Everyone loves a good story, and at this time of year the most unnerving and disturbing, the better.
For the past two years Creep LA, the Spooky Season show from Just Fix It Productions, has established itself as an artful haunt — more interested in the sense of the uncanny than in the jump scares and gore of corporate haunts. This year’s edition draws on a unique partnership: Amazon Prime’s upcoming anthology series Lore.
The series is itself based on the popular podcast of the same name, which turns pieces of folklore into fodder for dramatic retellings. The aim of the whole Lore project — both audio and visual — seems to be to hit that sweet spot where reality and the preternatural begin to blur. That place is where the Creep team lives, and their off-season work The Willows conjures up a similar world that may or may not be supernatural in nature.
Which makes the marriage of Lore and Creep a harmonious one, indeed.
For this live action adaptation, the audience is led into the underbelly of a conference venue south of downtown LA. For the first few minutes darkness and a striking bald actress are our only companions as we’re led through the unlit hallways of the space.
At last we arrive at a small room covered in scraps of stories and threads trying to tie them all together. Its occupant: a writer, played if I’m not mistaken by Creep’s lead writer Daniel Montgomery. I say “if I’m not mistaken” because Daniel happens to have a twin. More delightful uncertainty for those who know too much but not enough. The writer pecks away at his typewriter as our guide gives us a final reminder that we’re not to talk as we traverse the space beyond.
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Then the lights go out, and the storytelling begins.
This is a story about stories, specifically about folklore, with some of Lore’s greatest hits popping up over the course of the hour long run of the show. The action is all framed within an archetypal dark forest, you know, the one that is in every nightmarish faerie tale. Here the forest acts as a labyrinth, drawing the small cadre of guests deeper and deeper into Lore’s living grimoire.
As we slipped through hidden passages and chased after characters down darkened paths our group met changelings, boogeymen, charlatans, cursed dolls, and all manner of men turned beast. There was no singular overarching narrative to the promenade, but the structure provided a solid platform for some delightfully stylized performances. I found the overall tone spot-on for a fast-paced trip through the collective unconscious: a heightened reality two stops short of camp. That, for me, is perfect for Halloween entertainment.
In the seems of the vignettes, however, it is possible to detect the seeds of a greater production. The idea that stories are what connects us simmers under the surface without being fully developed. I can’t, however, fault the production team on this note. No more than I can fault them for the acoustic bleed that sometimes enhanced, sometimes distracted as two tightly packed scenes played out next to each other.
I can’t fault because I know just how much of a pain it was for Creep to even open its doors this year; with the company getting shut out of venue after venue thanks to Los Angeles’ increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucracy. In the city’s attempt to avoid a tragedy like last year’s Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, responsible producers are being stymied. Even the might of a partner like Amazon Studios wasn’t enough to sway the powers that be. I’d be lying if I said the thought of “what could have been” didn’t follow me through the halls.
That Creep: Lore manages to be an evolutionary step forward for Creep, one where they take the lessons — and a good chunk of the cast — from The Willows and put out a clever, fun, seasonal show that doubles as an adaptation of a new TV series is something of a minor miracle. This is a fun show that doesn’t rely on gore and jump scares to delight and disturb. It’s a testament to the level that the Creep team is working on, and it left me praying that someone with a vault full of money sees this thing and gives Justin Fix and company the runway they need to build something truly epic.
For now, we get to gorge ourselves on this wicked treat.
Creep: Lore runs through November 12th at The Magic Box at The Reef in Downtown Los Angeles. Tickets start at $65.
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