It’s a tradition that actually dates back to the 1980s in LA, long before Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More began its iconic New York run. That’s when John Krizanc’s play Tamara took up shop at Hollywood’s American Legion Hall for a multi-year residency. Starring Anjelica Huston, Tamara was a groundbreaker, inviting audiences to move freely through a re-created Italian villa while the characters walked, talked, and interacted around them. Despite that head start, however, the immersive theater scene in Los Angeles stalled out, and it wasn’t until Jon Braver’s interactive horror play Delusion opened in 2011 — and the extreme haunted house Blackout came to town a year later — that the community began to develop newfound momentum.

"The scene was fairly anemic," says Noah Nelson, creator of No Proscenium, a newsletter and podcast devoted to chronicling immersive theater productions across the country. "There were a couple of companies here and there. There were people experimenting with the form, some of whom have walked away, but it’s not cheap to put these things on." In 2013 local upstarts like The Speakeasy Society began experimenting with small, personal shows staged in private homes, but for most audiences their first taste of immersive theater came from an entirely different avenue: haunted houses.

The new wave are full immersive experiences, not jump scare parades

Southern California’s scare scene has been anchored for years by attractions like Knott’s Scary Farm and Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights, but shows like Delusion and Blackout incorporated real actors and a sense of narrative; they were interactive experiences, not just a parade past a series of expertly timed jump scares. "I attended Blackout the very first year that it was here in Los Angeles," says Russell Eaton, one half of My Haunt Life, a podcast that tracks Southern California "haunts" and immersive theater. "I’m a [film and TV] editor by trade, and it was such a unique form of storytelling. It was non-linear, it was a live event, and yet it didn’t tell a traditional story. You had to gain a lot from it through your own interpretation. You had to participate."

Eaton wasn’t alone in his fascination, as both fans and other creatives saw the introduction of live theater elements as the logical evolution of the horror scene. "The line is getting so blurred, because haunts are becoming more interactive," says Eaton’s co-host, Mike Fontaine. "You have things like The Tension Experience. You have things like Blackout, and Delusion, where you become a part of the story. You can actually interact, and that’s the biggest thing that has been happening, year after year."

One of the people that saw that early Blackout show was Nicholas Sherwin, Jr., who felt so impacted by the experience that he ended up working for the company behind the productions as a stage manager and production manager. In a trend of pay-it-forward inspiration that seems to repeat throughout the LA community, Sherwin eventually started his own immersive theater company, Screenshot Productions, which has been garnering attention for its unique shows that combine existential themes that expand well beyond Sherwin’s roots in immersive horror.

"This medium is a great conduit for imparting emotional knowledge to other people," Sherwin tells me from the art gallery that serves as the stage of Screenshot’s latest production, The Rope. The company’s previous shows have encouraged audience members to re-experience their own birth (Parturition) and death (Bardo Thodol), but The Rope uses a quest-based gaming dynamic to help players explore an immersive, Tolkien-esque fantasy world while trying to reach a magical land. It’s a unique experience with a breathtaking visual payoff at the end that left me utterly breathless, and an example of how richly varied the work in Los Angeles has become.

That’s been enabled by a number of environmental factors. Just from a pure talent side, the number of actors and would-be creators that move to Los Angeles, only to find themselves without work from traditional Hollywood sources, are legion. ("What this form calls for is for a kind of acting that is neither theater nor film, but somewhere in the middle," explains Nelson, "because you need the intimacy with the camera that a film actor has, but you also need the physical presence that a stage actor has.") But these are also productions that take place inside actual physical spaces that must be transformed and explored, and LA’s notorious sprawl provides a unique canvas of opportunity.

Legions of unemployed actors and urban sprawl become a benefit

"In the first year, it was just like, ‘Oh this is going to be a panacea!’" says Nelson. "This is going to be better than New York, because there’s so much space. Things are cheaper than the [San Francisco] Bay Area, they’re cheaper than New York, and there’s all these actors!" And while that’s been true, Los Angeles is still a city with a mindset built around film production, and the expectations both of landlords looking to lease properties and the city’s permitting offices are not accustomed to theater shows that want to take over a space for months to put on an immersive horror or theater piece. It’s part of the reason why the scene, burgeoning though it is, has up until recently remained so seasonal — centered around the Halloween haunted houses that have helped give it life.

The strain is felt even by relative newcomers, like creator Justin Fix’s Creep LA. Only in its second year, Creep has already set itself apart by merging the more traditional, walk-through vibe of a haunted house with theatrical scene work and interactions, and while Fix acknowledges that things work well at the moment — "This business can be a really lucrative business," he admits — to truly expand to the kind of year-round installations that New York audiences enjoy with shows like Sleep No More and Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell is a different challenge.

"We would love to keep on pursuing this and really get some money behind us, so we can really be a company and a group of artists based on stability," he says, with shows in the fall and spring that would allow his troupe to expand beyond just horror. But it’s a way of thinking that the City of Los Angeles still hasn’t quite come around to. "For what we’re trying to do now, these short term, nine-week, 12-week runs, the City of Los Angeles calls them ‘ghost tours.’" It's a mischaracterization that reveals just how behind the curve the city's thinking can be, and would be outright hilarious if it weren't standing in the way of more ambitious productions.