Disclaimer: while there are staff members at Haunting that both direct and act in HVRTING experiences, this review was written by someone who was not influenced by HVRTING staff upon writing and was a paying customer.

I am pushed into the darkness, into a small room filled with the sounds of a woman being tortured. Screams are emanating from a television in the corner, which casts a sickly green glow on a man sitting on a folding chair, his hands deep within his pants and moving with ferocity. Is he masturbating? I think to myself as I inch closer. My worst fears are confirmed as I approach and gently cough to alert the man that he is not alone. He quickly pulls his hand from his pants and leaps up to greet me – and that’s when I notice McKamearly Manor in bright yellow letters against his grey sweatshirt. Where the hell am I? I think to myself as the man pulls me in close with his greasy, slick hands. fright night

Halloween. It’s a time of treats, but also of tricks, and HVRTING brought plenty of both to their Halloween Fright Night of Horrors. HVRTING is known for their solo experiences that deliver intense physicality with a genuine sense of humor. Fright Night of Horrors followed suit: The seventy-minute, interactive, and playful affair maintained the satirical edge we’ve come to expect from HVRTING while delivering on some deeper themes – and some sticky fun.

Fright Night of Horrors took great pleasure in exploring the thin line between a “normal” haunt and the real world. HVRTING used every moment as an opportunity to ask the participant to question their preconceptions about the experience and their relationship to the performers. It lured guests in with familiar Halloween iconography (skeletons, witches, and werewolves) and, once participants were grounded in each scene, HVRTING took the chance to explore how we connect to each other, and how we present ourselves to the world.

Participants began (as many of these experiences do) by waiting on a street corner in downtown Los Angeles. Guests were met by two masked monsters (wearing shirts that identified them as Trick and Treat) and then marched through the streets of Los Angeles. After locating a storefront that could be giving out the best candy this year – king-sized candy bars of course – the participant was pushed into a dark door and into… McKamearly Manor. This scene was notable for its scathing satire of Russ McKamey, the creator of the titular McKamey Manor, who is notorious within the extreme haunt community for operating both the longest running and most controversial extreme haunt in the world.

With this in mind, it was an unexpected and pleasant surprise to meet Russ McKamearly, a not-so-thinly-veiled caricature of McKamey. Even though I interrupted his masturbation vacation (which was duly noted on a nearby calendar), McKamearly was more than happy to assist in walking me through signing another waiver (and changing into a Superman onesie) to participate in a walk-through of McKamearly Manor. McKamearly was a know-it-all braggart who, if you believed him, invented practically everything that we associate with extreme haunts today. He name-checked a number of other haunts while taking sole credit for their ideas and, well, maybe this wasn’t much of a satire at all. The self-referential dialog from McKamearly (played with contagious enthusiasm by Pete Metzger) made this scene shine as it set up expectations for the ensuing scenes of the show, while simultaneously caricaturing one of the most notorious figures in the haunt scene today.

The show continued with several individual scenes inhabited by the motley crew of characters that filled the Manor. Jorge Lozano was exceptional as a kindly wolf who assisted the participant in taking the best Instagram pic to document the experience, as well as providing appropriate set dressing in the form of fake insects and bugs (a common tactic in the real McKamey Manor). His gentle physical handling kept me wary and on the lookout for a more intense scare to come, and also reinforced a recurring motif of expected scares becoming something more playful and fun. In an interesting twist, the photo taken was also posted in real time to Instagram and other social media networks. This simple act set up an ongoing thread throughout the show in which actions taken in the experience directly impacted reality (a common theme of reality meeting fiction in HVRTING productions).

Tristan Wells also delighted in a dual role as a friendly sheeted ghost and a devil. He managed to instill a sense of urgency in the proceedings, even with his face covered underneath the white sheet, as he urged me to remove the onesie and hide under a sheet of my own. As a devil, he helped me bob for apples in a vat of blood and corn syrup. The threat of intense physicality was ever present in this scene but, in actuality, the contact was limited to a bit of head-holding in the sugary blood pool. The ongoing interplay between my assumptions of what would occur as a participant and the actual events I experienced was unlike any I’d encountered before, and it was clear that the HVRTING team took joy in subverting my expectations. And, as an aside – this apple-bobbing scene was a great reminder that when an event says they’ll ruin your clothes, it’s best to prepare like they really mean it.

The back half of the event brought the full narrative into focus as I found myself with two charming witches who were on a mission to resurrect a surprise figure from our past. I learned that Russ had really been recruited by the witches to gain likes and influence on social media, and that my adventures through the Manor had been live-streamed to the internet in an effort to achieve this goal (narratively, not literally). I ended up having a lot of fun with this aspect of the witches, as we all continually addressed the omnipresent (and non-existent) audience. My time spent with the witches (played with charm and aplomb by Rosie Mayer and Charlotte Cocker) was a fun romp that asked some surprisingly hard questions about what social media means for our important relationships. Together, we explored relationships, especially those that exist within the confines of a digital screen.

One stand-out moment for me was when I went into a small closet to talk to one of the witches about my circle of close friends (remember those from MySpace?), and the discussion evolved into a prompt to reach out to someone that I hadn’t spoken to in a while. That’s what made this event so special – several times it bled over into the real world in a fashion that doesn’t typically happen in extreme shows. I ended up reconnecting with my friend later and had a great story to tell them about what had brought on my text. That rekindling of the relationship was wholly unexpected when I walked in the door assuming a “traditional” experience.

While this show was on the lighter side of the physicality spectrum, the HVRTING team managed to keep a consistent level of anxiety and fear in the participant via a keen understanding of the implicit expectations of an extreme horror show. Combine that subversion of expectations with some real-world interactions and you have a recipe for another thrilling experience from HVRTING.

To attend an extreme HVRTING show, you must email The Director to make sure the experience is a good fit. Find more information on upcoming shows and out-of-show, personal experiences on HVRTING’s website, Facebook page, and Instagram. Check out our Event Guide for more extreme horror events throughout the year.