Casa Loma needs humans to make event truly scary
Casa Loma’s Legends of Horror runs through October.
In 2011, Punchdrunk Theatre’s Sleep No More opened in New York City’s McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, and it hasn’t stopped since.
In fact, it has expanded into hosting special seasonal events, two restaurants to begin or close your theatrical experience, and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.
Immersive theatre has become the trendiest buzzword in live performance, as audience members seek out alternative experiences in their cultural consumption. But there’s a familiar feeling to anyone who enters the gothic rooms of the McKittrick, with its ample haze, fake blood, and Macbethinspired witches, spells and rituals. The chill that crawls up your back, knowing that things exist in your environment beyond your control, was likely first felt at a haunted house.
The rise of immersive theatre and the success of shows like Sleep No More has spread throughout cities like New York and LA, especially around Halloween.
The trend has yet to take off in Toronto, even as 60,000 patrons visited past Legends of Horror editions and thousands more attend Wonderland’s Halloween Haunt and the Exhibition Place’s Screemers.
As October nears, bringing with it the beloved season of spooks and spectres, one of Toronto’s newest Halloween attractions opened its doors this week, Casa Loma’s Legends of Horror.
Beginning in 2016, transforming the mansion’s grounds and basement into a two-kilometre walk through the crypts, lairs and mazes of classic film monsters is a natural fit. Casa Loma is an easy stand-in for Dracula’s castle, its dungeons for Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, and its landscape for the woods that hid the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon — a few of the horrors that Legends of Horror attendees will find along the path.
Legends is aware of its connection to immersive theatre: it describes itself as “promenade theatre,” and describes the audience as being “immersed in a variety of theatrically designed sets … on a macabre chase for love and immortality.”
But the reality falls short of its aims — its campy embrace of animatronic ghouls, plastic skeletons, robotic mental patients, hanging body bags and a castle-spanning projection make it difficult not to slip outside of the moment, to emerge from the immersion.
The best thing Casa Loma could do to make its Legends of Horror tour more effective, as a piece of immersive theatre or as a piece of pure thrill, is increase its cast of human bodies (alive and undead). The vampire circus performers were easily the highlight of the entire journey, culminating in an impressive, but brief, hair hang act in a setup of Frankenstein’s lair.
But outside of the designated circus performance areas, live actors are the basis of any good piece of theatre, or any good fright. Humans are surprising, and surprises are scary. A common factor in the “elevated” haunts of New York and L.A. are human players interacting with human guests.
If Legends of Horror is the latest haunted house to come to Toronto, we’re due for a more engaging, immersive, experiential, in-your-face ride.
Carly Maga is a freelance theatre critic for the Toronto Star.