COMING SOON: NIGHTCRAWLERS
Berlin’s only queer Haunt looks to immersive horror on the map in Germany
Spooky Season is a global phenomenon, with grizzly ghouls from every tomb shuffling forth to get their mash on.
In Berlin, Jos Porath, Creative Director of the upcoming NIGHTCRAWLERS, is looking to serve up scares and transform the way performing arts in Germany looks at Haunts.
The haunt takes place at Alte Münze Berlin, 2 Molkenmarkt, and runs from 28 October though Halloween itself. Tickets are €20.00 for the three night run.
You can get a taste of the mayhem on Instagram at @nightcrawlers.berlin and right here:
This is No Proscenium’s COMING SOON, a look at upcoming immersive experiences & events. To learn more about how your event could be considered for the feature check out How To Get Covered By NoPro.
No Proscenium: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Jos Porath: NIGHTCRAWLERS is an immersive scare experience and love letter to monstrosity and horror. It is also Berlin’s only queer Haunt.
The 360° degree performance installation, conceived in the tradition of walk-through Halloween Haunts, invites the audience into a netherworld inhabited by the Nightcrawlers — monstrous beings who have been pushed into the shadows where they experience pleasure, lust, dignity and community on their own terms.
NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
JP: Horror has been with me since I was a teenager — as genre, obsession, artistic language, aesthetic and a growing archive of stories that would not be told elsewhere.
I have been directing immersive performance installations in Berlin for nearly ten years, and all of my work has elements of horror in it, one way or the other. However, NIGHTCRAWLERS is the first straight-up horror experience I’ve designed. With this production, I am setting out to prove that horror speaks uniquely of and to queer experience, and that Haunts belong in the immersive performing arts — a distinction that is, frustratingly, still insisted on in Germany — a country with a lack of a haunt and scare experience tradition.
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
JP: As a blend of classic walk-through Haunt and “elevated horror” experiential storytelling, NIGHTCRAWLERS offers us multisensory, sensual, emotional and unmitigated access to engaging with our own narratives around monstrosity, especially queer monstrosity and body horror. Am I afraid? Repulsed? Attracted? Empathetic? Who and what triggers those responses in me? Why? Not as discourse, but as something to be experienced.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
JP: I was glad to find that what I had experienced as a horror lover but not creator held true: Playing in the scare experience arena does not mean that you have to compromise on sophisticated storytelling, complex characters and poetic aesthetics, even while reveling in the more “traditional” genre conventions that come with the territory.
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: Treat yourself to some queer horror: Whether it’s a movie (David Cronenberg! Rob Zombie! Karyn Kusama! Jane Schoenbrun! Julie Ducournau!), a book (Shirley Jackson! Carmen Maria Machado! Clive Barker! Mariana Enriquez!), a podacst (Horror Queers! Girl That’s Scary! Girls, Guts and Giallo!) … it’s Spooktober, after all.
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