With a city full of filmmakers, Halloween in Los Angeles has become increasingly interactive with Hollywood-worthy actors and producers making it their mission to scare the hell out you.
For the fourth-straight year, “Creep LA” has competed for the title of scariest show in town and this year creators JFI Productions partnered with MOUSETRAPPE, an immersive design agency and media studio, to bring horror and theater together. Their new show, “Awake” is a 75-minute walk-through experience in an empty warehouse in downtown L.A. with “American Horror Story”-style characters, close encounters and scripted scenarios.
“JFI Productions wants to redefine the theater scene in Los Angeles and introduce people to the limitless opportunities of this new immersive way of live storytelling,” producer Justin Fix told TheWrap. Fix aims to disprove the notion that there isn’t a theater culture in Los Angeles by using local actors to bring experiences to life. “The goal is for ‘Creep LA’ guests to feel like they’re actually in a Hollywood horror film,” he added.
Guests are separated from their friends or partners and sent up an escalator to a cavernous 60,000-square-foot space where different nightmarish scenarios take place involving ghoulish creatures, demented families and corpses that come back to life. At any moment, they can be snatched away from the group for their own personal scarefest.
“What we’ve designed really is our art, and art is meant to illicit a response, to make you feel something. When we can affect, shock, surprise and even touch guests coming through the experience, then they are truly present — and that’s rare,” writer/artistic director Daniel Montgomery said.
In an age when we’re all glued to our smartphones for most of our day, “Creep LA” actually aims to increase person-to-person interaction with the intimate 25-guest shows. “Although much of our work is creepy by design, in the end what we’re after is recapturing the connection we have with other human beings … that feeling of dread from when we were kids that anything could happen,” artistic director David Ruzicka added.
“Creep LA: Awake” runs now through Nov. 4.