Immersive Review Rundown: The One With Spooky Comic Books & The Titanic

It’s a quick Rundown this week, but we still manage to hit two continents and two of the capitols of immersive entertainment at two very different ends of the spectrum.

In London we’ve got an immersive museum exhibition and in LA we have an indie Spooky Season offering.

Sometimes, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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The Legend of the Titanic — The Immersive Exhibition — Madrid Artes Digitales & FKP Scorpio Entertainment
From £26; London UK; through 2 November 2025

The edutainment-centric experience now open at Dock X (appropo) sets out a lofty goal: to showcase the romance and tragedy of the most iconic shipwreck of our time. With a packed menu of digitally augmented spaces & experiences they certainly achieve it, although at times the flash feels like it’s outweighing the history.

A 2025 visitor would expect things like the curated era-appropriate relics, film props & costume displays (there are no original Titanic items present) as well as the exhibition set design laid out like first- and second-class passenger hallways with the occasional foray into the boiler rooms. Digital wall panels depicting characters riding the elevators and an app (which didn’t work on my phone…) bringing informational text to life through animatics made the walkthrough pop a bit brighter.

But it was the VR headset walkthrough of the ship and the 360-degree film room which blew socks off. The walkthrough was charmingly gorgeous: a physical journey through an empty room which became elaborate staterooms, promenades, boiler rooms, the telegraph office, all in the height of their beauty.

In the video room a condensed version of the voyage is spread over the huge walls where, in the defining moment, we “sit” on the lower decks cross-section and watch as water floods in, rising, and eventually tipping the whole room forward until everything is immersed and we float on the surface as flares rise up into the night sky. It’s a sobering moment.

In the end I’m conflicted. The experience, while very flashy and an impressive way to showcase a collection of memorabilia, lacks the gravitas one would expect from an incident which cost 1500 lives. There’s a memorial wall near the end, but this is placed next to video games where children direct cartoon boats around icebergs. Across three elaborate VR experiences there are no depictions of people who did not escape. I absolutely understand the family-friendly choice to avoid depicting the heavy mortality, but without it the experience feels anemic. I catch myself thinking (more than once): where are the bodies? …Are we meant to be the bodies?

Much more elaborate than a standard museum exhibit but several fathoms short of a grounding experience, this show is maybe not the right choice for a heavy history buff or relatives of the deceased (of which there would be many around London), but indeed a family- and techie-friendly attraction for an iconic topic.

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— Shelley Snyder, UK Curator

Fallen Saints: Tales From Blaze City — Force of Nature Productions
$25; North Hollywood; Sep. 12–27

This year’s Spooky Season offering from Force of Nature is an imaginative melodrama set in a comic book world that has lost almost all its color.

Guests as cast as visitors to this fictional world/citizens of Blaze City — it’s a little fuzzy — who are recruited by one of three guide characters, for my run it was the vigilante Black Jay, to save the city from the strange affliction that is draining the color from the world. The first stop: a visit with the creator of the Blaze City, who himself is starting to succumb to the creeping change even though he, like us, is a real person.

The metaphysics may be a bit messy, but the metaphors hold up and they support the action across three rooms that FON decks out cleverly to support multiple vignettes per room with light interaction in the various scenes. It’s interactive processional theatre in a space not meant for processional theatre, but the costumes and the commitment of the ensemble make it work.

Force of Nature Production’s Spooky Season offerings are always fun, and I’m admittedly a mark for all things comic book, but with two caveats this one hit harder that the last FON show I caught.

A big part of what worked was the character design, as the black and white comic book makeup on the actors gave everyone a distinct look and supported the broad, melodramatic acting choices being made. Those choices were backed with commitment, and the cast — particularly those who played the characters trapped within the doomed Blaze City — are to be commended as a whole for taking that tone and grounding it. Playing melodrama in closeup for over a half hour straight, eye to eye with the audience at times, and not losing it? It isn’t for the faint of heart or those who break easily.

The underlying melancholy of the story also got to me: a world populated by people desperately clinging onto the one thing that has any meaning left in their lives, even as an encroaching darkness drains the last bits of joy and hope from every corner? It’s on the nose, but that’s melodrama, baby, and I’m always a sucker for well executed melodrama.

Not that it was all black sunshine and monochromatic rainbows, as there were two clunky notes on press night, one that wasn’t fully in FON’s control and one that was.

I’ll start with the later, which is the ending.

On the one hand: it’s Spooky Season, and it’s not like we can expect to leave all smiles, but the dismount felt a bit flat given what had come before. A choice seemed to have been made to gear down into something more naturalistic as opposed to the preceding melodrama, and the result was more like a balloon deflating than a bubble bursting. At least this was true for the run I was in, the three different guide characters also lead to multiple endings. Tenor and tone might be different for the runs featuring the characters Lt. Markowski or Sketch.

The other bit isn’t so much about the show than about the cultural moment we’re in, so forgive me. That said, it did impact the lens through which I viewed the show, muting the color, if you will. Which was this: it was media night and we had an influencer in with us. One who had just gone through in the previous run, and spent this run mugging for their camera operator and treating the run as if it was for them and them alone.

Suffice it to say it pulled focus the whole way through, and when we are talking about an audience size of 16–20 and a cast of 2–3 at any given time this level of distraction can be the kind of thing to turn folks off. Moreover: what people see on influencer videos is the behavior they’re going to model when they show up to shows, so creators need to think long and hard about the guidelines they lay down when they invite folks in to film. You’ve got a whole room full of people to entertain and engage, not just the one with the clip on mic.

All that said: Force of Nature Productions is really bringing it this year, and while it might not reinvent the wheel, it certainly offers up a reminder of the breadth of Spooky Season fun that is LA’s signature.

— Noah J. Nelson, Publisher

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