Happy Halloween, intrepid readers! We’re getting near that bittersweet time when the last night of October falls and all the excellent spooky stuff packs it up in the aftermath. Before the fog lifts, however, there’s one more eerie experience I want to talk about, one that takes a very different angle than the other attractions I’ve talked about this year.
The Shadow Space was brought to my attention while looking for immersive offerings for Halloween that don’t involve menacing scareactors or jumpscares. I’ve admittedly built up a tolerance to a lot of the frights that come with a traditional haunt, but for a number of years beforehand I couldn’t bring myself to go to one. I know people who love Halloween but hate the idea of being stuck in a haunt, where masked strangers intentionally try to get a rise out of guests. It’s legitimately distressing, and I completely understand how that can be.
Thankfully the hunt for alternatives in and around LA is not a difficult one, and my wife and I have made a tradition of attending many annual Halloween shows and immersive theatrical experiences. We are longtime fans of Wicked Lit (literary plays frequently performed in a real-life mausoleum) and Fallen Saints (a dark anthology series), and just this year visited the interactive exhibits at the Heritage Square Museum dealing with true crime stories of old Los Angeles. There’s plenty of escape rooms, spooky galleries and themed pop-up bars to be experienced as well. The plethora of options is comforting, and the more we dig in the more we find, which is always a good thing.
Yet The Shadow Space surprised us with something very different and uniquely engaging. It’s part interactive theatre, part immersive roleplay ala a mystery dinner party, and part puzzle-solving challenge. It’s a haunted house story turned on its ear, because for once you’re doing the haunting.
The main conceit of the show is that you are among the recently deceased, and this will be your first haunting. Luckily for you, a friendly association of spirits is present to help ease you into your new non-corporeal existence and explain the rules. They’ve invited you to a Hollywood house (one built in 1919, no less) to spy on and mildly flummox a pair of living couples having a get-together. It’s only as the hour-long experience progresses that you start to learn of the tangled web these people’s lives lead, and when something genuinely sinister happens, your role changes to solving a mystery and putting clues together in order to put things right.
This fairly simple premise, putting the ghosting in the hands of the guests, would seem difficult to pull off in theory, but The Shadow Space does this with well-established rules, small groups of visitors (no more than ten per show) and absolutely superb improv on the part of the actors. No living person in the house can see you, and the actors do an impressive job completely ignoring the guests, engaging with each other and the environment as if they really are invisible. It’s made clear by the always-hovering (pun intended) spirit guides that touching the living spells catastrophe, for both them and you, and so it becomes organic to move out of the way as they move between rooms. Considering the intimacy of the space, this can be oddly tense at times, with guests stumbling out of the way as they try to eavesdrop yet maintain a fair distance.
Of course, they do react to changes in their environment, which is where the escape-room like elements kick in. Lights can be flicked on and off and certain objects that exist “between worlds” (revealed to be colored under black light flashlights) can be picked up and moved by guests. In the beginning this can be used for comedic effect - one of our group was clearly enjoying being a troll, constantly flicking lights and blowing on the back of the living’s necks, with them commenting on the faulty wiring and wondering where the draft was - but soon becomes a strategy for gathering information. Hiding objects from the living or placing key items in their path while they’re distracted becomes a matter of timing, since the guides state that the living seeing the objects simply appear and disappear would frighten them. As a group, sharing information, dividing and conquering to follow the action or solve puzzles, and deciding when to be discreet and when to cause incidents is the challenge. In the end, success or failure in solving the mystery comes down to how well the group worked together.
I‘m genuinely impressed by how well-craftedThe Shadow Space is. Engaging, tense and exciting without being outright scary, it draws you in through its setting and storytelling, making you feel like a ghost purely by suspension of disbelief. I cannot commend the actors enough, both the living and our guides, for equal parts making sure things went smoothly and rolling with the choices of the guests, all while most of them had to pretend we weren’t there. I’m sure there’s the possibility for hiccups here and there, but the night I went everything ran smoothly, and my group was able to successfully solve the mystery. It’s stellar work all around, and well worth checking out if you get the chance.
I sincerely look forward to future iterations of this experience, if there are more planned. This year’s run is wrapping up, but if it returns in some capacity next year, I think I have another Halloween tradition on my hands. My first crash-course in haunting certainly left me wanting more.
Happy haunting, and I’ll see you in the fog.
The Shadow Space runs select nights until November 3rd, with two shows nightly. More details and tickets can be found here.