This Halloween, Exiled: Crooked Rose Woods is coming to Kansas City, but this immersive experience is much more than a haunt.
Darren Lynn Bousman, a Kansas City native known for directing horror films like Saw II and Spiral, is teaming up with Exiled: Trail of Terrors and production company 111experience to create a live event that hopes to truly haunt its visitors long before and after their visit.
“When I was a kid, Kansas City was the mecca of haunted houses,” Bousman says. “Every Halloween from September to November, we were down in the West Bottoms, and there were 15, 16 haunted houses.”
These haunted houses helped cultivate Bousman’s love for horror and inspired him to later pursue work in Hollywood.
When Bousman discovered Exiled: Trail of Terrors at the Bonner Springs Zip KC zipline park, he knew it had massive potential. The one-mile haunted hike has been around for nearly a decade, but this new partnership plans to take it to the next level, Bousman says.
The Exiled: Crooked Rose Woods event is inspired by other immersive experiences Bousman created in Los Angeles, such as the Tension Experience, where participants discovered the secrets of a fictional cult through a months-long alternative reality game. Exiled: Crooked Rose Woods will similarly use storytelling along with other traditional haunted house techniques to create an alternative world for visitors.
“In most haunts, people jump out and they scream ‘boo’—that’s not what this is,” Bousman says. “That’s not what I do.” While there will be more than 60 actors along the five-mile trail who help create the alternative world, what makes these haunted woods special is how personally invested each participant will be in this fictional world that they are entering, Bousman says.
“It’s much more of a horror movie that you can walk through and be a part of as opposed to a trail you walk down and have things happen to you,” Bousman says.
There are three ticket levels, each designed for various ages and degrees of immersion. Level three, a 24-hour immersive horror experience, is offered only to a limited number of applicants.
Beyond the individualized experience of the haunt itself, which is open September through early November, the team has also created an alternate reality game that local horror lovers can participate in now through the Exiled: Crooked Rose Woods website and by interacting with its Instagram account @exiledkc. As part of the game, there are secret websites and live events throughout the city that include interactions with characters before the actual haunt itself. These various experiences ensure that anyone who wants to actively immerse themselves in the Exiled world will never be sure of what’s real and what’s not.
“We’re blurring the lines, letting people come in and hopefully dissolve into this world that is not gonna feel like you’re in a haunted house,” Bousman says. “It’ll be a living, breathing thing.” exiledkc.com.
