Zombie Joes’ Underground Theater never takes any shortcuts, except for one: Other haunted attractions put you through a gauntlet of frights and then let you have your own nightmares. ZJUT’s Urban Death Tour of Terror is all about removing the middleman and making you experience walking, talking, in-person nightmares. Which means that this very short maze and attached theater of the grotesque doesn’t stick strictly to shocks and jumps—instead, it veers into the uncomfortable, the queasy, the funny, the inexplicable, the surprising, the shocking, the sexual and the avant-garde. Like everything ZJUT does, it’s got a helping of brainwork sifted in, but the Urban Death Tour of Terror is lighter than a lot of their mad theatrical experiments. “Lighter” is relative, of course: It’s still got a metric ton of body horror and an uneasy mixture of fantastical horror and real-life dread for the audience to deal with. But the layering of messages is simpler, if not absent, and you can sit back and watch from all kinds of perspectives without having to be part of the intelligentsia.
It’s very hard to really describe the Tour of Terror. You’ll gather with the rest of the audience outside the front door, but you’ll only be admitted in groups of one or two people, each group armed with only a tiny, weak flashlight that can barely give you a thin beam to see things by. You only need the light for the short maze, but it’s definitely effective, and claustrophobic people should beware. You won’t be far away from the things that go bump (and scratch, and groan…) in the dark. I can’t tell you what you’ll see in the maze, but it’s horrific and it’s different each way you go, into or out of the show.
The theater segment is up close and personal, too. It’s essentially a series of blackouts that follow a dream-logic that can’t be sensibly deconstructed; you don’t know where this simulated subconscious will take you next, but you know it won’t be easy. One moment a goofy vignette, the next a scream in the dark; once a flash of fright, the next a short scene that makes you more and more uneasy. The more you let the images and sounds take hold, the more they will take hold… it’s not like any other horror theater or Halloween haunted attraction you’ve ever seen.
As noted earlier, you then return on the reverse version of the maze, but it’s not the same stuff you saw before. It’s just as gruesome and disturbing, and absolutely creepy. Emerging into the terrifying real world, you’ll get your reward for survival. I’d tell you what it is, but I ate mine…
Have a once in a lifetime Halloween treat with Zombie Joe’s Underground Theater Urban Death Tour of Terror. It’s running (crawling, dancing, shambling) now through November 1 at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theater. And tell ‘em CreepyLA sent you…