“Red tourism” serves political and educational functions. It could take dark tourism sites as the spatial basis for constructing the red experience, with patriotism cultivation as the result. Taking the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders as a case study, this research integrates field survey data, spatial luminosity, and user-generated content. It explores how the museum space unifies the spiritual production of body (visual darkness), experience (dark and red experiences), and patriotism, illustrates how the official discourse constructs the sites as a red experience, and demonstrates the process of transforming abstract history into individual psychological experiences through bodily and personal narration. Furthermore, this research constructs an approach from individual to collective emotion and the production mechanism of patriotism. The study offers a new reference for tourism experience and provides a highly representative case and theoretical analysis for “dark” and “red” tourism. Display omitted •Explores the “red” tourism which is often located at dark sites.•Synthesizes the on-site visual data and UGC data.•Illustrates how the use of narration and illuminance generate the red experiences.•Found the red experience including anger, sadness, mourning, respect, remembrance.•Identified the production of patriotic feelings through an embodied ritual process.