It may not seem like the best place for a little rest and relaxation, but Darren Lynn Bousman and Clint Sears’ aptly titled ‘The Tension Experience: Ascension’ offers, in its own weird way, an escape from the confines of social media, conventional morality, and reality itself.
“This isn’t as necessarily about freaking you out as it is about making you feel uncomfortable and making you be present. It’s to get them out of the mundaneness. I mean, for me, it’s this: we’re so distracted by our cell phones and our technology. This is to immerse you in the story,” explains the Saw II-IV director and ‘Tension Experience’ creator Darren Lynn Bousman. “To me, it’s to make people present, to be in the moment, and to show that entertainment can exist outside of a TV screen or book. This is a play that requires you to be active, not passive. To me, that’s the future. I want people to be active in the entertainment they consume.”
When entering the premises, each participant is asked to leave their cell phone, purses, glasses, jewelry, and any other item of value or distraction in their cars. Although in this day and age it might seem odd to leave one’s phone behind, the point is to cut off a person’s constant connection to the reality, and fully immerse them in Bousman’s wicked little secret societal universe.
As Bousman himself puts it, “Think about it when was the last time you watched a movie, honestly, and weren’t doing something else. Checking email, texting somebody, tweeting, walking out of the room to grab a snack, I think to force someone to be present, where they can’t do that, we take away everything from you, and you have to be in the moment, your suspension of disbelief is much easier to do because you have nothing to distract you and I think that’s what I want to do.”
It’s very important to Bousman for people to leave what they know behind, and enter his structure with an open mind.
“I love immersive theater, I loved this thing called “Sleep No More” when I went to it in New York, which is, you are a simple character. You are in the production and it requires you to be active. You have to actually get out of your comfort zone and do things that make you feel uncomfortable. [For The Tension Experience], you come here, and come to this weird place, where you can talk to the actors and be someone you’re not, and I think that it does break people out of their shell.”
After your social media outlet has been taken away, it comes time to enter the OOA Institute, and begin the immersion process into the Church of Anoch. Normally, when it comes to haunted attractions, the experience may become a little frightening at times, but you’ll at least have your friends alongside you to laugh with you when someone jumps out and scares you. No such mercy is granted at the Tension Experience. First, you’re told to park your car in a dark and desolate parking lot somewhere in the realm of downtown Los Angeles. You’re then asked to sign a waiver agreeing to allow the actors of the Tension Experience to touch you, while simultaneously agreeing not to touch them. Next, you’re picked up by a stoic driver in a strange van and a bag is placed over your head. You’re then driven to an unknown location and dropped off one by one, separate from your friends, and told to pound on a door just before the van speeds off with everyone else still on board, and you’re left alone in the dark.
“There’s like three different storylines running at the same time, and each of those storylines has numerous things you can do in it”, says Bousman excitedly while describing his horrifying haunted attraction baby. “You can even do one where an actor will take you on a one-on-one. That means you can literally get in someone’s car and end up at a random gas station. So, like, the possibilities are endless, and it’s also a four-hundred-page script. It’s a living, breathing thing, and it continues to shift as you interact with it.”
After the van drops you off and you pound on the door, you enter a ‘50s style stark white waiting room with something akin to church music playing on the radio and a woman behind a desk smiling absurdly at nothing. She asks you to fill out some paperwork featuring some very personal questions, like your religious denomination and views on nudity. She tells you to say “Glory be” while you fill out your sheet and she plays with your hair and feeds you candy and stares at you openly without blinking; always smiling, always somehow seemingly on edge.
You’re then given a safe word (mine was COWARD) and led to another room that looks like a meeting area in a retirement home – if that retirement home happened to exist inside of a psych ward. Slowly, one by one, people you recognize begin to enter the room, but it’s not long before you’re separated from them again, and ushered down a hall with a bag over your head, all the while trusting that these people aren’t leading you to some strange torture chamber. There’s more processing to be done, some of which includes removing your clothing and changing into a hazmat suit, and some of which asks you to close your eyes and describe how you would punish an abusive mother if you were God. In here, it feels less like an organization, and more like an endless labyrinth, filled with twists and turns and unholy secrets begging to be explored.
