Review Rundown: It Goes Bump In The Night (A Spooky Season Special)

It’s been quite some time since we’ve been so ON THEME and also chock full of just GOOD WORK.

That’s the magick of Spooky Season for you, with a host of offerings from the sublime to the silly, with a few shots of dread in between.

Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like to have a jet that could whisk me away to all of these in a day, and then I remember the environmental impact of such a thing and content myself to live vicariously through the team.

But hey: if one of these is in your neck of the woods go check it out!

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Arcade — Darkfield
£12; London UK; through 27 October 2024

Please note this review will contain light spoilers regarding physical experiences.

Aim yourselves towards the southbank because the Darkfield shipping container is back in town: parked beside the BFI as part of the London Film Festival’s EXPANDED roster. Their newest production Arcade offers a hands-on experience in near-total darkness; a choose-your-own adventure within a day in the life of an avatar who isn’t exactly ignorant of who’s pulling the strings.

Placed in front of a typical arcade game console (one of many in a long line along each side of the shipping container) I’m armed only with a pair of highest-quality headphones, a single button, and a coin dispenser & insert slot. The headphones go on and the experience begins; we are in Darkfield’s signature complete blackness. What follows is a steep learning curve: as the narration progresses we have to decide when to use the button to indicate “Yes” and accept whatever consequences result. Occasionally we’re rewarded with coins to spend in-game but with upgraded options comes upgraded stakes; do we spend now, or hoard and wait for better things?

All players begin in the same in-game location but it’s clear at the end of the experience that there are many different paths possible within the 30-minute playing time. Between tectonic rumblings through the machines, the only breaks in our pitch-black environment are occasional flashes of light when I or another player make a choice resulting in the worst and most violent outcome: a fatal gunshot. Accompanying the flashes are personalized gusts of air to the gut and sometimes a splash across the face: a charming (and gruesome) upgrade to the traditional arcade game experience. 30 minutes feels both too short and too long — moments of anticipation feel like hours but the lights come back on all too soon.

Arcade is a lovely iteration of the Darkfield sounds-in-the-darkness model: a sharp reimagining of the arcade format which removes all of the bright lights and other-players atmosphere and instead plunges players into a personal and visceral hellscape. Fans and newbies alike should catch this one while it’s here, as replays are limited before they continue on their well-deserved worldwide tour.

— Shelley Snyder, London Curator

House of the Exquisite Corpse IV: Superstition — Rough House Theater Co.
$21.00-$48.00; Chicago; Through Nov. 2

Returning for its fourth year, the puppetry-focused Rough House Theatre Co. presents their latest iteration of House of the Exquisite Corpse in Lincoln Park. As in previous years, the audience is on a clockwork track, witnessing the puppet performances through openings in walls while wearing headphones playing a soundtrack of music, effects, and dialogue. This year’s theme and subtitle is Superstition, with the six pieces, each roughly five minutes in length, focusing on the anxiety of powerlessness.

Without a doubt, Superstition is the best Exquisite Corpse yet, truly being a Spooky Season must-see. I haven’t been this captivated by Rough House’s work since 2019’s The Silence in Harrow House. This year’s success is due to each piece boldly playing with presentation and scale along with mixing in another genre, allowing each piece to have an incredibly unique tone. Best encapsulating these choices are this year’s standout highlights of “Evil Can Be Scared Away By Its Own Reflection” and “A White Bird In The House Is An Omen Of Death” (though the other four pieces are fantastic!).

In “Evil Can Be Scared…”, rather than peering through an opening in a wall, the audience stands within the performance space. And instead of directly watching the action, the audience faces the wall, looking up into a tilted mirror to witness the puppet performance. The audio starts as mostly dialogue that’s laughably charming, perfectly heighting the guaranteed fall into terror. The staging is an intense act of vulnerability, the growing pain in my neck nothing compared to the horror I know unfolding directly behind me.

As for “A White Bird…” the piece is, bluntly put, a musical number, though this song won’t be confused with a Rodgers and Hammerstein showstopper. The song’s narrative is tragically heartbreaking, presenting a disturbingly relatable depiction of self-induced pain. But the song’s beat is catchy and the performers move their puppets and bodies with a Broadway dancer’s skill and grace. It’s unique and surprising, like any good scare should be during a Spooky Season experience.

