Nine Weeks of Being Terrified in Mandarin
From 4 September to 1 November 2026, Universal Beijing Resort is running Scares @ Universal (惊彩環球) — its annual autumn horror season, and this year the fifth-anniversary edition.
If you know Universal's Halloween Horror Nights from Orlando, Hollywood, Osaka or Singapore, adjust your expectations, because Beijing has deliberately done something different. It does not use the Halloween Horror Nights name. It does not build its mazes from Universal's American horror catalogue. And it is not a separately ticketed hard event.
What Beijing built instead is, for a foreign visitor, far more interesting: a Western theme-park format loaded entirely with Chinese pop culture. It is one of the few places on earth where you can walk through a professionally-produced haunted maze based on intellectual property that 300 million Chinese people grew up with and almost no Westerner has heard of.
That is the pitch. Here is the detail.
The Mazes: Chinese IP, Not American Horror
The headline change in 2026 is the lineup. Two homegrown Chinese properties anchor the season:
The Grave Robbers' Chronicles (盜墓筆記 / Daomu Biji)
If you read one thing before you go, make it this. The Grave Robbers' Chronicles is a serialised online novel by Xu Lei that became one of the defining pop-culture phenomena of 21st-century China — a sprawling tomb-raiding adventure saga spawning films, television series, games and a fandom of genuinely enormous scale.
Think of it as China's answer to Indiana Jones crossed with Lovecraft: ancient tombs, impossible architecture, things in the dark that should not be there, and a mythology dense enough that fans argue about it for years.
For a foreign visitor this is the single best cultural artefact in the park. You are walking through the interior of a story that shaped a generation of Chinese readers, built at theme-park production value.
Identity V (第五人格)
A wildly popular asymmetric-horror mobile game — four survivors versus one hunter, in a gothic Victorian-manor aesthetic. Enormous in China, and enormous with the cosplay community specifically. The maze is dense with visual references. If you see people queuing in elaborate costume, this is why.
HamiKuma
Universal Studios Japan's Halloween mascot, running across every Universal park worldwide this season. Cute, chaotic, extremely photographable — and the tonal counterweight to the mazes.
The Schedule Trap — Read This Part Carefully
This is where most visitors get burned. The nighttime experiences do not run every night.
Nighttime content (themed performances + haunted mazes) runs Thursday through the following Monday each week — so Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday are out.
Not available on: 17 September, 1 October, 8 October.
Additionally available on: 16 September, 30 September, 6 October, 28 October.
Those blackout dates are not random. 1 October is China's National Day, the start of the Golden Week holiday — the single busiest travel period in the Chinese calendar. The park runs different operations that week.
The practical rule: if the mazes are the reason you are going, verify the date on the official site before you book anything else. A Wednesday trip to Universal Beijing during Scares season gets you a normal theme park day and none of the horror content.
Ticketing: The Good News
Unlike Halloween Horror Nights in the US, Scares @ Universal is included with standard park admission. There is no separate hard ticket.
The catch: haunted mazes are walk-up queue only. No standard reservation system. Universal Express is available as a paid add-on and is the only way to skip the maze lines.
Our honest read: on a weekend during peak season, Express is close to mandatory if you want more than one maze. On a Thursday or Monday in late September, you can probably do it on standby. Decide based on your date.
Where This Sits in a Beijing Trip
Let's be direct about something. Universal Beijing Resort is not why you fly to Beijing. You fly to Beijing for the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the hutongs.
But Scares @ Universal is a legitimately good use of a day in three specific situations:
- You are travelling with teenagers. Day four of imperial architecture is when teenagers stop pretending. This is the release valve.
- You want to see contemporary Chinese pop culture, not just ancient China. This is the point most Beijing itineraries miss entirely. Beijing is not a museum city. It has one of the most vigorous pop-culture economies on the planet, and Daomu Biji and Identity V are a faster, more vivid education in what young China actually consumes than any guidebook chapter.
- You are a theme park person. Universal Beijing opened in September 2021 and includes attractions found nowhere else, including a Kung Fu Panda land built specifically for this park. The Halloween season is when it runs at its most ambitious.
The Practical Brief
Dates: 4 September – 1 November 2026 Nighttime content: Thursday–Monday, with listed exceptions Cost: Included in park admission Maze access: Walk-up queue; Universal Express is a paid upgrade Location: Tongzhou District, east Beijing Getting there: Beijing Subway Line 7 to Universal Resort station — direct, cheap, no taxi needed Book via: Official Universal Beijing Resort site or app; real-name registration with passport
Foreign visitor notes:
Bring your passport. Chinese ticketing is real-name; your passport is your ticket ID at the gate. Set up mobile payment before you arrive. Alipay and WeChat Pay both accept international cards now. The park is effectively cashless. Signage and app support are bilingual, but maze content is Mandarin-language and Chinese-cultural. Read a plot summary of Daomu Biji on the subway ride out. Ten minutes of reading roughly doubles what you get from the maze. Arrive in the afternoon, not the morning, if the mazes are your priority. You want energy left for the night. Weather: late September and October in Beijing is the best weather of the year — dry, clear, 15–25°C. Bring a layer for the evening.