In one room, I was told my senses were “being removed” as I was blindfolded and given earbuds that played nothing but static while people threw hot wax on me and forced me to eat random items. In another, I stepped into a blood red lit confinement filled with sand and talked openly about my sexual experience with strangers while fully naked people wearing tribal gear stalked slowly around me. At one point, I was even kidnapped and taken off site and forced to bear witness to a man being murdered, as a bag was again thrown over my head and I listened to the man’s pleas while I heard his brain being bashed in and felt bloody brains shoot up onto my arms and chest, all before being escorted back into the institute, which by this point, I thought I might never be leaving. The entire time, I realized slowly, that this was unlike anything I had ever done before. Usually, when it comes to haunted houses, the thrill is all in the seconds where a person or an effect jumps out and scares you. This wasn’t about frightening its audience for a moment, it was more about the creeping dread; the sensation that something was sneaking up behind you, and that you be safe for the moment, but that moment is about to end.
After the experience was through, which took around two and a half hours total, I was brought behind the scenes to speak with the ringleader himself, Mr. Darren Lynn Bousman. Backstage, Bousman stands in front of a monitor that displays thirty different little screens for each individual room, so he can see what is happening every single moment of the way. From there, he conducts his actors, recites instructions, and in the meantime takes little breaks to tell me about his unique immersive experience. It is a true peek behind the wizard’s curtain.
“I think what I love about this is how much it’s evolved from where we started. I think if I were to do this with Abattoir or Saw, there’s already pre-defined character base and what it looks like. There’s not room to for it to grow. With this, we’re constantly building upon to let it change, so it’s gone 180 degrees from where we started. I love that it’s its own thing, but what the idea is that this thing will turn into a movie. The storyline will turn into a film after this closes. And it’s the idea of taking one piece of property and having numerous things. It’s an immersive experience, it’s an ARG, it’s a movie, it’s an online game. That way you’re having one narrative that’s told over three or so different platforms and each platform is furthering the narrative. Not retelling it, it’s furthering it. So if you come in on the ARG you hear the storyline, and then if you start here, it’s a different storyline continuing it, and then the movie would pick up where this thing ends.”
When asked to expand upon the idea that eventually this would all be turned into a movie, Bousman confirmed that he is, definitely, planning on making a ‘Tension Experience’ film. According to him, the movie will begin production in January of 2017.
“The script was written long before this” Bousman tells me matter-of-factly. “The movie is what got this made, so I have a script for this. The script is about uh, it’s quite different, but it deals with an immersive experience gone awry. So the movie actually deals with an immersive experience gone wrong. There are so many things that could go wrong in this that uh – I have blood on my face don’t I?”
I laugh and tell Bousman that yes, he does indeed have blood on his face. After everything I had gone through during the evening, I just assumed he had done it on purpose. He grabs a tissue and begins wiping the blood off of his cheek as he continues to describe his plans for the movie adaptation.
“It’s not a horror film. It’s a kind of psychological heist movie about how an immersive theater company…here’s the thing. What’s so scary about these type of productions is, someone could come in and change the script, do whatever. People submit themselves to this, and they do whatever we ask them to do. Eat this, sniff this, take this, pull the trigger on this gun. How do you know what reality is? So, it deals with [the actors] manipulating people who go through the immersive experience, but it’s very much Reservoir Dogs, which is kind of a departure, and that’s how I got this finalized. The producer, Gordon Bijelonic, read the script and was like, ‘We gotta make this’. I was like, ‘Let’s make the immersive experience first’. And we created the brand name around The Tension Experience. And so now, it’s kind of blowing up.”
All in all, ‘The Tension Experience: Ascension’ was the most immersive and exhilarating haunted attraction I have ever participated in, and if you think you can handle it, you should do so immediately. This is an experience definteily worth checking out – showrunner Bousman is a master of manipulating people into leaving what they think they should know behind and readjusting their sense to accept a new way of thinking, even if it’s just for a few hours. After all, when it comes to the latest event in holiday themed terror, it’s not about the scares, it’s about the tension.
“What kills me and what would kill me is this ends, and it’s written off as just another haunted house. I think that the choreography and the acting ability, I mean these actors are so fucking incredible, that I want to see more of these things, and I think the only way that more of these things exist is if people know about them and know what immersive theater is. This is the type of entertainment that I, personally, as a fan of this stuff, want to see more of” says Bousman with fire in his eyes. “I think that that’s where this is important, as an artist, as a filmmaker, as a director, I think we have to look for new ways to engage an audience. That’s always been my thing as a director. How does an artist engage? This. This is how you do it. You force them to do something that forces them to be present.”
November 12th marks the final weekend of the ‘Tension Experience’, so make sure to get your tickets and get sucked in to this intricate odyssey through the strange and the macabre while you still can. Glory be to the church of Anoch, to the OOA institute, and most of all, to the twisted mastermind Darren Lynn Bousman.