Additionally, more so than previous years, I found the sound design in Superstition to be outstanding. The sound design, meaning both the audio played and its technical presentation, in every Exquisite Corpse is always an undercredited MVP masterfully manipulating the audience’s terror. Usually I lean away from the action, as the pieces keep me on my toes, dreading what’s coming next. But with Superstition, I was drawn in, caving to the sound design’s demand to closely witness each piece’s horror regardless of my fear.

With changing up presentation and scale and mixing genres together, House of the Exquisite Corpse IV: Superstition is the most frightfully captivating entry to date. Rough House Theatre Co. yet again makes bold, thoughtful choices, a testament to their artistic prowess and commitment to keeping Chicago’s Spooky Season audiences frightened every year.

– Patrick B. McLean, Chicago Curator & Remote Experiences Editor

Living Memory — Asher Young
Free; NYC; through October 25 (Viewing Thursday — Sunday)

Are memories ephemeral or corporeal? Artist and producer, Asher Young argues both in his newest, intimate art installation, Living Memory, currently on display in Chelsea, New York.

A meditation on memory and mortality, the experience offers a rare opportunity to reconnect with a dead loved one — for just a fleeting moment.

The piece comes after many iterations of Young’s custom hologram technology, which he developed initially for an original adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

In this version, like a few since then, the technology is presented as a standalone art piece.

Like any good experience, the user interface is simple. Guests submit a photo (either before coming or upon arrival) of someone from their life who has passed away. Then, they walk down a dark flight of stairs into an eerie yet comforting basement, where they are greeted with meditative music and informational signage about the piece.

After rounding a corner, guests are confronted with a smoky hologram of their loved one, projected against a cloudy haze. As they approach the hologram, it wavers and wafts until eventually disappearing, right when they are close enough to touch it.

The effect is raw, evocative, and effective.

It’s both beautiful and heartbreaking to stand face-to-face with a loved one, even if for just a few brief moments. I found myself repeating the experience over and over again, walking up and down the hallway, almost ritualistically, as if I was remembering her again and again. And in the process, I was.

Interestingly enough, through Young’s meditation, I also found myself creating a new memory with my lost loved one, one more time.

— Alec Zbornak, NYC Correspondent

Terror Vault: Fatal Abduction — Terror Vault
$60-$105; San Francsico; through October 31

The Old San Francisco Mint is yet again playing host to Terror Vault, the annual event, from the minds of creators Peaches Christ and David Flower.

Each year’s production is wholly reimagined, and this year’s entry does not disappoint. Fatal Abduction invites participants to join the elite forces fighting back against the Reptoids, a hidden subterranean alien race who stand to thrive in the ever-warming climate of our home planet.

The experience bills itself as a one-hour immersive theater experience, and it’s a largely accurate descriptor. It’s a full heart-pounding one hour, which has the potential to be exhausting, but never feels so. Each scene is unique and fully realized, the sets are elaborate and varied, and the world feels fully lived in by the multitude of actors who fill them. The special effects are convincing, and the scares are varied and earned.

More impressively, despite the varied scenes, the plotline is maintained and tells a whole story. Characters reappear, and callbacks to earlier plot elements land effectively as the audience remains engaged from start to finish. The casting is uniformly superb. Each actor fit their role so effectively, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’d been scripted to fit the actors rather than cast later.

Of course, there are some mainstays of Terror Vault. Returning are the glowing necklaces that allow participants to opt-in to a more full contact experience. While this has felt more tacked on/gimmicky in past years, this year felt more well-calibrated, with the contact elements coming more sparingly, and therefore more organically and effectively (my only complaint was that when our whole tour was wearing them, they provided a bit more illumination to some darker passages than I imagine was intended). One can also always expect to see some nudity in the Terror Vault. This year’s bit provided one of the most effective and hilarious bits of gross-out humor I’ve ever seen in an immersive production.

And to that end, though the tension remains high throughout, Terror Vault also consistently pulls off a starting amount of humor. Its climate change adjacent plotline allows plenty of pointed barbs (my personal favorite — the Scott Baio and Kirk Cameron appearances), while never feeling preachy, and little local in-jokes pepper the set for those with a keen eye.

Terror Vault is yet again the highlight of the Bay Area spooky season, and retains its crown as the premier Bay Area Haunt.

