N.J. has an insatiable demand for fright. How scare actors tap into your deepest fears.

The trembling wife tiptoes into the sanctuary, desperate to escape without being noticed.

The lights are low. The music is dark. She enters cautiously with her eyes glued to her husband’s back and her hands gripping his shoulders as if she wishes she had never come to Brighton Asylum.

But it’s already too late.

A body covered in a white sheet pops up from one of the pews. A gray-faced, chain-swinging nun charges toward her.

“I smell the sin on this one,” snaps a haunting, blood-stained figure lounging on the remains of a broken cross. “Naughty, naughty sinner.”

The tall, blonde-haired guest shrieks and shakes. The nun charges again and barks like a dog. An air cannon fires from under the pulpit.

“They did not confess their sins,” the demented figure on the cross taunts in a harsh, strained voice as the couple hurries out of the room, the wife on the verge of tears.

A few minutes later, Lexi Fisektsis laughs about her performance as Marie, the escaped asylum patient on the cross.

“There is no mercy,” Fisektsis, 32, says during a short break between scares. “I’m enjoying the heck out of it.”

Greetings from the high-stakes, low-inhibition world of scare acting, where horror is required, terror is encouraged and depravity is limited only by your own imagination (and maybe the occasional straightjacket).

Halloween is no longer merely a holiday, but a growing and influential subculture driving an $11 billion seasonal industry. It inspires legions of fanatics and fuels an insatiable demand for fear. Sure, any Halloween junkie can watch a slasher film on Netflix or spend $299.99 on a talking animatronic. Yet nothing brings the essence of Halloween to life, apparently, like being chased by a stranger with a chainsaw.

But not just any stranger. A well-trained, impeccably costumed stranger who just might have professional acting credits.

“We love the adrenaline rush,” says Wayne’s Anna Ledwozyw, standing first in line at the Passaic haunted house with her son David, 13, a half hour before doors open. “Not knowing what is going to scare us next is exciting. The scarier the better.”

I’ve come to Brighton Asylum on Friday, Oct. 18, the kickoff to the chaotic final stretch of the haunting season, to try to understand why anyone in their right mind would subject themselves to either side of this twisted transaction.

I quickly learn that scare acting is an art form, raw and animalistic and physically and emotionally draining. Yet the people behind the makeup have long felt overlooked and underappreciated, oft-dismissed as a bunch of half-baked, fully buzzed teens pulled from a back alley.

In reality, several Brighton Asylum performers are classically trained actors deeply committed to playing characters with surprisingly detailed backstories, like the butler who ate his twin in the womb, dooming him to a life of cannibalism. Many others were introduced to the dark art of the scare by friends who worked at Brighton or fell into it through their own love of Halloween.

Just like in Hollywood, scare actors bring their own egos, dreams of starring in larger roles and an apparent love-hate relationship with the media — “I don’t do interviews,” one brand new actor says before disappearing into the darkness. But whatever brought them here, their job is one of the industry’s most unique.

A scare actor can never break character, must constantly improvise and gets just one take to deliver a scream, all under the specter of verbal or physical retribution from guests.

“And that, to me, is quite a challenge,” says Cameron Knight, head of the acting program at Rutgers University, who I call for assurance that this is really as hard as it seems.

But there are perks beyond the paycheck — think minimum wage, although some actors do earn more.

Scaring has long been the domain of the outcasts, the misfits, the marginalized and the ignored. Many scare actors at Brighton Asylum come from jobs in the service industry, including Bella Rose Iannice, an affable 25-year-old with curly brown hair who waits tables at The Cheesecake Factory when not playing the sadistic nun.

By day, she serves up Glamburgers and Mexicali salads in hopes of a decent tip. By night, the Totowa woman with a film degree is handed a skeleton key to other peoples’ brains with full consent to unlock their deepest, darkest fears.

Brighton is a world that she controls, her own escape from reality.

“That gives me more than just a thrill,” Iannice says. “It feels like I have power over their emotions to control them.”

