Horror is a funny genre. In order to succeed – that is, to afright – it must almost transcend its chosen medium. It must, in some small way, trick us into forgetting ourselves. The slightest trace of cynicism – a refusal to become immersed – will always prove fatal. It is, after all, near impossible to scare someone prepared for and guarded against scare tactics. Horror must persuade us to leave ourselves defenceless or else circumnavigate those fortifications with something utterly unexpected.
Slung Low’s latest sets out to scare. It does so not by presenting a distinct fictive world and sucking us through a portal, but by weaving an alternate reality into this one. The need for investment remains, but the company ask us to remain entirely present rather than entering a state of semi-dissociation. That the joins between fiction and reality, the mechanics of the piece, are so evident, so clunky, however, prevents any real commitment to the fiction spun. Resistance is not so much futile as inevitable.
From the start we are told that the event we were expecting has been cancelled, replaced instead with a night-time tour of the city. “Oh, yeah!” we think, “Really?” – before being bundled into a car and driven around the block to the entrance of a dark tunnel, lined with white plastic sheeting. Through headphones, two competing voices – one advisory and caring, the other throatily malevolent – explain the scientific reality of vampiric myths through the crackle of interference. Sillhouettes stalk the dark: some shiftily appearing behind you, others sprinting past, blood-soaked. Pools of blood mingle with the salt path you tread. Gutted cars and carcasses are scattered around the confined space.
Admittedly, the experience sets your pulse aflutter and has you glancing over your shoulder. However, the overall is too consciously constructed for us to really succumb. The space – an underground car-park with a fear-factor of its own – is overdressed and the fictive circumstances forcibly imposed. Both the mechanics and motivations of They Only Come at Night are too evident and justifications too flimsy. The white sheeting, for example, is apparently in place to prevent unwanted radio communications.
What’s more, the script is a confusing mixture of religious and scientific waffle that never adds up to understanding. It is altogether reliant on staples of horror – seers and seekers, that sort of thing – without finding an underlying consistency that enables them to stand up to scrutiny. Formulas scratched on walls are as obviously meaningless as the pools of blood are fake. It begins to look like Slung Low are merely begging for our investment, rather than doing anything to cause it. “Ignore that projector,” they seem to say, “it’ll break the illusion. And, whatever you do, don’t turn around and catch the stage-hand re-setting the scene before.”
Perhaps that seems unforgiving, but the truth is that if Slung Low are aiming to catch us out they must expect us to try and catch them first. Instead, the whole experience feels like a conveyor belt of cause and effect. We are over-manipulated and expected to comply placidly; our pace is curtailed to suit their needs.
Yet, at times, this mechanistic effect feels deliberate. Its timing is such that, as you are initially instructed out of the car, a previous party can be seen leaving the tunnel. When you reach the same stage, your tour-guide turned rescuer assures you that “this has never happened before.” Then there’s the newspaper article left in your possession that dismisses the whole story as scaremongering hokum. Slung Low, it seems, can’t decide whether they want to succeed with smoke and mirrors or demonstrate their inevitable failure.
It’s a shame, because there’s evident potential behind the original commission. By doing far less, much more could have been achieved, but it requires the recognition that it is the real circumstances, rather than the fiction spun, that will set us on edge. Credit to the company for trying, but They Only Come at Night is a catalogue of miscalculations.
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