REVIEW: Sleepwalkr 2.0

October 18, 2024

review: Sleepwalkr 2.0

Several years ago, a group of young haunters all popped up at the same time. This new generation of teenage builders - Murder House Productions, Twisted Minds, Rosewood, and Opechee, to name a few - all breathed new life and energy into the Southern California haunt atmosphere. The latter, Opechee, formed numerous variations each season from interactive displays to well executed walkthroughs (our favorite being 2018's "The Donnie Darko Experience" maze). The brains behind this operation, Sam Kellman, eventually went dark for a few years while he went to college - coming back with his 2022 interactive play, “Within Our Walls”, followed up by 2023's immersive audio experience, “Sleepwalkr”.

For this season Kellman has partnered up with David Coleman (of the aforementioned Twisted Minds team) with a continuation of the Sleepwalkr story, which explores a sci-fi world where you experience peoples’ dreams through the use of the Sleepwalkr machine. This more expansive experience in LA's Historic Filipinotown, located down the street from the legendary Pehrspace (where Val Kilmer famously bought pizza for everyone and did a psychedelic spoken word performance opening for Future Islands and Dan Deacon), is a voyage into the otherworldly realms of the subconscious. 

Sleepwalkr is somewhat difficult to explain as it is not necessarily a haunt, nor a play, nor a podcast, but rather something that is a combination of all of those concepts. Attendees enter a red light infused sci-fi workshop, followed by a dark, blue room where mysterious, masked men (named The Sandman Collective) give you headphones and sleeping masks. You spend the next twenty minutes in an immersive auditory voyage with live sensory effects where you experience peoples’ dreams (or in some circumstances, nightmares). This is followed by a climactic ending that might be the closest this gets to Kellman and Coleman's background in haunted mazes (this is a plot point that we do not want to spoil - sorry!).

Sleepwalkr is a unique experience that is very original and therefore difficult to describe. While we would lean into saying that this is more audio-based than visual (you spend most of the time blindfolded), it still contains aspects of their backgrounds in building haunts. Kellman and Coleman have become masters of innovation, always offering elements of surprise within unchartered territories. With their combined creative minds you are never quite sure what you will get - anything from a haunt to a play - but you know it will have a tremendous amount of love and thought put into it!

VC

October 18, 2024

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