Terrifying Minds, Horrifying Bodies and Evolving Horror Forms: Progressive Horror Making and the Immersive Horror Experience (Fright Night in NI)

In this chapter, we participate in, and analyse, an immersive horror environment, Fright Night in rural Northern Ireland, so that we might better understand popular interactive environments which speak to body and mind, that draw on the narrative, aesthetic and technical components of screen horror, summoning them from the screen and into material experience, allowing the genre’s intellectual property to subvert and pervade socio-cultural spaces. Our aim is threefold: to offer insight on the overlooked material and sensorial nature of horror; to explore how emerging experiential fear-based entertainment is made; and to examine how such physical, participatory and visceral experiences might be a useful means with which to explore and excavate peculiarly dark and labyrinthine cultural histories.