It’s an unreasonably warm day in London and everyone is out enjoying the weather — buskers have sprung up like daisies in the public squares, playing music to the tourists and locals who linger a bit longer than usual to enjoy the late afternoon sunshine. I walk down to Waterloo on a leisurely tour of the city and savor this brief reprieve from the miserable post-holiday slump toward Spring, arriving at the VAULT Festival in warm spirits.

Oh, how unwittingly unprepared I am.

Production company The Tom Sawyer Effect has made a habit of bringing hyper-reality horror installations to the festival. As I’ve written in the past, I am a card-carrying scaredy-cat and their production of The Pendulum last year was enough to rattle my jimmies. My spirits dip only slightly as I amble into Unit 9, slip into the provided jumpsuit, and sign their disclaimer, assuring the reception team that I do not have any concerning medical conditions and that I am comfortable with being touched. Though I have arrived in a mindset far from prepared for a horror show, this is no obstacle to The Incubus’s almost-immediate effectiveness.

A table is full of literature from a company called The Foundation which offers to tap into my latent abilities and help me overcome mental blocks in order to conquer my fears. The overall effect feels like recruitment for a corporate cult; I listen to a promotional recording and leaf through pamphlets for a few moments until I am approached by my host: a dour-faced young man in monk’s robes. He instructs me to follow him into the facility and have a seat in a wheelchair which I soon discover is a bit too tight for comfort. He condescendingly advises me that I am very lucky to have been invited. I don’t feel lucky; I feel anxious and a bit claustrophobic as I surrender control to him while he wheels me into a side room.

The Tom Sawyer Effect puts an emphasis on the virtual reality elements of their projects and The Incubus is no exception. My escort helps me place a VR headset on myself and I am left alone, watching a video recording of a lovely spa attendant who begins to soothe me into a relaxed, almost sleepy state through ASMR* techniques. I feel the occasional tactile stimulation of soft brush bristles against my face and wind moving over my hair, issued in sync with the recording, delivered in the real world (presumably by my host). While these sensations are lovely, they are soured by the underlying knowledge that this is meant to be a horror experience and I feel my nerves steadily become more tense as every minute passes, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When things begin to go spooky, it’s insidiously gradual, like a dream with nightmare elements beginning to creep in at the edges. I’m looking for clues, as I’m now hyper-sensitive to sensations and sounds back in the “real world,” and the juxtaposition of VR and physical stimulation makes it so much worse as the performance continues. Every time the headset goes on I’m cringing and waiting for something to sneak up on me. The visual story hearkens back to what I’ve already seen of the set (the VR shows footage of the spaces I’ve already physically been through, as well as areas beyond). I’m aware that not only am I about to be moved through the multi-room environment, but that someone — or rather something — is undoubtedly following me. The physical stimulus during the VR segments is no comparison to the dread I feel as I’m instructed to remove the headset and progress into the next space, where more VR and more real-world stimulus awaits.

I make it as far as the second room and halfway through the video segment, where I devolve into a broken mess and beg out.

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To his credit, lead actor Rob Thompson handles my request immediately and gracefully: the performance comes to a complete stop and he gently escorts me out of the space while assuring me that everything is fine. I am able to collect myself in the brightly-lit entrance area where I seriously rethink my future commitments to reviewing horror productions.

During my informal interview afterward with production director Ben Mason, we chat about how The Tom Sawyer Effect has drastically honed their horror chops since last year. A far cry from Pendulum’s single-room experience, The Incubus uses the journey to remove the audience’s spatial familiarity and to unbalance expectations. Audiences in a single room who know all the sensible entrance and exit points won’t be taken by surprise, but the suggestion that they will have to move toward or be overtaken by spooks while being denied the ability to see the action due to wearing a headset proves much more terrifying.

I learn that I am the first visitor to chicken out, but the fact is surprising given how well the production handled my request; there is genuine warmth from both Mason and Thompson in their aftercare for their audience. Mason fills me in on the segments of the show that I unfortunately missed: how there is in fact a small degree of audience agency throughout the show and depending on your choices (how quickly you follow orders, how eagerly you pass through to each space) the ending of the show can change.

While The Tom Sawyer Effect hopes to scale The Incubus up into something more sustainable, it seems like the only thing missing for longevity is a more formal and isolated locale. A proper set budget could provide for more solid walls rather than curtains between areas. The biggest issue would be finding a way to usher more than one audience member at a single time through the path in order to promote commercial success.

Because I am not a horror performance aficionado (and in fact really ought to run screaming from any future invitations to review), I cannot offer a comparison to other immersive horror productions such as Creep (Los Angeles) or Blackout (nationwide in the USA), but I can safely say that The Incubus does exactly what it sets out to do: it lures the audience in with the promise of a blanket of security and then slowly unravels the tapestry in order to produce real scares. Contradictory to my naive entrance, visitors should arrive prepared for shrieks and shivers, because The Incubus delivers.

* ASMR: “Autonomous sensory meridian response is an experience characterized by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. It has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia and may overlap with frisson.” — Wikipedia

The Incubus has concluded. Learn more about the Tom Sawyer effect.

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