The New York Times: On a recent Saturday night, ten anxious individuals were blindfolded and taken to a secret location in the desert, 40 minutes outside of Los Angeles. They were told that they would each be playing the part of a futuristic criminal who had been lobotomized and summoned to help investigators identify two bodies discovered on the grounds.
3 comments:
These people are sick, they don’t need an extreme “haunt,” they need a mental health professional and lots of counselling. I would also like to call into question the stability of the people putting on the “experiences.” I very much like the idea of immersive theatre, but this is not that. If anything they are preying on the money of these poor people who need near death experiences to feel “alive.” You wanna feel alive? How about I kill you then ask you how it feels to be alive. If you are breathing, you are by definition alive, you want an adrenaline rush? Ride a f**king roller coaster! Also, these are not haunts! A haunt is something that has some relation to Halloween, if there are no pumpkins, vampires, witches, or skeletons it is NOT A HAUNT! This is living torture porn, and that is gross. Their tag line about not scarring or killing them is also rubbish, you can perform a lot of surgeries with little scarring, will they pull out by appendix for $170? The whole concept turns my stomach.
I’ve heard about these kinds of people who like extreme situations and things that’ll nearly scare them to death. Honestly I think it’s a really interesting part of the human psyche that craves adrenaline and a thrill. While I enjoy a spook or an haunted house, I personally wouldn’t want to take part in this kind of thing. Mainly because I’m so opposed to being dirty or sticky. But if other people want to go through with it then more power to them. Maybe it’s ridiculous, but there are other people who jump out of airplanes, climb buildings, or go big game hunting for that rush, so it’s not even the most dangerous source of adventure. It’s weird for sure, but out of everything that people could be doing, it’s not really doing much harm.
On the other hand, I think I would really enjoy creating the environments and pieces of scenery that go into these extreme horror places. There would be a lot of cool processes that could create the textures and other elements that will really scare people.
I think a lot of people don't realize that stuff like this is an addiction. At one point, the man being scared said that this was the way he escaped his high pressure job. This type of escapism has become very popular recently. Between Live action role playing and even underground fetish groups that use role playing for sexual stimulation, people have been trying to escape their realities any way that they can. In a way, it's no different than playing video games, or reading a book, it's just a little bit more extreme. Personally, I don't think I could even comprehend voluntarily traumatizing yourself like the people who do these immersive horror experiences do, because the realism involved makes me think that I really wouldn't be able to separate fantasy from reality. I do think that if you need to be traumatized like that just to deal with the stress of your normal day to day life, then perhaps you need to evaluate what is causing you that stress and how to eliminate it, but honestly, we all have things that help us get through the day, and if that's what helps this man and other people, and it's safe, then there's no reason he shouldn't be allowed to.
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