Fear Lab
In Denmark, researchers put heart-rate monitors on 110 people walking through a haunted house. Enjoyment followed an inverted U: too little fear was dull, and so was too much. Try it yourself. Pick a guest and scare them.
Test subject
Heart rate above resting over the last 30 seconds. Hover the chart to read values.
Fire a scare
Area effects toggle on and off
Where they are on the curve
An illustrative curve shaped like the study's findings. The peak sits in each guest's own sweet-spot band, and every guest type has a different one.
Habituation
Each repeat of the same kind of scare lands softer (×0.8 per repeat in the game, faster for Horror Buffs). Mix your categories.
What to try
- Fire the 🧟 three times quickly. Stacked spikes break through the panic line, and if they stay there long enough the guest takes the chicken exit.
- Turn on 🌑 Blackout, then fire one scare. The area effect stops the heart rate falling back, so the fear lasts.
- Compare a White-Knuckler (narrow, low band) with an Adrenaline Junkie (wide, high band).
- After a big spike, the 💀 skeleton's comic relief brings them straight back down.
Why a sweet spot?
The Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University studied visitors to a commercial haunted attraction (Dystopia, in Vejle, Denmark) using self-reports, observer notes and heart-rate monitors. Both enjoyment and heart-rate data traced an inverted U. In the researchers' words, being scared is most enjoyable when it is a quick, minor deviation from your normal state. When the fear goes on too long or the physiological change is too severe, it turns from fun into distress.
As the lab's Dr Marc Andersen put it to The Psychologist: "If it's too scary enjoyment starts going down and if it is not scary enough then enjoyment goes down."
The heart-rate model on this page is a toy, not a medical model: a spike for each scare, a smooth return toward resting, and a sweet-spot band per guest. It's tuned for a game, but its shape follows the research.