You’re in a musty, creepy warehouse in Red Hook, forced to wear a drab jumpsuit and led, blindfolded and bound, to whereabouts unknown. You then watch, helpless, as a person just like you is tortured by a psychopath who’s coming for you next. What do you do? What can you do?
“You have to get the f— out when it’s time — and you’ll know when it’s time,” is among your scant directions.
Luckily, this is not real, but it is This Is Real, a new immersive theater horror story, and you’re its star — if you survive, that is.
“I honestly have no idea what to expect,” recent participant Romain told Metro when we visited the new outing for Psycho Clan, which hosted Nightmare Haunted House on the Lower East Side for more than a decade.
“I wanted to create a real horror scenario that felt real and was able to utilize quiet and mood and people could take their time,” creator Timothy Haskell said. “It stemmed from wanting to achieve things in horror you can’t do in a haunted house.”
But don’t think this is an escape-room scenario. “Although you have to escape it, there’s no riddles or clues,” Haskell said. “It’s ‘Can you survive? Figure it out.’”
While Metro watched the action via strategic peepholes throughout This Is Real, we won’t give too much away other than to say that this writer is glad she was a voyeur instead of a victim.
Haskell’s favorite part is the hiding involved to survive. “That’s what I think is really terrifying, creating quiet, stasis, like in horror movies where both you in the audience and the character are both waiting for the bad guy to discover you, and it takes so long,” he said. “To me, that’s the thing I couldn’t do in a haunted house that I could do here.”
Romain, who ended up one of two survivors, liked the hiding and said the scariest part for him was “when the psychopath was whistling and we knew he was coming back.”
While This Is Real is sold out for the remainder of October, it currently has an open-ended run at 153 Coffey Street, which is just a few blocks from the NYC Ferry’s Red Hook landing on the South Brooklyn route.
Tickets range from $95-$110, and only eight tickets are sold for each time slot. For more info, visit thisisreal.nyc.
