Last week I stood in front of a warehouse outside downtown Los Angeles, its exterior lit by errant street lamps and the glow of a supermoon. It was my fifth trip to the place, and over the past two months I’d been able to sit down for lengthy conversations with the alleged cult members inside. Some were people I was on a first-name basis with; others I’d chatted with on the phone, or taken brief rides with in their cars. I guess I considered them friends.
The front door opened and I stepped forward, passing a group of young women to my right — splattered with blood from head to toe. As I would soon find out, all of my friends inside were dead.
When I first visited The Tension Experience: Ascension last September, I approached it as part of the immersive horror scene in Los Angeles: shows that combined interactive theater and haunted house techniques to create a living, breathing world that audiences can roam and explore. And while I knew that director Darren Lynn Bousman and writer Clint Sears had conducted a 7-month alternate reality game that led up to the live show, I still assumed my visit would be a one-off experience. But in the weeks after that initial visit, I returned multiple times, engaged with the community that had sprung up around the show, and found myself enveloped in a multi-platform, fractured narrative that unfurled beneath my feet with every step.
The Tension Experience was more than an ARG, and it was more than a haunted house. A dramatically engaging, layered story experience that breathed new life into the ideas of transmedia storytelling, it raised the bar for the kind of emotional experiences that people can expect from the world of immersive theater — and it pulled it all off by making the audience part of the storytelling itself.
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Source: The Verge