Live-mediated horror entertainment: the culture, history, industry, and experience of haunted attractions

Abstract

Haunted attractions are as much thrill-based amusements as they are complex, deliberately designed spaces where fear, technology, labor, and performance converge. This dissertation examines the industrial and affective dimensions of live-mediated horror entertainment (LMHE), a term I use to describe immersive horror experiences such as haunted attractions, immersive theater, and interactive horror events. While "liveness" in media theory has often implied mediation, the term LMHE emphasizes how these experiences merge co-presence and embodied performance with mediated aesthetics and narrative structures, highlighting how these experiences extend beyond broadcast liveness or theatrical co-presence by foregrounding embodied participation, mediated storytelling, and labor-intensive infrastructure. Rather than relying solely on "liveness" or "immersion," LMHE highlights how horror depends on visceral immediacy, technological mediation, and intensive affective labor to create its impact. Framed in this way, haunts reveal how fear is produced through industrial practices that require physical, emotional, and economic investments from both workers and audiences. It also underscores how horror's physical and emotional intensities enable negotiations around identity, social tension, and collective anxiety. Through LMHE, I argue that haunted attractions act as ideological texts that expose the contradictions of contemporary life, where fear and spectacle are tightly bound to the labor, aesthetics, and infrastructures that produce them. Haunted attractions remain critically understudied within performance and media scholarship, despite their cultural ubiquity and economic success. Haunts are spaces made legible through their relationship with the horror genre, which heightens and exaggerates the very tensions, paradoxes, and anxieties embedded in contemporary life. By staging fear, horror enables a visceral confrontation with themes often repressed in other entertainment forms: death, trauma, monstrosity, and social breakdown. As a genre defined by its affective charge and bodily address, horror is well suited to illuminate the ideological work of LMHE. These attractions stage real-life ideological struggles in exaggerated form, often with minimal subtlety, making them powerful cultural texts that mirror and manipulate collective fears. Methodologically, this dissertation integrates empirical fieldwork and affective observation with theoretical analysis grounded in performance studies, media theory, and cultural criticism. Site visits, interviews with industry professionals, and immersive encounters provide the empirical foundation. This empirical work is complemented by a historical and theoretical framework that situates haunted attractions within a broader hauntological lineage, allowing for a recursive reading of how the past echoes through affective and industrial forms. The historical emergence of haunted attractions is traced through a genealogical hauntology, a recursive framework that shows how past trauma resurfaces through entertainment, echoing across time in aesthetic, thematic, and economic form. This hauntological lens reveals how haunted attractions recycle and recode societal anxieties, particularly in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the post-World War II era, 9/11, and the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyze how haunted attractions restage affective rituals of haunting, through which audiences confront both real and symbolic fears. Throughout, the dissertation foregrounds the role of labor, technological mediation, and performance aesthetics, emphasizing how affect is not only experienced but also produced and regulated through behind-the-scenes infrastructures. Interstitial narratives and site-specific disruptions—such as Althusserian moments of hailing, recursive hauntings, deliberately disorienting dramaturgies, and improvisational play—are shown to call audiences into new subject positions, blurring the line between spectator and participant. The dissertation proceeds in four chapters: (1) a genealogical history of haunted attractions and their relationship to cultural trauma; (2) an analysis of immersive design and genre hybridity; (3) a look at the industrial logics and economic tensions that shape haunt production; and (4) an exploration of labor, performance, and embodiment, focusing on how monstrosity is enacted and internalized. Reinforcing the claim that haunted attractions serve as ideological texts, my project makes legible the affective, ideological, and infrastructural work performed by LMHE. Haunted attractions offer a potent site for examining how contemporary culture processes fear, trauma, and control, and how horror functions as a vehicle to render social paradoxes grotesquely visible. While they may initially be dismissed as mere entertainment, haunted attractions serve as a mirror to the ideological hauntings that permeate everyday life, offering a critical lens through which to understand media, performance, and affect in a fear-driven world.