COMING SOON: NIGHTCRAWLERS 2024

Last year the makers of “Berlin’s only queer immersive scare experience” reached out to us to let us know about the show. It was early in the days of the Coming Soon feature, and NIGHTCRAWLERS seemed odd and disturbing enough for our Spooky Season sensibilities that we offered up a featurette.

Well things went well enough last year that NIGHTCRAWLERS is back, once again beckoning audiences into the world of the Nightcrawlers: “monstrous beings who have been pushed into the shadows where they experience pleasure, lust, dignity and community on their own terms.”

We checked in with Jos Porath, Creative Director of NIGHTCRAWLERS about this year’s edition which runs Oct. 26th -31st.

This is No Proscenium’s COMING SOON, a look at ongoing immersive experiences & events. To learn more about how your event could be considered for the feature check out How To Get Covered By NoPro.

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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us about this year’s NIghtcrawlers? What makes it immersive?

Jos Porath: NIGHTCRAWLERS 2024 will be an adult immersive scare experience where the audience roam freely through 10 themed, multisensory microcosms, all dedicated to distinct facets of fear, and inhabited by a different Nightcrawler with a unique story to step into.

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This year’s NIGHTCRAWLERS is going much deeper with the immersion than last year’s run — instead of a walk-through Haunt with short “bursts” of interactive scenes, this year we invite the audience to linger, choose their own adventure, explore their limits and sink deeply into the horror.

NP: What lessons did you take from last year?

JP: You can’t rush fear! Last year’s audience experience was short but sweet, clocking in at a high intensity 30 minutes on average, and we felt like our audience hardly had a chance to get to know the Nightcrawlers. Because we are interested in really getting under the skin and working with dread, slow-build discomfort and the psychological ins and outs of what makes our audience’s skin crawl, this year we are letting our audience roam free, and we have doubled the amount of time they get in the Haunt. Everything depends on their choices, and so they can leave knowing that whatever they experienced would have never happened that way without them, truly putting them at the center of their experience.

NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?

JP: NIGHTCRAWLERS 2024 offers an unusual take on a full-contact adult scare experience: It is an all-out horror experience committed to dark and disturbing themings, twisted characters, multisensory gross-out moments, and intense physical and psychological interactions, without compromising on nuanced dramaturgy, artistic quality control, a certain poetry, and, most importantly, the audience’s agency, power to negotiate intensity and consent to their experience.

NP: What are the inspirations for this edition?

JP: In the past months of developing NIGHTCRAWLERS, Rob Zombie’s (directorial) back catalog, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer horror masterpiece I Saw the TV Glow, plus some late-night rabbit holes of online Alternate Reality Games like Marble Hornets were on my mind and undoubtedly impacted how NIGHTCRAWLERS has evolved. It’s a heady mix that embraces “low art” genre horror and internet culture, participatory storytelling, grungy aesthetics, nightmares as welcome escapism and queer kinship in the unlikeliest of places. I hope it shows.

NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?

JP: Have a sleepover and watch some found footage horror from the 1990s and 2000s, listen to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Backrooms soundtrack, stay up all night reading Julia Armfield’s short stories, and eat candy corn until you get sick.

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