‘We’re not Disney’

Brighton Asylum is best described using words my editors won’t print. So let’s just call it a 40,000-square-foot adrenaline rush from hell.

The two-story haunt opened in 2011 inside a nondescript former rubber factory, nestled between a dense residential neighborhood and a thicket of trees lining the NJ Transit tracks.

Its fictional backstory claims the asylum housed mentally unstable and psychologically damaged individuals in the mid-1940s until it was closed in 1952 for “extremely harsh living conditions, grotesque medical experiments, staff disappearances, and screams spilling into the residential areas during the night.”

Now it’s a full-scale assault on the senses, featuring a hex room, a doll room, a serial killer room, a Pennywise room, a cave and a pitch-black padded cell. There’s also a giant snake, a giant alligator, a giant shark and a Venus flytrap that closes on guests (you know, for good measure).

And then there’s the narrow passageways, air cannons, optical illusions, falling lamps and pipes, not to mention the blood, the half-eaten brains, the dead bodies strung up by chains or the horror movie soundtrack that would be scary enough just listening to it from home.

Throw in 50-plus actors popping out from under tables and behind walls, and you have one of the most popular haunted attractions in New Jersey for $55 a pop.

Oh, did I mention there’s a chainsaw?

“We’re not Disney, you know. We’re not this goody-two-shoes haunt,” says Frankie Peracchio, 31, a Brighton performer who once scared a woman so badly she peed herself and had to be removed from the attraction. “People will walk in and walk right out the entrance and be like, ‘Nope, nope. nope,’ and power walk around the line and leave.”

Brighton owner Rich Gonci, 49, has been a Halloween fanatic since childhood and began working haunts in the early 2000s. He rents the space year-round — it’s his full time job — and constantly tweaks the attraction, which now offers other seasonal events like Dark Valentine, Midsummer Scream Fest and the popular Santa’s Slay, featuring zombie elves and rabid reindeer.

The second an attraction closes, work begins on reconstructing and reconfiguring for the next.

“Insurance costs are high. Rent costs are high. Payroll is high. And people expect you to change every single year,” Gonci says. “It’s quite cost prohibitive.”

And yet totally worth it, whether for a couple hundred customers in late September or thousands on a peak October night.

“It’s like going through your own horror movie,” Gonci says. “Inducing fear, inducing excitement, just bringing those emotions to the forefront… people are longing for that.”

The origin of haunted houses is often traced to 19th century Europe, where a London exhibit showed off wax sculptures of famous French heads decapitated by the guillotine. But the practice of scaring one another? That must be as old as time itself, says Bayonne’s Yasmin Yarosh, who plays the shrieking, frenetic Brighton Banshee.

“I think it’s been going since cavemen, honestly,” says Yarosh, a warm 29-year-old with long brown hair and an angelic voice perfect for her day job as a kindergarten teaching assistant. “I think having that adrenaline, it’s in our blood, like it’s already psychologically there. It’s always been there.”

She’s not wrong. Fear is not only good, according to Anna Marks, a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner at Virtua Health. It’s necessary for staying alive.

Fear activates our brain in a way that contextualizes memories and reminds us what to avoid, she says. Our blood pressure spikes. Our heart rate jumps. We become so hyperaware of the perceived danger that we can’t possibly think about anything else.

But after the threat passes, our brains are cleansed of mundane worries like work deadlines and getting the kids to practice on time, leaving a hit of dopamine and a sense of relief.

“People go to haunted houses because the antelope never feels more alive than when it just escaped a lion,” says Allen Hopps, a Texas-based haunted house owner who trains scare actors. “We’re giving guests a chance to escape the lion.”

But the bar for what’s scary keeps escalating in a world oversaturated with horror movies, video games and immersive experiences, according to Hopps.

“We have to make the audience say, ‘How did they do that?’” he says.

All of this raises the stakes for scare actors, says Rex B. Hamilton, a traveling scare actor from Cleveland with “an ego the size of North Dakota” and a business card that reads, “Terror is my business.”

