Halloween Horror Nights 2026: The Architecture of Fear | Thursday Thrills

Universal Orlando holds the first of its two 2026 Premium Scream Nights on August 27, followed by the regular Halloween Horror Nights event opening on August 28 - and this week's Thursday Thrills goes inside the architecture of fear. Rather than rank haunted houses before they open, Henrique Couto asks what a walk-through attraction can do to our bodies and imaginations that a horror movie cannot.

The answer begins inside a real haunted-house experiment, where visitors wore heart-rate monitors while researchers studied the strange overlap between fear and enjoyment. Their findings showed a group-level inverted-U association across three recorded scare points...