Scream Score® Brings Biometric Fear Measurement to Horror Entertainment

Invented in 2023, Scream Score® uses heart-rate data to measure physiological responses to fear during haunted attractions and horror movies.

BALTIMORE, MD, UNITED STATES, October 7, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Horror fans have long debated which haunted houses and movies are actually scary. Scream Score^® offers a different way to settle the argument: measure the body’s response.

Invented by zoologist and immersive-experience designer Heather Doggett, Scream Score^® is a biometric entertainment technology that uses changes in heart rate during scary experiences to generate a personalized score. The technology was conceived and developed for the haunted-attraction industry beginning in 2023, publicly demonstrated in 2024, and became publicly available in 2025.

The latest version of Scream Score^® released September 2026, expands the experience beyond haunted attractions to include horror movies, personal profiles and group experiences. Users can compare scores with friends, compete and claim bragging rights over who actually got the most scared.

“People have been arguing about what is scary forever,” said Doggett, founder and inventor of Scream Score^®. “I wanted to give people a way to settle the argument. Not ‘Was that scary?’ but ‘How scared did you actually get?’”

The idea began with a personal question. When Doggett’s then-14-year-old wanted to visit a particularly intense haunted attraction, she wondered whether there was a way to understand how much fear an experience actually produced.

As a zoologist and longtime experience designer, Doggett began exploring whether the body’s response to fear could be measured and translated into an engaging entertainment experience. That work became Scream Score^®.

“I realized there was a gap between saying something is scary and actually measuring a person’s response to it,” Doggett said. “I wanted to turn that invisible experience into something people could see, compare and play with.”

Scream Score^® has been tested in haunted attractions and at horror-industry events, including the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival, where the technology was used across 28 films. It has also been demonstrated at events serving the haunted-attraction and immersive-entertainment industries.

Scream Score^® is designed for entertainment, not medical or diagnostic use. The system is built around anonymous scoring and does not seek to identify individual users through their physiological responses. The company does not sell users’ biometric information to advertisers or other businesses.

The app is currently available on compatible iPhone and Apple Watch devices, with Android availability also supported. Scream Score^® is a DBA of Immerse Universe LLC and is currently patent pending.

Doggett brings more than 30 years of experience designing visitor and audience experiences across the zoo, aquarium and immersive-entertainment industries. She has spoken at national conferences and was named a Blooloop Top 50 Immersive Influencer.

About Scream Score^®

Scream Score^® is a biometric entertainment technology that measures physiological responses to fear and translates them into a score people can understand, compare and share. Originally developed for haunted attractions, the technology is expanding across horror, immersive entertainment and other experiences where audiences want to know just how scared they really were.

Tracking Chills | Measuring Thrills^®

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