Hollow House Calls — LA’s ‘CREEP’ Dares You To Answer (Review)
Spooky, sexy, strange: Creep’s triple threat treat is no trick
Creep is back and it’s exactly what you’d want out of the Los Angeles Halloween-season staple.
After a year without many of the normal Spooky Season activities here in Southern California, it’s great to have anything back, but getting a new edition of Creep from JFI Productions feels like something special. I’ve been missing in-person immersive theatre (and I’d hazard a guess that, as a NoPro reader, you have been, too). And getting to step into that patented Creep blend of artsy, fun, weird vibes just feels good, y’know?
This version is operating out of JFI’s new digs at the Ghost Light, their new venue/club/entertainment space in Hollywood, which is also a nightclub known as The 3 Clubs. They’ve used that space shockingly well to build out a show which begins in the established bar area before journeying into a fully realized small town with a central square, shops, and hidden nooks and crannies, along with a haunted house.
JFI has built part of their COVID-19 protocols into the arrival experience of Creep 2021, where they give each attendee a mask — printed with a pattern specific to their small group — before they enter the Ghost Light. (They also require all audience members to show proof of vaccination and wear their JFI-provided masks when inside the venue.) It’s a smart way to incorporate their COVID-19 policy into the actual experience and acclimate attendees to Creep’s atmosphere, while giving the team an easy way to control the show’s audience flow. As an added bonus, I found the mask to be pretty comfy and you get to take home a seasonally appropriate mask.
After receiving their masks, audiences enter the bar where they’ll chat with the denizens slinking about. Each of them has a story and offers some information about Hollow House, a strange building that just appeared one day; inhabitants of the town have been drawn to it but those who go in never come out (naturally). Attendees are likely to spend 30 minutes or so hanging out in the bar and it’s just a really solid bit of immersive theatre where you can sip on a cocktail and talk to some strange characters while you wait to enter the next part of the show. The interactions are nothing major, but this first area does a good job of setting up the rest of the piece and easing attendees into the right headspace.
From there, you and a small group head into that genuinely impressive town square that JFI has built inside of the Ghost Light. It’s a lovely bit of set decoration outside of Creep’s normal style, so it’s nice to see that the creators are trying something new. Elizabeth Jarrett, an Atlanta-based designer responsible for the scenic design on LA’s beloved The Nest, was brought in for the scenic design on Creep this year, and that investment pays off from the moment the inner doors open.
This part of the experience is on rails and where you’ll visit a few businesses and homes to learn more about what’s happening. Those who are left in town seem to be losing their minds as they try to resist the call of Hollow House, so they’re all a little… strange. Each character, from a mysterious fortune teller to a camp counselor to an old shopkeep gets a scene or two to cut loose in their own homes that capture their personality and attitudes (the cast being almost all JFI Productions regulars). They help to put the audience on edge, and set them up to succumb to the inevitable.
Obviously, attendees will end up inside Hollow House (which just makes sense story-wise, plus, it’s in the marketing materials so that’s not a real spoiler). Creep takes another format shift at this point, by becoming their own version of a haunted maze that you might find at Halloween Horror Nights or any number of local haunts. This sequence really captures that feeling of wandering through dark, narrow passages where you never know what’s around the next corner.
Instead of finding rooms with jump scares, though, you’ll (usually) wind up running into a character or two who are delighting in the horrors of Hollow House or trying to escape its clutches. It plays out like a series of spooky vignettes, all tied to the overall experience. One scene with a deranged dentist really walks the right line of creepy, weird, and fun, while accentuating the character of Hollow House and what it’s doing to the area, but they all fit within this specific world. If the town is impressive due to its scale, then the maze area shines with high quality production design and even a few neat special effects which I don’t normally associate with Creep. That may, in part be thanks to the JFI team turning to home haunters Murder House Productions to maximize the look, feel, and impact of the maze itself.
The three distinct sections of Creep 2021 — the bar, the town and the haunted maze — are carefully layered on each other to slowly build dread and excitement as you get ready to enter Hollow House and then fall prey to the murderous manor. It all works really well and reflects the polish of a typical JFI Productions event while also demonstrating that they’re willing to push forward and try new things with more intricate production design and effects. The show knows exactly what it’s trying to be: just a fun Halloween-y time where you’ll hang out in a bar, explore a strange town, and then venture into a haunted house.
Spooky Season in LA is officially back and it’s time for you to creep into one of the most consistently entertaining immersive theatre experiences out there.
Creep 2021 takes place at The Ghost Light/3 Clubs in Hollywood, CA and is currently sold out.
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