Before you stands a derelict and long-forgotten house, if that’s what you can even call these ruins. An expansive yard lies almost in wait before you; two well-trodden paths lead to the left or the right… Which do you choose? The Haunted Basement presents The House a remote haunt experience.

Under normal circumstances, the Haunted Basement considers Minneapolis, MN, home. The artistic non-profit prides itself on having a collective conscious approach to creation, blending a wide diversity of theatrical specialties to make a unique flavor of psychological interactive horror. It’s only natural that this innovative spirit would lead to further cross-discipline exploration, mixing in film and ARG design to create a choose-your-own-adventure edition titled The House.

The premise of The House is simple: As guests cannot attend the Haunted Basement in person, they are instead invited to witness the “Creeps” in their commune-sized home. The window into this world is a browser experience with embedded YouTube videos. After watching the video on each page, buttons corresponding to different ways to “move” around the house determine the next video that is played.

Unfortunately, the framework of this design falls apart just a few clicks into the experience. By the fourth or fifth room, it’s clear that there is no overarching narrative to follow, and no single character with which to emotionally bond. Each room is a standalone story, with the audience largely along for the ride in a first-person view of each scene. The only other commonality between clips seems to be a lack of dialogue, which feels like a deliberate choice to create general scenarios rather than a full script. Adding a cohesive narrative to string the vignettes together would help provide an emotional connection to a character and provide a driving force to reach the end.

Perhaps more frustratingly, however, is that a text-based narrative below the video guides the audience to choose between the next potential room, but often has no correlation to the video itself. For instance, one of the prompts stated a choice between two doors, each with engraved plaques. One read “Never Trust the Living,” the other something illegible, possibly in Latin. The video embedded above it never showed those doors, playing a seemingly disconnected video of the house’s attic. While perhaps not a cardinal sin, the violation of the “show, don’t tell” makes the house itself feel less alive and the choices between rooms less tangible.

As for the videos, the end product is mixed. The diversity of filming styles suggests creators were given a large amount of liberty to craft their parts, and as such, the quality wildly varies -from a V/H/S level short film to something you may find on your friend’s TikTok feed. The high points deserve acclaim – such as the gentleman who shaved his beard in the bathroom mirror, only to begin carving into the flesh of his own cheek. But the scares come too infrequently to keep tension, further stymied by intentionally comedic breaks, such as three people slapping their own bare chests for five-and-a-half minutes straight.

For the rooms with a strong premise, many are also limited by distracting editing choices. Heavy use of a faux-double-vision filter muddies the details in multiple appealing scenes. Alarming jump-scares lose their venom due to slow-motion replays occurring immediately after the event, almost acting as a behind-the-scenes reel to show the human behind each monster. Horror is often derived from the unknown, and a less-is-more approach to viewing some “Creeps” may have been more effective.

Ironically, while The House is largely ineffective as an online experience to replace an in-person event, it is successful and appealing as promotional material for a future live event. The videos that fail to land largely do so due to inexperience with the medium of film. The scenarios presented, as an idea, would be much more threatening in the flesh. The experience could be likened to watching a video of other people experiencing a haunted house – fairly innocuous as a viewer, but clearly intense and disturbing to those directly experiencing it.

Haunted Basement’s The House is the rare example of the parts being greater than the whole. Conceptually, a choose-your-own-adventure horror experience is a winner, and precisely appropriate for the current environment. Likewise, a series of video shorts tied into a loose anthology is tried and true. But a murky vision for connecting the content with the interactive features, along with a lack of mastery in editing footage, leaves The House in disrepair.

For more information on the Haunted Basement and their upcoming experiences, check out their website, Facebook and Instagram pages.

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Haunted Basement presents The House a remote haunt experience.