 Fear happens to us all the time, but this time of the year we get our way to get scared. Monsters be good! Monsters be good! It's really time for it. But we rarely think what's going on in our mind and bodies, so why do we get scared and what does it take to manufacture fear? Aaaaaaah! Hang on. Aaaaaah! What a monster! What a monster! To see all of this in action, we are here at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which hosts the haunted attraction Terror Behind the Walls in the fall. Eastern State was an actual prison until 1971 and it was abandoned for years, which makes walking through it even in the daylight kind of terrifying. We're walking to the second attraction of Terror Behind the Walls, which is called the Machine Shop. That's Amy Holliman, the creative director here at Terror Behind the Walls. Eastern State Penitentiary, you can see, is a perfect setting for a Halloween event, because spaces like this, we don't really have to do anything to. We just have to put lighting to sort of showcase this crumbling cell block architecture. But at one point there was a whole wall here. Like, we're looking into the back of all these individual cells. I think that what keeps people coming back here and so emotionally engaged in this space is that it is kind of the closest thing to time travel that we have, and when you're here, you can't help but think about the people that were here. You look into these cells and your mind immediately starts thinking, God, what would it have been like to be in solitary confinement? That's Margit Kare, a sociologist who studies the science of fear. The way we understand each other, empathy, is by recreating those feelings ourselves. So when we look at people, for example, screaming in an fMRI, their brain has a certain kind of signature. And when you look at someone who is thinking about somebody screaming or watching someone scream, those same areas are activated. So in a very real way, we come here and we actually experience a little bit what it must have been like to be here. All right, so we're going to enter the machine shop now. So in this room, we're setting the story of the machine shop. So you'll find one of the members of the machine shop who's looking in the mirror here. They're actually in the midst of shaving their head when you come in, and they see you through the mirror, and they turn around and they startle you. When I think about designing, I think about what we know from a lot of the psychological testing that has been done on the threat response and what is really effective at activating the sympathetic nervous system in the lab. So for example, we know that the looming threat, so things that are coming at our face, really mess with our threat response. I mean, it has this, you know, effective feeling like time is slowing, it's just terrifying, and that makes sense. I mean, the things that we're afraid of are typically those things that can kill us really effectively and really quickly. So this is a dark corridor here. There's no actors here. It's sort of helping build your anxiety as you're stepping into the next room. There is a laser sensor on the floor down here. So as you walk past this, it makes these crack and sparkle, sort of shockwaves. Sound is really a great way to activate the sympathetic nervous system by using sounds at different frequencies and especially sounds that have a lot of cultural significance too. So something like a crying baby or a car wreck or chainsaws, you know, those things will, you know, tap into our experiential knowledge and get us going. Okay, so we're about to go in. I know what to expect, so it should be fine. I know where the noises are. I know what's going to happen, so it should be fine. But these actors are really scary. Okay, let's do this. Really when we're afraid, some of the chemicals that are contributing to a positive feeling are the endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin. All of these things are ramping up our body, some bringing down our body after we're scared, and they can contribute to a positive feeling. Oh, God! There's real psychological benefits to scaring ourselves in fun and safe ways, because we can know rationally and logically that we're not in danger when we walk into a haunted house. Okay. It's flickering lights. And here's the guy who's shaving his head. I knew he was coming. Oh, poor guy. I hope he's going to turn. We can tell ourselves nothing in here is going to hurt us. The monsters aren't real. But because our threat response system has evolved to protect us, we have this ability to kind of suspend our disbelief and forget that we know we're safe and really feel like we are in a threatening environment. So then you see this really great kind of transition where we will scream when we're startled and then start laughing when we remember, oh, wait, you know, this is a haunted house. I'm here to have fun. And in that moment, we are kind of in a way hijacking our threat response and reinterpreting it as fun, as excitement, and it becomes just a positive high arousal state rather than a negative one. All pause must fit in the machine. Oh, my God. It's hard to scare people effectively if you're just going in right away from a psychological angle because people are still in that heavy thinking mode, and we want to knock that out. We want to kind of knock out their critical thought so they're fully in their body. You're about to enter the machine. It's going to go out. Oh, God. Fear is not all bad. It's not all bad. It's not all good. It is. I mean, it is something that we can't avoid, and it's something that our life literally depends on. I'm sweating a lot. One of us! One of us! Oh, God. I'm really scared. Rationalizing it and knowing why fear happens and what happens to our bodies did not help at all. I thought it was over. I knew I was in a safe environment, but still everything was so well coordinated. It still makes me scare and jump, and these people are still looking at me, and they're really creepy. Creepy as hell. Oh, the guy with the axe or the hammer. The big guy by the furnace. That was scary. He's huge.