Living your worst nightmare at The Nightmare Realm
The invitation to attend the premier of The Nightmare Realm, described on the event website as “preying on your deepest fears and nightmares and turning them into a reality” was accepted with some trepidation.
I don’t like being afraid; I fear fear, in fact. I read Stephen King, James Herbert and Clive Barker and scared myself witless when I was a teenager, and was a member of the War Gaming and Role Playing Society in college but now I like happy books about kittens and puppies, and films like Forest Gump.
The Nightmare Realm….even the name is disturbing. Based in Navigation House on Albert Quay, it occupies an area that was developed in the early 19th Century. Before this, the river and mud, so there are plenty of ghosts here already. I came to the event with my daughter, an Arts Student in UCC and a true child of the technological age. We chatted with staff as we waited for the dark horrors to be unleashed. She asked questions about the facebook page and tweeted her status; I sipped wine to steady my nerves. I know it is an interactive, theatrical experience with actors playing the parts of the crazed scientists, tormented spectres and demons (think Hellboy without the humour) but even so…..
My daughter and I were sent in together, like lambs to the slaughter. She was a reluctant participant and 30 seconds into it, up the first set of stairs she pleaded with me to turn back. Nonsense, I said, did Frodo turn back at the gates of Mordor, and shoved her through the door into darkness. Never having read Lord of the Rings, the reference was lost on her. The walk through The Nightmare Realm seems never ending, twisting and turning until you lose all sense of direction. Senses are assailed; darkness, smoky air, can’t breathe, screaming, flashes of light. Sound is another dimension, the music like Carmina Burana mixed with Slipknot.
There are periods of utter darkness, where you can only grope along walls trying to find a gap, terrified of what your hand will encounter. The descent into pitch darkness is timed to perfection – just when you approach the moment of panic, when you think you must turn back but you can’t bear to turn back a faint glimmer of light appears and you stagger towards it. You begin to feel like you are in a dream. Then I realised I know this house, it is every horror novel I have ever read. It is Nightbreed and Hellraiser, Dracula’s castle and The Evil Dead.
I remember most of it in flashes – blood-stained underpants hanging from the ceiling, an abattoir, a giant exposed brain, bodies abused, the twisted results of experiments gone awry. What you glimpse in your peripheral vision scares you the most. The bars set in the walls, a dark figure shouting at you from a distant cell and you think it is ok, he is behind the wall and we are not going that way. Then it gets darker, the corridor twists and suddenly you realise you have to pass through that cell and you really don’t want to but a figure lurches at you from an alcove and you run, screaming.
She dragged me through it, terrified, hissing at me to hurry up. I haven’t held her hand for this long since she was 8. I thought it was ironic. I had a childhood almost bereft of technology, when we could actually be out of touch for days on end. I grew up with tales of ghosts, piseogs, curses, saints and devils. She is a child of Apple and Nintendo, where there is no magic, and no secrets and everything is available at a click, and she emerged at the end shaken and stirred.
My chat with staff did not prepare me for the level of creativity and attention to detail evident throughout. Imagine a labour of love, spiced with hate and evil. The team behind this, and everyone involved in its construction and production have earned the right to be proud. My advice? This is not for the faint hearted, but if you must go then wring the most out of the experience. Absorb the atmosphere, and get in the mood.
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