A town built on film and TV is looking towards the next generation of entertainment. Audiences associate the word “horror” with scary movies or terrifying novels. But over the past half-decade, live theater and haunted house exhibits have merged, bringing new life to the genre with interactive, real-world experiences that let audiences step through the screen and into their own personal tales of terror. In The Future of Fear, we’re talking to the creators of some of the most striking, immersive horror experiences to see how they’re taking the genre in directions it’s never gone before.
Over the past month I’ve been indoctrinated into a cult, had my wife kidnapped by vampires, and been choked to the ground by a mad king while searching for a mystical land called Conscientia. And I did it all within a four-mile radius in Los Angeles.
For a city that’s rightly considered more of a home to film and television, Los Angeles has been making strides over the past five years, establishing itself as a fertile playground for artists interested in exploring the worlds of immersive horror and interactive theater. Fueled by Southern California’s active haunted house scene, they’re pushing storytelling in daring new directions — and are on the brink of bringing immersive entertainment mainstream.
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Above: Imagery from Screenshot Productions’ The Rope.
It’s a tradition that actually dates back to the 1980s in LA, long before Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More began its iconic New York run. That’s when John Krizanc’s play Tamara took up shop at Hollywood’s American Legion Hall for a multi-year residency. Starring Anjelica Huston, Tamara was a groundbreaker, inviting audiences to move freely through a recreated Italian villa while the characters walked, talked, and interacted around them. Despite that head start, however, the immersive theater scene in Los Angeles stalled out, and it wasn’t untilJon Braver’s interactive horror play Delusion opened in 2011 — and the extreme haunted house Blackoutcame to town a year later — that the community began to develop newfound momentum.
“The scene was fairly anemic,” says Noah Nelson, creator of No Proscenium, a newsletter and podcast devoted to chronicling immersive theater productions across the country. “There were a couple of companies here and there. There were people experimenting with the form, some of whom have walked away, but it’s not cheap to put these things on.” In 2013 local upstarts like The Speakeasy Society began experimenting with small, personal shows staged in private homes, but for most audiences their first taste of immersive theater came from an entirely different avenue: haunted houses.
Eaton wasn’t alone in his fascination, as both fans and other creatives saw the introduction of live theater elements as the logical evolution of the horror scene. “The line is getting so blurred, because haunts are becoming more interactive,” says Eaton’s co-host, Mike Fontaine. “You have things like The Tension Experience. You have things like Blackout, and Delusion, where you become a part of the story. You can actually interact, and that’s the biggest thing that has been happening, year after year.
“Southern California’s scare scene has been anchored for years by attractions like Knott’s Scary Farm and Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights, but shows like Delusion and Blackout incorporated real actors and a sense of narrative; they were interactive experiences, not just a parade past a series of expertly-timed jump scares. “I attended Blackout the very first year that it was here in Los Angeles,” says Russell Eaton, one half of My Haunt Life, a podcast that tracks Southern California “haunts” and immersive theater. “I’m a [film and TV] editor by trade, and it was such a unique form of storytelling. It was non-linear, it was a live event, and yet it didn’t tell a traditional story. You had to gain a lot from it through your own interpretation. You had to participate.”
One of the people that saw that early Blackout show was Nicholas Sherwin, Jr., who felt so impacted by the experience that he ended up working for the company behind the productions as a stage manager and production manager. In a trend of pay-it-forward inspiration that seems to repeat throughout the LA community, Sherwin eventually started his own immersive theater company, Screenshot Productions, which has been garnering attention for its unique shows that combine existential themes that expand well beyond Sherwin’s roots in immersive horror.
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Source: The Verge