Described plainly, a haunted house makes no sense. You hand over money, sometimes a lot of it, to walk through a dark building where strangers have been hired to make your heart pound, your palms sweat and your voice do things you did not authorize. The machinery being triggered is the oldest alarm system the body has, the one built to keep our ancestors alive around things with teeth. And we come out laughing, and some of us go back next year.
Three years ago, in a column about true crime, I wrote that scary stories let us experience fear without any real danger, and I attached the wrong psychological term to the idea. ("Affective forecasting" is about predicting our future feelings, which is a different thing entirely.) The basic intuition was roughly right. But it was also badly incomplete, because the researchers who study recreational fear have since gotten much more specific than "safe fear is fun." They have taken heart-rate monitors and brain sensors into actual haunted houses, and what they found is more interesting than I gave it credit for.
What Happens in a Haunted Basement?
The sociologist Margee Kerr, who worked with ScareHouse, a haunted attraction for adults in Pittsburgh, teamed up with a colleague at the University of Pittsburgh to set up a makeshift lab in its basement. They recruited visitors who had already bought tickets, so everyone in the study had chosen to be there. Over two years, more than 250 people filled out mood questionnaires before and after the roughly 35-minute experience, and about 100 also had their brain activity recorded.
Afterward, participants reported feeling happier and less anxious, tired and stressed, and the improvement was strongest in people who had walked in feeling frustrated, bored or stressed. Their brains' reactivity also dropped across a range of tasks. The researchers, publishing in the journal Emotion, suggested that "within the context of safety and control," visitors let themselves "lean in" to the fear, and that the experience offers a chance to practice tolerating distress. Kerr's own explanation was simpler: "In those moments of intensity we are more grounded in our body."
That's one attraction, with visitors who had chosen to go, so it can't tell us that fear improves everyone's mood. But it does complicate the assumption that being scared is something we merely endure for the bragging rights.
Is There a Right Amount of Scared?
The most precise answer so far comes from the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark. A team led by Marc Malmdorf Andersen fitted 110 visitors to a haunted house of nearly 50 rooms in Vejle, Denmark, with heart-rate monitors, watched them on closed-circuit cameras, and asked them afterward how frightened they had been and how much they had enjoyed it. Their results, published in Psychological Science, traced an upside-down U. Visitors who weren't very scared didn't enjoy themselves much. As Andersen put it, "the same happens if they are too scared." Enjoyment peaked in between, at what he called "a 'sweet spot.'"
The heart-rate data told the same story. Enjoyment went with "just-right deviations" from a person's normal physiological state, while big, long-lasting swings, a pulse rising and falling over and over for a long stretch, went with an unpleasant experience. Andersen noted that this pattern looks "strikingly similar to what scientists have found to characterize human play."
I think that comparison is the key to the whole puzzle. Watch small children play chase, and you'll see the same structure: the shriek, the near-miss, the laughter, the immediate demand to do it again. Play looks a lot like rehearsal for the serious business of life, escaping and recovering, with the stakes removed. A haunted house is chase for people too old to be chased on the playground. And as the Vanderbilt neuroscientist David Zald pointed out about scary books, the crucial ingredient is control. If it gets to be too much, you can always shut the book.
Does Practicing Fear Actually Help?
This is where the research becomes genuinely intriguing, and where I want to be careful. In April 2020, shortly after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Coltan Scrivner and his colleagues surveyed 322 people in the United States. Fans of horror films reported less psychological distress than other people. Fans of what the researchers called "prepper" genres, such as zombie movies, did too, and also said they felt more prepared for the pandemic. People high in morbid curiosity, which Scrivner defines as "an internal motivation to learn about threatening situations in your environment," showed greater positive resilience.
Scrivner was testing what he calls the ordeal simulation hypothesis: that people who have rehearsed frightening scenarios in fiction might cope better with the real thing. He was also frank about the limits. The study, he said, does "not say anything about the mechanism." It's a survey taken at a single moment, and it's entirely possible that calmer, steadier people are simply more likely to enjoy horror in the first place. His suggestion that horror fans may have "practiced" regulating their emotions is a hypothesis, not a finding.
So What Is a Haunted House For?
Here is where I've landed. Fear itself has never been the real problem. The problem, in anxiety and in genuinely dangerous situations, is fear without control and fear without an ending. A haunted house offers the exact opposite: fear you chose, at a dose you can adjust by clinging to a friend or closing your eyes, with an exit sign glowing at the end of the hallway. It is, in Kerr's framing, practice.
The sweet spot is personal, too. Some people's ideal dose of fear is a full haunted maze, and some people's is a scary movie watched through their fingers, and for some people, as Scrivner notes, the intensity simply outweighs the fun. None of that is a failure of nerve. It's just a different setting on the same dial.
So if you find yourself in a dark hallway this month, screaming at a stranger in a mask and laughing a second later, you are not being irrational. You are doing something very old and possibly very healthy: playing at danger, so that the alarm system gets a workout and then gets to stand down. As Scrivner put it, his findings show "that feeling anxious or afraid isn't always bad." I'll take that as permission to scream.