Hamilton, a tall 74-year-old, waves me over to his makeup chair, where his face is being airbrushed for a role screeching at people at Brighton, the 118th haunted house he’s worked at since 1974, he says.

Haunted houses once could get by with popular stock characters like Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, he says. Now they need their own unique characters, experiences and environments.

Brighton’s main characters have become the face of the brand, roaming outside to haunt customers waiting in line, participating during shows and sometimes moving inside to support the pop-out actors.

Peracchio’s Frankie the Patient character snuck into the asylum, as the backstory goes, because he feels there’s more order inside than in the outside world, and he can take advantage of the real patients. Now he’s everywhere, shaking the security railing, charging at unsuspecting women, warning people to “check under your car” and pushing a wheelchair with a mutilated, bloody mannequin that he calls his wife.

Fisektsis’ Marie was patient No. 69420, tortured with shock therapy before she broke out of her restraints, killed a doctor named Marie, stole her name and ran free. She toggles between accents and personalities — a side effect of the shock therapy — but typically sounds like a combination of an angry Russian and Steve Carell’s Gru from “Despicable Me.”

The most savage is the Brighton Banshee, Yarosh’s new character. She’s constantly falling, crawling and trying to free herself from a cage-like helmet that she must wear for punishment, all while swallowing bottles of pills and repeatedly screaming for the “doc-tooooooor.”

“Every single scare, every type of scare, is equally important,” says Gonci, in part because that’s what the customer reviews tell him and because he doesn’t want anyone thinking there is a hierarchy.

One of the best parts of scare acting is the instant feedback. Graham MacCardle, an almost 11-year-old from Caldwell, flees from his first haunted house without finishing.

“My mom told me if I don’t look at them, they can’t scare me,” he says innocently. “But that didn’t work, because they kept creeping up on me from behind.”

‘This takes a lot of guts’

At 7:20 p.m., the lights in the makeup room go dark, and Brighton Asylum is ready to open.

“My Taser?” an actor hurriedly calls from the bottom of a staircase.

“I’ll get it to you,” general manager Conor Lenahan yells back. “You gotta hide.”

Soon, the scare actors are attacking the queue line in full force as screams from inside and outside the attraction cut through the nervous chatter and repeated warnings not to touch the performers.

Fisektsis, in character as Marie, has a one-sided conversation with a pumpkin. Frankie the Patient charges toward a crowd, and a grown woman almost falls in shock. Ricky Soto, who plays the flesh-eating butler, squeals like a pig and gets within inches of a startled teen, saying, “You came out nice and juicy tonight.”

Yarosh, just hours removed from a school field trip to the pumpkin patch, lurks outside the porta potty with her real-life boyfriend, Joe Guardino, a delivery driver who plays Charles Manson during haunt season. The door swings open. Michael Wagenstein, a thrill-seeking New Yorker on a first date with a woman he met online, jerks backward, shouting in terror.

Every September, Brighton Asylum has open auditions. No masks. No makeup. No music. Think you’re scary? Go into a room with the lights on and prove it.

Fisektsis, a preschool special education paraprofessional who lives in Secaucus, was a long-time customer interested in joining the dark side. So she went to the tryouts five years ago and found herself on the set of the morgue.

“I found a mannequin that was in the corner, and I acted like I was gnawing at his neck,” she says. “I jerked my head to the side. And I was like, ’No, leave me. This is my meal.’ And I just started eating at the mannequin like an animal. I started crawling on the floor. I started bending backwards. I started just making weird shrieks… This weird character just came over me.”

Needless to say, she has the right stuff.

“The amount of stress I release is great,” she says. “It’s such a good feeling, like I’ll still be in character, but inside, I’m like, ‘Sweet! I got them.’”

Thirty years ago, the typical scare actor was a young man with long hair wearing a Metallica T-shirt, says Hopps, the veteran haunter who got his start at 10 years old. Today, it’s a young woman with short green or blue hair and a lot of friends who are gender fluid.

