Once upon a time the L.A. immersive scene thrived on a formula that looked a little like this:
- Catch wind about a new immersive haunt somewhere out in the suburbs.
- Posse up with a friend or two to drive out to La Mirada or Van Nuys or, god help me, Irvine.
- Wait in your car in some perfectly average of slightly affluent neighborhood until it was time to stand under a streetlight or approach a garden gate.
Then step into an imaginarium inspired by a range from Steven Spielberg to Clive Barker. (Or maybe you’d actually get the actual imaginarium of horror impresario Darren Lynn Bousman.)
It was a wild few years before the pandemic hit and the combination of airborne viruses and political bifurcation transformed the United States from a relatively high trust society where getting into a strangers car in a west side Vons parking lot and being driven to an unknown location was almost reasonable into a low trust society where just writing that sentence feels reckless.
And yet we miss it, which is why the slow stirrings of the kind of intimate — largely horror and horror-adjacent — work in L.A. has been such an exciting little trend.
The Fear Program, the debut work of Third Way Studios, is being spearheaded by Sam Eliassi, a recent USC grad who if I did the math right was in junior high the first time I went into a strange building to have an even weirder encounter.
Many of the core elements of that immersive horror heyday are present in The Fear Program: post-ticket instructions lead participants to a quiet neighborhood out in the San Fernando Valley where we are told to not arrive early or late, nor do anything that might disturb the neighbors.
At our appointed time my running buddy and I— I brought Juliet Bennet Rylah along since she we often carpooled out to strange environs together — made out way to the driveway where Eliassi met us and reminded us of the rules: no running, no touching the performers, the usual. This wasn’t going to be an extreme horror experience, but there might be some crawling and confined spaces. After that he told us someone would be along for us shortly.
Not long after the driveway gate opened, revealing a golf cart. We donned blindfolds and got on the cart, where an in-world radio sparked on and started giving us some information about the Fear Institute, which had lost funding for working on adults but still had enough for new hires to help with a case involving a child.
Once the golf cart came to a full and complete stop we were shepherded into a room where a representative from the Institute waited to interview us for the Temporary Fear Assistant positions. The receptionist (Cara Leahy) proved to be quick of wit and slightly sharp of tongue, making sure that we knew we were not to indulge the child subject in her belief that there was a monster in her closet.
June (Nina Santoyo) had been remanded to the Institute’s care by her parents, who don’t know what to do about her insistence that there is a monster in her closet who feeds off fear. The Institute has reconstructed her room, and our job is to go in, run down a checklist that will show there’s no monster in the closet, and reassure June that nothing is wrong.
Naturally, there’s plenty wrong.
There really is a monster in June’s closet and after June reads us a story that lays out the monster’s aims and m.o. we are soon enough exploring the space beyond the back of the closet where the monster dwells — the fears of others hung like trophies amongst the lost bric-a-brac and forgotten cardboard boxes.
To make it back out we’ll have to trick the monster and let go of our own fears along the way.
There’s a lot of charm to The Fear Program, which finds its young creators treading on ground that those who have been on the immersive beat for long enough have seen before. Eliassi shows off strengths in presentation and onboarding into the world he’s created, and Leahy sets clean stakes in the first scene that help power what’s next.
One particular feat of note: it took trading notes with a friend who had been squeezed in before sundown (the show was a hot ticket from jump) to know that Eliassi and crew built the interior of the closet set outside. I was convinced we were inside, although with clear hindsight it should have be obvious: that’s how good a job they did with the built environment.
As a first effort for a creator just out of college The Fear Program is a fantastic debut. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t room for improvement. Once in the other world inside the closet the tension in the piece deflated somewhat due to the nature of what we are asked to do and performances more turned to explaining what is happening than letting the moments breathe.
The ideas and the set are there and a bit of tuning of the car and mouse game that June and the guests play with her monster would make the work sing.
All in all, though, a rather auspicious debut that harkens back to L.A.’s immersive heyday: and a welcome signal that the next generation of creators has arrived to take up the mantle.
The Fear Program ran July 23- Aug. 9. in an undisclosed location in Encino. Tickets were $45 for one and $85 for two guests.
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord!
In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.
Discussion