Nightmare: Gothic offers Victorian scares on the Lower East Side (photo by Joshua Hoffine)
NIGHTMARE: GOTHIC
Teatro SEA @ the Clemente
107 Suffolk St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
October 17-31, $30 GA, $45 VIP, 6:00 – 11:00 pm
nightmarenyc.com
Nobody loves Halloween scares quite as much as the folks at Psycho Clan do. For twenty years, cofounders Timothy Haskell and Paul Smithyman have been presenting varieties of immersive haunted house experiences as well as other holiday-themed (mis)adventures, including Nightmare Haunted House, This Is Real, Full Bunny Contact, and SANTASTICAL. Their latest horror presentation is Nightmare: Gothic, a half-hour immersion set amid Victoriana macabre, running October 17-31 at Teatro SEA @ the Clemente on the Lower East Side. The hunt is on to locate a missing child, but there are frightening barriers every step of the way.
“People have a very specific idea when they think ‘Goth’ and it is mostly of the romantic goth genre,” Haskell said in a statement. “We are, however, inspired by the Victorian Goth era. Think mid to late nineteenth century. Think Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kafka, the contemporary work of Edward Gorey, corsets, dark purples and black, hoop skirts, parasols . . . you get the idea.”
Advance tickets for Nightmare: Gothic are $30 for general admission and $45 for skip-the-line, arrive-any-time VIP access; groups of up to five people are welcome, but no one under twelve will be admitted, and those between thirteen and sixteen require a guardian. The event was conceived by cowriter and director Haskell (The Rise and Fall, Then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of . . . Jean Claude Van Damme as Gleaned by a Single Reading of His Wikipedia Page Months Earlier) and cowriter and production designer Smithyman, with sound by James Lo and lighting by Yang Yu.
Psycho Clan’s goal is “to haunt you well beyond the ephemeral,” so be ready for anything.