene simply said, “It hurts,” in the most devastating voice. A giant baby doll in the dollhouse bedroom (featuring Jack the Clown bedding) waddles toward you crying “Mama!” in distress.

A mannequin in a pink dress and wig stands eerily, like a prop from HHN houses featuring flesh-eating demons.

This house has nearly no blood (apart from one scene toward the end where Lyla’s sadistic games escalate), but it doesn’t need it.

The sets are simplistic, given the dollhouse setting, but they’re well designed enough to be immersive.

Rating

This isn’t the top house of the year, but we’ll still miss it when it’s gone.

Rating out of 7: 6

Know Before You Go

Location

Theme park map section with water, bridges, and attractions like Let’s Play Dead House and Hatchet & Chains for HHN 2025.

Dolls: Let’s Play Dead is in the World Expo section of the park, next to Men in Black: Alien Attack.

Fun Facts

Two black AA batteries labeled "BzzZcon" in a pink battery compartment, with HHN Houses scribbled in the background.

Because we’re the dolls and everything is to scale, Lyla does not appear as a Scareactor in the house. Instead, we see glimpses of her, life size, through the dollhouse windows.
Some of Lyla’s toys are powered by Bzzzcon batteries — the company notoriously behind the rat poison incident in this year’s Mutations: Toxic Twenties scare zone, and the Bugs: Eaten Alive house from HHN 31.
Watch out for three big buttons. These are guest activated triggers (GATs), and if you press them, it will set off a special effect.

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