Thorpe Park’s Fright Nights is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, running on selected nights from 2nd October to 1st November, and its headline addition is Tenement – billed as the park’s first fully immersive, pitch-black scare maze. According to Time Out, guests are given nothing but a faulty handheld light to guide them through the darkness, past reflections, illusions, and sensory jump scares.
A torch that flickers at precisely the wrong moment, a scream timed to the second you turn a corner, a figure that lunges only when you’re close enough: none of it is left to chance. Strip away the fake blood and the fog, and a modern scare attraction looks remarkably like any other connected system. Sensors detect people, a controller decides what happens next, and actuators fire with millisecond timing.
So what does the technology behind a scream actually look like?
The sensing layer: knowing where you are
Every good scare starts with detection. The most common building block is the infrared beam or PIR sensor. At Cincinnati’s Dent Schoolhouse, for example, visitors trip infrared sensors as they walk through, setting off events that include inflating air bags in its Claustrophobia room.
Others have moved beyond simple tripwires. Austin’s House of Torment swaps conventional sensor triggers for infrared video cameras that track where guests are throughout the building – an early form of the computer vision now common in smart buildings and retail analytics. One Denver haunt went further still, reportedly using giant animatronics driven by Microsoft Kinect technology to detect individual guests and interact with them.
The floor is wired too. Industry body America Haunts singles out hidden floor sensors as one of the core technologies behind today’s most advanced attractions. Its 2025 round-up of the most technologically innovative US haunts describes Baltimore’s Bennett’s Curse using motion-sensing effects that respond to each guest’s footsteps, alongside AI-driven scare timing and branching pathways that change the order in which horrors appear.
Once an attraction knows where each group is, it can do more than fire a fixed sequence. It can adapt pacing, vary the route, and make sure no two visits feel the same – the same shift from static automation to context-aware response that IoT has brought to factories and buildings.
The control layer: from PLCs to networked show control
Detection is only useful if something acts on it. For years, that something was the programmable logic controller – the same industrial workhorse found on production lines. When James Travis III joined Philadelphia’s Terror Behind the Walls, staged inside the historic Eastern State Penitentiary, the attraction ran its sound, lighting, and animatronics on PLCs. He told Technical.ly they were hard to learn, and the team later moved to more intuitive, custom-ordered controllers from Canadian supplier Fright Ideas. Motion and reflective light sensors trigger the timing of scares, and actors know where those sensors sit so they can step over them.
At the more sophisticated end, haunts now run on the kind of networked architecture you’d expect in a theatre or theme park. Entertainment Sciences Group’s Venue Magic, for instance, is a show-control system that ties together audio, video, animatronics, and DMX lighting and is widely used across the haunt industry. Its CEO, Don Nolan, told My TechDecisions that light beams and motion sensors keep the action tied to each visitor’s progress, rather than running predictable loops.
The Gravesend Inn, a student-built haunt at New York City College of Technology, shows how far this can go. According to the same article, its video is managed by a Medialon show and event control system on a managed network of 24 Cisco switches and seven VLANs, with audio carried over a Dante network. Sounds are triggered by motion and other sensors via OSC (Open Sound Control) messages from the Medialon system, played back through QLab.
Orchestrating the senses
The output side of the system has grown well beyond a speaker and a strobe. In its 2025 list of the most technologically innovative US haunts, America Haunts describes Atlanta’s NETHERWORLD as having more than 450 activated special effects in its two new attractions, with synchronised lighting, AI-enhanced soundtracks, water blasts, and scent effects. Kansas City’s Beast combines AI holographic projections with motion-activated fog, scent, and vibration, while San Diego’s Haunted Trail of Balboa Park uses projection-mapped scare zones and motion-sensor creatures along an outdoor trail.
Integrator JD Systems told My TechDecisions that it spreads many small speakers around a space and positions them to maximise reflections, so visitors can’t tell where a noise is coming from. It also uses battery-powered LED fixtures, recharged during the day, to avoid trailing cables that could break the illusion. At the Gravesend Inn, each speaker is assigned to a specific moment in the story, so visitors effectively create their own crossfades as they move through the building.
People remain part of the loop, too. At Terror Behind the Walls, Technical.ly reported that actors can control lighting and sound themselves, on the basis that a human often times a scare better than any trigger. Guests who opt in to a more intense experience wear a glow necklace that tells actors they can be touched or pulled into hidden passages.
Smart scares comes home
The same building blocks are now finding their way into people’s homes. US retailer The Home Depot’s 2026 Halloween collection includes a 12ft SKELLY skeleton with an app that lets owners customise servo-driven head and mouth movements, record up to 30 sounds, choose from 20 LCD eye effects, and speak through the figure in real time over Bluetooth.
The rest of the range follows suit. A 7ft witch figure, Lethal Lily, is app-controlled, with custom phrases and five adjustable movements. A new 11ft mummy uses motion-activated LED illumination, while an animatronic parrot uses what the retailer calls conversational technology to answer visitors’ yes-or-no questions.
What’s lurking next?
AI-driven scare timing, AI holographic projections, and AI-run interactive phone lines all feature in America Haunts’ most recent innovation round-up, so it’s clear that AI has a big role to play in ramping up the scare factor this Halloween.
Wearables are an obvious next step. Today’s opt-in glow necklace could become a tag that tells the system who has asked for an extra scare, and the industry could even look at biometric sensing to measure fear directly. Although that will raise the same questions of consent and data handling that follow any personal sensing technology.
Either way, technology is becoming scarily advanced!