— Brian Resler, SF Curator

Unhinged Hotel — Winchester Mystery House
$70; San Jose; through October 31

Pointing out the questionable veracity of the story behind the Winchester Mystery House has almost become almost as much a rite of passage of Bay Area residence as complaining about our bagels or arguing over burritos.

The haunted tale of Sarah Winchester, the heiress of the Winchester Rifle Company’s blood-fueled fortune, endlessly building her home to fit the mortal souls of those lost to the company’s deadly product is a legend so large it could only fit in a structure as impressive as the mystery house. Its enduring appeal is a testament to the wild structure that contains it, and so it’s a natural choice that, on autumn evenings, the historical Winchester ghosts step aside to make room for the more literal demons of Unhinged.

Approaching from the road, the mansion cuts a striking and imposing visage, smoke pours from the enormous mansion, and it’s bathed in eerie spotlights. (Though I must apologize to the unsuspecting couple in the parking lot whose night I almost ended tragically prematurely, as the smoke was so thick that driving conditions in the lot were probably the scariest part of the night. I just hope they didn’t realize it was me when we ended up on the same tour…).

This year’s entry sees the home transformed into more temporary lodging, as it becomes Unhinged Hotel. The scene is effectively set as you check in at the lobby and are ushered to the hotel en route to your room. The illusion of the hotel is well maintained by the long creepy hallways, and multitude of kitchens and bedrooms, even if the plot is quickly forgotten.

Actors placed throughout the house were uniformly wonderful, and the jump scares were effective, largely because they were used sparingly. They veered from terrifying to humorous, largely based on the response of each guest, never outstaying their welcome.

But, more so than past year’s entries, this year’s Unhinged allows the house itself to be the star, and it is much to its benefit. We found ourselves wandering down disoriented hallways or through uninhabited rooms, even looping the same rooms, creating the sensation that we’d veered off our path, an unnerving sensation that only a venue such as the Mystery House could ever provide.

In its early years, Unhinged struggled to fill the lofty shoes left by the daytime tour’s Winchester ghosts. By taking advantage of the strengths of its venue, Unhinged Hotel has made a huge step in the right direction. Much like our bagels, the last few years have been a big improvement.

— Brian Resler, SF Curator

You Can’t Scare Me — LunaBeat
$10; Meta Quest 2 or later; Available Now

Let’s cut to the chase: if you like Haunted Houses and have at least one other friend with a Quest 2 or newer bit of kit from Meta then the two (or more) of you should buy this. Now.

I’ll put that together for the pull quote so they don’t have to butcher my punctuation:

Buy. This. Now.

While there is a single-player mode, You Can’t Scare Me shines as a multiplayer experience. Up to four can play, with one person taking on the role of the haunt-ee, trying to score points by finding keys and bones. They HAVE to find three keys to escape. The bones are, ah, bonus.

The haunters — up to three — get access to a backstage area filled with traps, ranging from creepy monster maquettes to fourth wall-breaking gags that mess with the player’s perception. They also get access to a costume closet filled with avatars of various villainous creatures. They score points by making the haunt-ee scream.

Or at least shout. That’s the whole game. It’s perfect as it is.

NoPro’s Patrick and I played around with this over the weekend and had a delightful time trying to scare each across multiple maps in this delightful multiplayer haunt game.

Is it super sophisticated? No.

Is it elevated horror? Not in the slightest. There’s a creepy hospital and a fun house.

Is it ridiculous fun to lay traps from someone and creep around invisibly while they spring them and then turn visible while wearing a virtual circus monkey with cymbals costume? YOU BET YOUR ((REDACTED)).

At $10 a throw this is cheaper than the local haunt being run down at the country fair grounds. The one where those kids all went missing last year. So, you know, it has that going for it too.

Okay, I’m being a bit silly now, but there’s a lot of smart design choices that lean into the limitations of a Unity game that still runs on Quest 2 hardware. The onboarding is solid. There’s a lovely touch for how invited guests show up in your game. There’s even a party mode to play in real life with a shared headset. (We didn’t try that one, to be fair.)

Now the version we played had all the different maps and elements unlocked, but it’s implied from the text in the lobby that most people will need to earn their way through the various maps to get all the options available. I suspect it will be worth it, because there’s a lot of fun to be had messing with your friends.

If you’re into that kind of thing. (P.S. I know what NoPro’s Online Halloween Party is gonna be this year. Also we are having one.)

— Noah Nelson, Publisher & Podcast Host

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