If you've attended Darren Lynn Bousman's road show tours of The Devil's Carnival movies or Repo! The Genetic Opera, then you've seen that the director knows how to effectively bring viewers into his darkly imaginative worlds. Bousman takes that immersion to the next level later this month with a new theater production set in a spooky house, The Tension Experience: Ascension, opening September 8th in Los Angeles:
Press Release: Ascension is the mastermind of one of the biggest names in Hollywood horror, the director of one of the most successful horror franchises in history, Darren Lynn Bousman.
The creative team behind The Tension Experience is compiled of a talented team of artists, including producer, Gordon Bijelonic, creator and director Darren Bousman, writers Darren and Clint Sears, assistant director Devil's Carnival star Emilie Autumn and composer Joe Bishara.
The show Ascension, which launches in a custom built set in Boyle Heights on September 8th, is a production that has been underway since January, available to a limited audience and a continuation of the beginning of the experience, called Indoctrination.
Tickets have just recently gone on sale for the performance production of Ascension, an immersive theatre production, which will take place in an incredibly detailed theatre set, that will take up an entire city block with set design by one of the finest teams in Hollywood.
When theatre goers purchase a ticket, they immediately become a part of the narrative and are injected into the Indoctrination part of the show. Their participation with Indoctrination will guide their own individual storyline. No two audience members will have the same experience, even if they go through the show at the same time, as their storyline is dictated by their answers to correspondence which begins when they purchase a ticket.
ASCENSION combines the cinematic quality of a film, the individual control of a first person video game, and the unique, moving and emotional experience of live theatre into a new immersive form of entertainment opening in Los Angeles this fall.
The Tension Experience: Ascension is -
- An indoor, interactive experience covering an entire city block that will last over two hours.
- Part haunt, part theatre, part escape room and a completely new, living, breathing… alternate reality.
- Completely immersive. Everything and everyone is there to be interacted with.
- An entity designed to let the audience mold and shape the mysterious and terrifying narrative through their own actions and decisions.
The world that is created for each participant begins the second they purchase a ticket. For six months, the creators of Tension Experience have been honing their skills in a free online “Prologue” called INDOCTRINATION (www.TheTensionExperience.com/timeline) that has left players and critics in awe. Participants have found themselves emotionally invested, and have been left shaken, confused and disturbed, as they have been constantly pulled into the world through phone calls, texts, forums, live streaming events and even real world interactions blending the lines of fantasy and reality. Ticket holders will find that these same techniques will be the terrifying primer weeks before their actual, on-site event. They won’t be stepping into a one night performance; they will be entering the pulse-pounding climax of their new, terrifying world.
The Story:
THE TENSION EXPERIENCE: ASCENSION is a fully immersive, site specific-journey of trust, betrayal and submission.
We invite you to enter the doors of the O.O.A. Institute, a mysterious organization that promises enlightenment, but at what cost? Nothing is quite what it seems and something sinister lurks behind every welcoming smile.
Participants deemed worthy enough to be permitted inside will discover fervent disciples, tasks that probe and chronicle the darkest recesses of their mind, and, sometimes, unexplainable terror.
Individual decisions will reveal whether this is a true path to enlightenment or merely an elaborate trap set by a dangerous cult.
Ascension is more than immersive theatre, more than a haunted house, and more than anything you could possibly imagine. It is a journey into darkness with the possibility of being reborn in the light.
You will be processed, tried and tested. But only if you succeed, may you find…
Ascension.
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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