By Dakota Galvin, College of Arts & Sciences
Tara Perreault has always been drawn to the darker side of human nature — fear, the macabre and a desire to understand why people seek out these experiences on purpose.
As a doctoral student in USF’s Department of Psychology, Perreault studies why people enjoy being scared and what that fear does to us, particularly to our relationships and sense of right and wrong.
Doctoral candidate Tara Perreault wearing special‑effects makeup inside Gainesville’s Fear Garden, where she conducts research on fear and emotional responses.
“Sometimes that means building a haunted house and surveying the people who come through it. Sometimes it means studying horror movie heroes and villains to understand who’s good, who’s bad and who deserves to survive,” Perreault said.
This work started for Perreault in 2022 during her first semester at the University of Florida, when a mass call went out for research assistants to work in a haunted house. The Gainesville Fear Garden became her introduction to the behind-the-scenes world of scare attractions — and the surprising psychology behind them. Now, she is one of a handful of people who have been with the Fear Garden since its beginning.
The origins of fear
Every October, millions of people across the country visit haunted attractions — a seasonal tradition that now fuels an industry generating about $917 million in annual revenue, according to a recent industry analysis.
Perreault’s research asks a simple question: Why?
“A lot of this comes down to our evolved fear system,” Perreault said. “Our ancestors survived by responding fast to threats, like hiding from a big predator. Today, a saber-toothed cat isn’t going to ambush us on the way home from class or work, but we still carry that ancient survival machinery.”
Perreault’s research shows that scare attractions trigger a full fight‑or‑flight response — adrenaline surges, your body braces — but because people know they’re actually safe, the brain’s reward system switches on too, releasing dopamine and turning fear into something that feels thrilling instead of threatening. Psychologists call this benign masochism: enjoying a negative experience precisely because you know it can’t really hurt you. Perreault says it works because it’s fear in a safe place, and we seek this kind of stimulation from a very young age.
“Peekaboo is essentially a baby’s first jump-scare: build the suspense, hide, surprise and then laughter because the person behind the hands is someone you trust. Haunted houses are the grown-up version.”
Fear as a connection
Perreault’s work doesn’t just explain why people seek out fear — it reveals what those scares do to our relationships. Her team found that going through something frightening together brings people closer, but not always in the way you’d expect.
“We asked guests to think about the person in their group they were least close to, even the one they argue with most,” Perreault said. “Almost half said the haunted house brought them closer to that person, and nearly two‑thirds said it brought their whole group closer.”
After a 2020 decline, haunted houses returned to pre‑pandemic crowds, drawing 17 million visitors in 2022 and 22.1 million in 2023. Photo courtesy of Busch Gardens’ Howl O’ Scream.
With best friends, she explained, the effect is harder to measure — they’re already near the top of the closeness scale. But with a coworker or a friend‑of‑a‑friend, a haunted house does something grabbing coffee together can’t. It’s new, a little harrowing, and forces people to depend on each other. “You see each other unguarded in a way that would normally take months,” she said.
In 2025, two best friends braved the Fear Garden. At first, Perreault said, they acted like every other guest — nervous, silly, giggly. During the sensory‑deprivation portion of the attraction, visitors were blindfolded and wore headphones that played a story matching everything they felt: uneven floors, props brushing their arms, bursts of air, and research assistants tapping them with fake hands and feathers.
“These two looked like they were trying to crawl inside each other,” Perreault said. “Their reactions were off the charts, so of course they got extra attention. They clung to each other, screaming and curling into little balls.” Then, when the sensory deprivation section ended, they were led out and the blindfolds came off.
“The relief and silliness that poured out of them was epic,” Perreault said. “Just in time for characters to start screaming at them to keep going, and the more traditional haunted house scares began.”
But that rush of fear is only the starting point. Perreault’s work shows that the real impact comes afterward — in the way people reach for each other, laugh together and walk out feeling closer than they did going in.
“People told us the bonding isn’t instant,” Perreault said. “It happens afterward, talking and laughing and swapping stories in the car. Who screamed the loudest, what got you, who grabbed whom. That retelling turns a scary memory into a shared, funny one. Our data suggests that haunted houses alone aren’t enough. The scare gives you the raw material, and the conversation afterward is where the bond actually forms.”
Fear as a moral test
When she isn’t behind the scenes at a scare zone, Perreault studies horror films — treating them as “little moral laboratories” where audiences decide who’s good, who’s bad and who deserves to survive.
Perreault with her research, “Between Malevolence and Morality: Exploring the Dark Triad in Pop Culture.”
“Horror films put characters in life-or-death situations with split-second moral choices: who to save, who to trust and when it’s okay to fight back. Audiences make those judgements right along with them, fast and gut-level, with nothing actually at stake,” Perreault said. “You could never ethically put people in those situations in real life, but a movie does it for us.”
To study those reactions, Perreault combines traditional film analysis with physiological data. She codes each movie scene for moral content — moments of fairness, loyalty, betrayal, vulnerability and agency — and then lines those codes up with audience heart-rate data from the Science of Scare project. The dataset includes viewers’ baseline heart rate and their biggest spikes for each film, allowing her to see which moments make bodies react, not just minds.
“A survey tells you what someone thinks they felt,” she said. “Heart rate tells you what their body actually did.”
This research shows that viewers aren’t just reacting to gore or jump scares. They’re responding to moral stakes — moments of fairness, loyalty, betrayal and especially vulnerability. Using heartrate data from the Science of Scare project, Perreault lines up physiological spikes with the moral content of each film. The pattern is clear: audiences’ bodies react most intensely when a character’s safety or agency is on the line.
The “final girl” is a perfect example. She can stab, trap and outwit the killer, and audiences still see her as the hero.
“Once we file a character as a victim, almost nothing they do changes that,” Perreault said. “Same violence, different moral meaning depending on who we think is endangered.”
Two labs, one truth
At first glance, Perreault’s two labs — a “haunted” building full of scare actors and a quiet lab coding horror films — couldn’t be more different. But the same force drives both findings: vulnerability.
“In the haunted house, vulnerability brings people together,” Perreault said. “You get scared, you grab someone and you learn you can count on them.” That moment of reaching out — a hand on an arm, a laugh in the dark — becomes the spark for closeness that unfolds afterward.
On screen, vulnerability plays a different role. It shapes who audiences trust, who they forgive and who they believe deserves to survive. A character who’s hurt, cornered or grieving is instantly filed as a victim, and almost nothing they do afterward changes that. “Same violence, different moral meaning depending on who we think is endangered,” she said.
Whether it’s a real person clinging to a friend in a haunted house or a fictional character fighting back against a killer, fear exposes something essential: how we respond when someone is in danger. Perreault’s work shows that vulnerability doesn’t just make fear thrilling — it shapes our relationships, our judgments and the stories we tell about who we are when things get scary.