12/13/2023 0 Comments Amazing halloween scenery“Witch!,” too, follows a multi-act structure in which the production flips the focus on its audience by play’s end. “The fear begins to live, and the tension begins to build, and you naturally find yourself living in a horror movie,” says Fix. Such moments, says Fix, help the audience to improvise and let go of any awkwardness they may have brought with them that evening. As the scene went on, it became borderline stressful as I tried to not be discovered while alternately calming the fears of the panicked Conrad, a character grieving the loss of his family member while also masking his intentions for the dinner guests. The 2022 revival, says Fix, is also meant to be a proof-of-concept, as he hopes to have the show start touring other cities in 2023.ĭuring one moment in “The Willows,” I found myself trapped under a bed with an actor, Jacob Miller’s character named Conrad, and a stranger as we eavesdropped on another group. “The Willows” follows the company’s recent revival of its ‘70s-themed disco immersive show “Night Fever,” which focused more on a communal feel rather than the intimacy present in “The Willows.” The latter, for instance, has seven distinct tracks that audience members can follow, depending on which actors they get paired up with and often results in encounters with just one or two other people. “With horror, we can immediately put people on the defense, build their nerves up, and make them be really alert and feel present,” says JFI founder Justin Fix. Both “The Willows” and “Witch!” run through early November. This year that includes a revival of “The Willows,” as well as the Downtown Repertory Theater Company’s “Witch!,” staged in Altadena’s Mountain View Mausoleum. Each fall sees increasingly story-driven haunts at theme parks such as Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios Hollywood, the latter of which expanded its scare-palette this year with a walk-through attraction influenced by the Weeknd, as well as a host of more long-form theatrical productions. Set to accommodate fewer than 20 audience members at a time, “The Willows” will divide and split groups until everyone is receiving intimate encounters with actors, the only common denominator among the various tracks is that each will treat us as the protagonists.įirst staged in 2017, JFI Productons’ “The Willows” has become a staple of Los Angeles’ immersive scene, a community that typically springs to life with eerie enthusiasm each Halloween season. “The Willows” instead aims to disorient the audience, through improvisation and light games, until the mystery centers on us. A son and a husband, Jonathan, had suddenly and unexpectedly died. There was a puzzle laid out at the start of the evening. What had begun as dinner theater with murder-mystery trappings was now starting to subtly shift. We talk to John Murdy, the architect of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, on transforming the emotional terror of the Weeknd’s music into a horror attraction. More than just creating a sense of presence, it gave “The Willows” a feeling of lived-in history.Įntertainment & Arts Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights redefines the haunt with a Weeknd-inspired maze This was genealogy laid out as if a puzzle, the work of someone trying to make sense of one family’s ancestry rather than celebrate it. While “The Willows” is set in a residence near Koreatown, what I was looking at wasn’t crafted out of familial love. I was told I had two minutes to sit and contemplate my actions, and while I knew this meant I was missing out on additional plot-building action that was occurring in the dining room, I wanted to be careful to make the most of my time in solitude.īefore me, on the back of the closet door and scribbled in broken sketch lines, was a family tree, which was designed to look hurriedly drawn. The first thing that caught my eye was a crumpled paper, which read, “I’m bad because I put elbows on the table.” While I wasn’t asked to write a confession, such a clever detail made it clear that I was now part of a lineage of poorly mannered guests at this haunted house.Īs lights and audio flickered, the setting was eerie - bordering on sinister. I didn’t even have time to nod a goodbye to my partner as I was instructed to stand, leave the dining room and sit alone in a cramped, red-lit closet. My offense? Resting my elbows on a dinner table. I was being scolded by the matriarch of the house, and the butler was quick to order me out of my seat. Just as a recent production of “The Willows” was starting to reveal its intentions around a dinner table, the immersive theater endeavor ripped me away from the action.
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