Fan of gothic horror novels? Love a creepy haunted house? Wish your adult life provided you with more opportunities to jump into ball pits and crawl through tunnels and secret passageways? If you answered yes to any of the above, you absolutely have to get tickets to A Midnight Visit, the immersive theatre experience currently on show in Brisbane.
Featuring 36 rooms spread out over a cavernous, disused warehouse building, this hour-long experience is part choose-your-own-adventure story, part performance, part horror movie set and part adult playground. Inspired by the tales of gothic author Edgar Allan Poe, it will feel like you’re wandering through the writer’s strange and gruesome mind, with rooms and performances themed around madness, guilt, death and memory. Basically it’s a fever dream inside a fever dream and you will walk out wondering exactly what you just saw.
But what can you expect to find inside, really? Well, we don’t want to give too much away, because half the fun is wandering into the unknown, but we’ll give you a teaser—there’s everything from a ball pit to an upside down room, along with secret tunnels, mist-filled passageways and somewhere to admit to your deepest secrets, all of it overseen by mysterious veiled women dressed in black from head to toe. Is it scary? A little (nothing is going to jump out at you though), but there’s also plenty of laughs to be had along the way. We will let you in on one little secret—there’s an entrance to a secret bar hidden somewhere in the maze of rooms, but you’ll have to find it...
It’s not just about the rooms though—the performers inside are each telling a macabre story, and following when they beckon will unlock a whole other layer to the experience. An asylum nurse may tell you to get into a hospital bed so she can administer your medicine, or a mad couple might invite you to dinner—you can say no to any request, but we highly recommend just going with it.
Bonus, Innocent Bystander, who has been serving up event themed cocktails, decadent wines and craft beers before and after at the pop-up bar just outside the experience, are also now doing cheese and wine tastings. On Thursday and Sunday evenings, event goers will be able to experience a taste of the Yarra Valley with a paddle of three wines paired with three complementary, locally produced cheeses. A Midnight Visit is definitely an intense journey so some wine and cheese is probably exactly the soothing end you’ll need to the action packed night.
Keen to fuel your nightmares? A Midnight Visit has shows on each night from Wednesday to Sunday and a Halloween festival on the cards. You can find out all the details and snap up tickets here.
The Details
When: Wednesday to Sunday evenings
Where: House of Usher, 95 Robertson Street, Fortitude Valley
Cost: From $69 per person
Looking for more stuff to do around Brisbane? Here's 50 of our favourite weekend activities.
Image credit: Anna Kucera