Service Experiences - Paying to be Terrified - Haunted Houses

This post is about paying to be terrified.

Photo from Flikr

Photos from Flikr

The NZ Herald published a story on haunted house attractions recently that is worth a look - see Terror worth paying for. The article is written from a first-person perspective, where the writer experiences the 'service journey' (being terrified). The experiences he describes are quite terrifying in and of themselves - psycho-sexual abuse, water-boarding, claustrophobia, prison abuse, and so on ...

Why do people seem to find such pleasure and enjoyment in vicariously experiencing torture, or sexual abuse, and are more than willing,  even eager, to part from hundreds of dollars for it? Horror and the enjoyment of it have been around for a long time (haunted houses have been part of fairs since their inception) but terror, as large scale paid entertainment, is a relatively new phenomenon, fueled no doubt by the popularity of the horror film genre.

Horror and enjoyment intersect, and the philosophy of why this is so is interesting reading. Books like The Philosophy of horror argue that comedy and horror are closely related.  People clearly enjoy being horrified, and with the rhythm of fear and release (being frightened and then relieved) being a key to the enjoyment people get from horror.  Comedy works in a very similar way with a build-up of tension and then release. 

The type of writing in the Herald newspaper article is typical of an ethnographic approach where the writer enters the world they are writing about and describe it.  Ethnographic writing after a period of participation is a useful method for understanding customer service provision because it enables thinking about social and cultural issues instead of the narrow issue of 'service quality'. In service management, most likely the approach to understanding the 'experience' might be a mystery shop, or an emotional audit (where consumers are asked to record how they feel as they engage in a service experience). A participatory, reflective perspective such as you gain in writing an ethnographic account encourages thinking about wider issues so that the growth in these types of business could be understood more.
    

On a more technical note, photos at places like the Nightmare Fear Factory's Flickr feed tangibilise the experience making the experience of being frightened in the dark visible through flash photography.  This is a variation of the traditional memory photograph (e.g. the photograph as you go over the edge of a theme park ride), but adds a freaky-funny element, and makes the experience publicly available so that friends and family can share. The terror experience has fan sites, chat rooms and plenty of other ways that users can share their experiences, and these all work to further commodify and virally spread terror as an experience worth paying for.