COMING SOON: NIGHTCRAWLERS 2025
“Fear is sweeter when you let it fester.” Berlin’s immersive haunt is back for 2025.
Halloween is almost upon us, and like clockwork NIGHTCRAWLERS returns to Berlin to disturb and disrupt the German capital’s Octoberfests.
We’ve put the ultraviolet spotlight on NIGHTCRAWLERS before (2023, 2024, and for this season we wanted to know what’s new and different about the show. So we checked in with NIGHTCRAWLERS Creative Director Jos Porath about the latest instance of the show which runs Oct. 25–31 and which they liken to “a dance with horror.”
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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Jos Porath: NIGHTCRAWLERS is Berlin’s only immersive horror experience in the tradition of Halloween Haunts and a love letter to monstrosity. This year’s run will be a 360 degree immersive walkthrough haunt, with “bursts” of intense interactive scenes. We have designed an environment over three floors in an old industrial building, and are inviting our audience to explore 15 themed spaces, dedicated to different facets of one Nightcrawler’s twisted mind, running through the experience as its mainline. The spaces are inhabited by 15 characters, all fragments of the Nightcrawler’s violent biography and dark imagination.
NP: You’re bringing NIGHTCRAWLERS back, what’s different this time around?
JP: We took stock of what had worked well in previous runs in year 1 (walkthrough, interactive, camp body horror) and year 2 (freeroaming, participatory, psychosexual mumblegore). Their 2025 lovechild is a densely ambient, grungy world where everything is characterized by its unique relationship to violence, dreamy and depraved. The audience is guided through the experience in small groups of six, but will have some agency over how long and intense their interactions along the way are, including the option of observing rather than directly participating if they prefer, without losing out on having a rich experience. With an extended running time of 45–60 minutes, we hope that the audience will sink even deeper into the horror.
In the past, we cycled through self-contained microcosm sitting alongside one another. This year, we decided to pull the focus on one particular Nightcrawler’s mind instead, digging deep into a more psychological mode of storytelling. The Nightcrawler at the core of the experience contains bleak multitudes, of course, and so the experience will be as multifaceted as previous runs, but spiraling down a narrow funnel of obsessions, fantasies, nightmares and appetites.
NP: What have you learned since last time that you’re excited to share with fans of immersive experiences?
JP: Fear is sweeter when you let it fester, at least the kind we are interested in, the one that stays with you beyond the haunt itself. To this end, we integrated winding liminal spaces, unnerving multisensory installations and haunting physical performance alongside adrenaline spiking scares and demanding one-on-ones, creating what we like to think of as a dance with horror. We want to get under our audience’s skin, and are truly committed to interactive storytelling that pushes beyond the confines of “good taste,” tapping into horror’s unique ability to reflect marginalized experiences, and the darkness of our times. NIGHTCRAWLERS 2025 goes hard but as ever, we are not interested in breaking our audience, but in taking them along for an unsettling and thought-provoking ride.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
JP: This is not our first rodeo of working site-specifically in an old industrial building but they truly are their own beasts that you can’t but love and hate in equal measure. This year’s venue definitely comes with its own ghosts.
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: NIGHTCRAWLERS 2025 smells like raw meat, iodine and leather, tastes like birthday cake, vomit and protein shakes, sounds like chains, screams and German Schlager, and looks like grinning jack-o-lanterns, Mommy’s chewed up fingernails and steelcapped boots. Read the global news, watch Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, read Mariana Enriquez’ short stories, pop on a “ten hours of vintage Haunted House sounds” playlist, have fistfuls of Tootsie Rolls and warm Strawberry Milk, then go to bed bloated and ready for what goes bump in the night.
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