Halloween has quietly become the busiest time of year for Zero Latency VR, the Melbourne-founded free-roam virtual reality network that now runs more than 150 venues across 34 countries. This spooky season marks two anniversaries at once: three years since the launch of Outbreak, its free-roam zombie survival shooter, and one year since Haunted, its immersive take on the classic haunted house. To mark the double milestone, the company called in an expert to answer a simple question — why do people willingly pay to be terrified?
Enter Dr. Coltan Scrivner, a research scientist at Arizona State University who specialises in what he calls "recreational fear": that odd cocktail of dread and delight that keeps us queuing for haunted houses, horror films and survival games. He is the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away, and his work has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, CNN, The Economist, NPR and Scientific American.
Scrivner's argument is that scaring yourself on purpose is genuinely good for you. Humans are, in his words, built to play with the things that frighten them, and doing so is a low-stakes way to practise regulating fear and anxiety. Simulating a stressful situation — ideally with friends — shows you how you actually react under pressure. And free-roam VR, he argues, is uniquely good at this: it can trigger real fear while keeping a playful psychological frame that keeps the experience fun rather than traumatising. After trying both attractions, he said he had never encountered a horror game as immersive as Haunted or Outbreak, calling them scarier and more fun than he expected.
Zero Latency's CEO Tim Ruse puts it more bluntly: the company has spent over eleven years perfecting the jump scare, and if guests don't leave Outbreak with an elevated heart rate, or Haunted feeling slightly rattled, they haven't done their job. Having a PhD confirm that's a healthy outcome is, he admits, a nice bonus.
For travellers who like their entertainment with an adrenaline spike, there are two Halloween double-features on offer this season. One pairs Haunted with Undead Arena, a post-apocalyptic zombie shooter styled as a game show. The other combines Outbreak with its sequel, Outbreak 2: Mall Mayhem, for a full hour of continuous zombie survival. Both are available at Zero Latency venues worldwide, so you can slot one into almost any city break — from Tokyo to Toronto to, fittingly, Melbourne, where it all began.
It's a growing niche worth knowing about if you plan trips around experiences rather than sights: location-based VR has matured well beyond the clunky demos of a few years ago, and free-roam formats — where you physically walk through large play spaces untethered — are the current high-water mark. If your idea of a holiday includes at least one activity that gets your heart pounding, this is an easy hour to add to an itinerary, ideally with a group of friends whose screaming you enjoy. Source: Laotian Times.
