Joe Pinsker: Do you have a sense of how the haunted-house industry is doing right now? Is it a pretty stable industry? Was it hurt by the recession?

Margee Kerr: I would love to know the truth, but there is a very disorganized haunted-attraction association. They all view each other as competitors, so they don't share numbers, or what works or what doesn't. Are hay rides doing well, versus indoor attractions? It's also hard because there's no standard for what a haunted house is. So the guy down the street opening up his house for one night a year and charging $5 is being lumped in with a place like ScareHouse, which is operating year-round and bringing in thousands of people.

Pinsker: It's really funny to hear you say this. Part of my job is a slow realization that everything that I assumed as a kid to be ragtag and impromptu, like baseball cards, are the result of a series of sophisticated business calculations and planning. So it's funny to hear that this is really a part of the world where it truly is as disorganized as I imagined it to be.

Kerr: Yeah, I think that a lot of the mega-haunts today are doing thousands of people. They grew out of the sort of old-school, tied-to-a-church, family-friendly haunts. Just in the past three years, I’ve seen a big trade show, a haunted-attraction show, but new people in the industry are not going to a lot of these trade shows. I think the next generation of haunters are much more progressive and much more forward-thinking, and they're not really lumping themselves in with this old guard of haunted houses. But I think people are coming to expect more from haunted houses, and so that is leading to smaller haunts not doing as well or just closing altogether.

Pinsker: I read in your book that after going through the data collected by the haunted house you worked at, you predicted the rise of zombies back in the late 2000s. Can you talk a bit about that? Do you have any theories about why zombies had their moment?

Kerr: Yeah, that was really fun. I remember getting that data set and looking at it thinking, "Wow, zombies are really starting to be a thing." That was before The Walking Dead. It was right after the recession. 2008, 2009 is when a lot of Millennials were graduating from college or just entering college. I think that it was sort of speaking to this fear that they were going out into the world with no real hope. I don't have any evidence to support a theory like this, but I think that they were really concerned that the apocalypse was going to happen in their generation. I think that the zombie narrative probably landed a pretty good connection with them—all hope is gone and it's a man-eat-man world trying to get jobs.

Pinsker: What’s the single best example that comes to mind of a feature that now exists in the haunted house as a result of collecting all this data and figuring out what people wanted?