Bar charges customers more depending on their heart rate

Halloween is almost upon us and plenty of people will already be planning their nights out to take advantage of spooky season.

While the kids are out trick or treating the adults get to enjoy a few more grown up activities like going out and drinking.

With that in mind Kraken Rum is putting together an immersive Halloween bar experience where the amount punters pay depends upon how much they can handle a fright.

Beneath where Victorian-era Clerkenwell Prison once stood in London lurks about 9,000 square feet of vaults which have come to be known as the Clerkenwell Catacombs, and it's here that the pop-up bar will welcome guests.

Kraken Rum

There's just one catch, everyone coming in will have to agree to wear a heart rate monitor and make their way through an 'immersive horror gauntlet' before they can reach the bar.

Kraken Rum calls it 'Screamfest VII: Shock Exchange', and the experience was designed alongside The Recreational Fear Lab to be as scary as possible.

This isn't all just to get people in the mood for Halloween, those who proved they had nerves of steel on the way to the bar will be able to enjoy lower priced cocktails.

If your heart is racing and you've been thoroughly spooked then you could pay full whack and be spending up to £7 a drink, but so long as you keep calm and carry on your drinks could go down to as little as £3 a pop.

Kraken Rum boasts that its scary gauntlet has been 'scientifically designed to test people's resilience to fear'.

Kraken Rum

The event is being held in London's Clerkenwell Catacombs between 26 and 28 October and while there's been plenty of demand for the £10 tickets you can join a waitlist to see if they can squeeze you in.

Anyone going to this Halloween event will have to sign a waiver, and those who are pregnant, claustrophobic, epileptic or have a heart condition are recommended not to give it a try.

For any in those groups, or those who'd like to give it a go but can't make it to the live event in London, there will be bars in Glasgow, Birmingham and Leeds offering VR experiences of the same ghoulish gauntlet.

They'll come with the same heart-monitoring technology used to determine if you'll be getting a discount on drinks or not.

Kraken Rum

Mathias Clasen from The Recreational Fear Lab explained why they were so proud of their creepy catacombs and the thinking behind monitoring guests heart rates.

They said: "An increase in heart rate is among the most well-known physiological indicators of fear and research has identified a range of stimuli that reliably induces fear in the average person.

"It is this knowledge that hosts of Screamfest VII have used in an event designed to heighten fear, and, by extension, heart rate.

"Hearts don’t lie, even in the presence of masking smiles."

Topics: Food And Drink, Halloween, London

Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

@MrJoeHarker