When you think of SeaWorld, you most likely think of orcas, school trips to the aquarium, or eating chicken fingers while contemplating the ethics of marine mammal captivity. But this Halloween, the theme park franchise wants to make SeaWorld synonymous with something else entirely: BookTok smut.
On September 11, SeaWorld Orlando officially opened its annual Howl-O-Scream event, an after-hours Halloween-themed immersive experience featuring various “scare zones” in the park. Scattered between the more expected spooky fare, such as a haunted “Woodrot Hollow” forest and an I Know What You Did Last Summer–themed haunted house is Just One More Chapter, a BookTok-inspired zone featuring the hunky tortured bad boys of romantasy lore.
In videos posted by Orlando-based influencers who got an early look at the park, young men with masks, floppy hair, and painted-on abs gallivant around wearing black denim, loitering next to brick walls, beckoning to park attendees, and gifting them with roses. And on Instagram, influencers posed around a central set piece, an oversized book open to a chapter called “The Cathedral,” emblazoned with the slogan “Good Girls Go for the Bad Boys.”
Some of the TikToks from the scare zone went viral, garnering mixed reactions. “Booktok dark ‘romantasy’ cancer is RUINING heterosexuality,” wrote one X user, “every little tasteful drop of eros has to be squeezed out of everything so it can be refined into pure concentrated fucking CRINGE.” The fact that the event took place at SeaWorld, an amusement park franchise that is perhaps most closely associated with a harrowing documentary about an orca, also lent to the absurdity.
But I did speak to one content creator present at the scare zone who had an entirely different reaction. “I wouldn’t say it was scary,” said the creator, who declined to provide their name because they did not want to “jeopardize their relationship with SeaWorld.” “But it did leave me with a good feeling—I guess you could say a sexy feeling, in a way.”
According to Jessie Kinsey, the art director at SeaWorld Orlando, that was precisely the point. She came up with the idea for the event last year, after seeing romantasy bestsellers like Lights Out and Haunting Adeline go viral on TikTok. She knew that a dark romance-themed scare zone was not necessarily “something that you would expect from a traditional horror event,” but she had a feeling it would resonate with the BookTok girlies. “I remember texting my production manager, saying, ‘Don’t judge me, but I have an idea,’” she tells WIRED.
A fiction writer in her spare time (she actually wrote the text for the oversized book set piece at SeaWorld), Kinsey came up with the narrative for the zone: It would be set in a crumbling Gothic cathedral, built in a town run by a wealthy family called the Blackthorns. “These roses grew up around it, and created this beauty out of destruction,” Kinsey puts it. “Which I thought was kind of fitting for the themes of these books.”
Romantasy, or romance and fantasy, fuses mythology and supernatural figures such as faeries or demons with explicit sex scenes, exemplified by books like Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm and Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses series. The genre has exploded in popularity thanks to BookTok, with Bloomberg reporting that romantasy pulled in an estimated $610 million in 2024 alone. The male antiheroes of the genre, such as the “shadow-daddy” Rhysand in Maas’ A Court of Mist and Fury and dragon rider Xaden Riorson from Yarros’ Fourth Wing, are tortured, dangerous, (at best) morally complex, and egregiously hot.
The MMC—“male main character,” in fandom terms—is an amalgam of different romantasy tropes, a mysterious, vaguely threatening masked man represented by the eight scare actors employed in the zone. (In one video, one of them inexplicably wears KneeBlades and skids toward a prostrate guest and jumps over them.) For both narrative and legal reasons, they’re not based on any one specific character.
The infusion of the romance genre with themes of psychological manipulation, violence, or nonconsensual sex has led to criticism of the dark romantasy genre in general, and of the Just One More Chapter scare zone. But “the threatening nature” of the romantasy bad boys is why it works in a horror context, says Kinsey: “It’s a love story, but it’s not all sunshine. This is someone who is morally gray, who is potentially violent, who is obsessive, and that part of it is threatening. But that also plays into the appeal of it.”
On social media, some pointed out the potential for fans sexually harassing scare actors, a not-uncommon issue at Halloween theme park events. “Being a scare actor, it does come with risks regardless of what area of the park you’re working in, because not everyone reacts the same way to being startled or surprised when alcohol is involved,” Kinsey says. “But our actors’ safety is first and foremost.” She says the actors receive extensive training for how to deal with harassment, and that security and stage managers are always present to intervene if necessary.
So far, however, SeaWorld Orlando says that horny millennial ACOTAR fans haven’t posed too much of a problem—in fact, quite the opposite. Kinsey says the viral attention has translated into an explosion in ticket sales, with Howl-O-Scream enjoying its biggest month in the history of its six-year run. “I knew that it was going to get people talking, and I know that the genre isn’t for everyone, so it was going to be a bit controversial,” says Kinsey. “I did not expect the size of the reaction, but it’s kind of fun.” It is, dare we call it, a Howl-O-Scream.
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