Continuing the Halloween theme in Los Angeles after going on a Chinatown ghost hunt and attending a festive funeral procession, I decided to take the plunge and check out this year’s Delusion haunted house experience. While I’d never visited previous incarnations of Delusion it didn’t really matter — this year it features an all new story and theme based around the circles of hell.
Delusion begins in a bar/merchandise area just past the ticketing area. Here you wait for a text message telling you to proceed upstairs. This is a smaller waiting area where the group you’re assigned with gathers. In my case, magician Matt Felten performed several slight of hand card tricks in a one-on-one setting as I was the first to arrive. This was by far the highlight of the night, there’s nothing like seeing magic performed up close by a professional.
Once the group has gathered there’s a brief intro, followed by a walk into the next area where the ghostly haunted house experience began. I’m not going to go into detail on all of these to avoid spoilers but getting in and out of each area involved either taking some stairs and/or a ride in an elevator with a spooky actor. There’s a lot of running/fast walking away from scary actors in each scene.
The scenes form largely self-contained vignettes, which is fine but they don’t effectively congeal into a larger story aside from the hand-wavy concept of escaping hell. This feels like a missed opportunity that could have elevated the experience beyond a typical haunted house.
The actors did an excellent job with their roles, playing out nightmarish, horror movie type characters designed to play into certain fears. The costumes, makeup, sound, and special effects were all on point as well.
Unfortunately, what wasn’t on point at all was the set design. Whereas something like Meow Wolf takes the mobility of visitors into account, the team behind Delusion built the set more like a stage play with lots of poorly-marked tripping hazards and at least one staircase with no handrails. Fumbling around in the dark trying to carefully avoid obstacles completely breaks the immersion as you’re forced to focus on your own safety rather than the scene playing out in each area.
My recommendation: Due to the aforementioned set design issues this one can be safely skipped, there are plenty of other Halloween attractions in the LA area to check out instead. Hopefully the folks behind Delusion can work the kinks out for next year.