Haunted houses foster their own alternative culture, Hopps says, because they are accepting of different backgrounds, viewpoints and genders.

“We’re like the misfits of the world,” Iannice says, “and Halloween is the time to come out of your shell and shine.”

But not everyone is cut out for scaring.

The best scare actors typically offer one of two things, according to Soto: an explosive physical scare (think charging at someone or popping out of hiding) or an explosive verbal scare (like Yarosh’s signature “doc-tooooooor”).

Yarosh has an associate’s degree in acting from Hudson County Community College and cut her teeth in traditional stage acting, like playing Catherine in a stage production of “Pippin.” Some skills translate. But nothing quite compares to the challenge of scare acting.

“This takes a lot of guts to do, to just interact with a complete stranger with that confidence,” Yarosh says.

But haunting is empowering.

“That is just something that I find, honestly, just entertaining and amusing,” Iannice says. “And it does help my self love towards myself.”

The rules of the performance are simple. Always scare forward. Don’t touch the guests. Never scare on the stairs. And most importantly, “Never hold back. Never do the bare minimum. Always strive,” says Peracchio, who estimates he’s scared nearly 50,000 people over his nine years at Brighton Asylum.

Peracchio is tall and energetic with shoulder-length brown hair that he covers in wax to appear white and crusty. He took four years of acting classes at a drama school in Clifton, but his primary source of income right now is working as an associate at Kohl’s, where he gets praised for “interacting with people so nicely.”

“Sometimes I want to scare them,” he says. “I have to hold back.”

He’s emerged as a star at Brighton because of his rare ability to read people, both scaring and entertaining them, Gonci says.

Fans come seeking Frankie’s autographs. Random women slide into his DMs. A couple drives down from Massacchusets and asks for a photo with him — “We actually follow him on instagram,” they tell me proudly.

The success is “surreal,” but gives Peracchio hope he will act onscreen someday.

“The days that sometimes he’s not here, people notice,” Gonci says. “They say, ‘Where was Frankie? I was looking for Frankie.’”

Fisektsis, who is all of 5-foot-1 with short dark hair, gets a different reaction when she tells people she is a scare actor.

Wait! You mean, you scare people for a living?

But the people who know her really well?

“They go, ‘Yeah, I can see you doing that,’” she laughs.

‘Blood everywhere’

Blood oozes from Yarosh’s skin as her co-workers form a circle around her.

She fell on the pavement about an hour into the show and has a golf-ball sized scrape above her left knee. Now she sits on the makeup room floor with her pant leg rolled up under the glow of a flashlight.

“I didn’t want to get blood on the costume,” Yarosh says without a hint of irony.

She screams and winces as a staff EMT pours peroxide over the wound and bandages it.

“I just wanted to get it covered so I can go back out,” she says. “I’m going back out. I’m going right back out.”

Scare acting is inherently dangerous. The physical toll can feel like purgatory when actors are setting, scaring and resetting over and over again for nights on end, Yarosh says. She’s worked under tables and beneath floors and has whisked guests down a hallway in a wheelchair. It’s always a mystery how many bruises she’ll find and SnapChat to her friends the next morning.

“We make it so the guests are uncomfortable,” says Hopps, the Texas haunt guru. “And then we ask the actor to hang out in that same area for six hours. So that’s the main reason why folks don’t make it.”

Actors need to be engaged in the performance for hours on end, the last scare just as vibrant, terrifying and important as the first, says Soto, 33, who serves as a Brighton Asylum acting coach when not playing the mad butler, Madison Addison Davenport.

“It’s Frankie!” Yarosh shouts, reappearing in front of the audience.

“Where were you?” he calls back.

“I got a boo, boo,” she shrieks. “There was blood everywhere.”

Reality can wait until morning.

The show must go on.

Brighton Asylum is open Thursday through Sunday and runs through Nov. 2.

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Adam Clark may be reached at aclark@njadvancemedia.com.