Cheap Thrills Help While Hot Nights Away

A waiter dressed as a zombie scares customers at a bar in Seoul on Monday.

Young people are turning to scary movies and other supernatural thrills to while away the sweltering summer nights, often in lieu of holidays they cannot afford.

Gwangmyeong city south of Seoul has been running a haunted-house theme park since 2014. It saw 720,000 visitors until July this year, up around 40 percent compared to the same period last year.

"We've seen a particular increase in the number of visitors in their 20s and 30s who are holidaying at home, perhaps because of the slow economy", a theme park staffer said.

A stage play about a haunted house that has been showing in Seoul since last year draws the highest number of visitors in the summer months. More than 5,000 people watched the play in July, up 20 percent on-year, and most were in their 20s.

Restaurants and bars are also capitalizing on the trend. One bar in Seokyo-dong in northwestern Seoul dims its lights at night and dresses waiters up as zombies. It has become so popular that patrons have to wait in line from 6 p.m.

A restaurant in Yeoksam-dong in southern Seoul decorated its walls with skulls and other bloody ornaments and serves drinks in intravenous fluid bottles. Owner Choi Min-joon (28) said, "It's a restaurant for those who enjoy a good scare. We get around 500 to 600 customers a day in the summer, up more than 30 percent compared to other months".

Tours of haunted houses and derelict schools are also popular, and they often stream accounts of bone-chilling encounters online.

There are five to six online clubs that recruit people for these tours. One 28-year-old student who went on one of them in the southern port city of Pohang said, "I wanted to experience fear, and visits to haunted houses don't cost a lot of money".