The appeal of horror doesn’t lie in confronting monsters and ghosts – not when you scratch beneath the surface. As Robbie Jones will tell you, the appeal of horror lies in confronting ourselves.
“The beauty of horror for me is being able to bring home the idea of the shadow of a person and forcing somebody to face that, because it’s not something that you can do in everyday life,” Jones says. “That’s the power of horror.”
This concept is the core of Jones’ and his partner Lisa De Palo’s interactive horror theatre show, Ritual. Audience members will be guided through a series of eerie ceremonies, where they will experience unsettling realisations about themselves.
“I’ve done a fair amount of study and work in psychology… There’s this massive overlay between spirituality, religion and psychology,” says Jones, explaining the choice to explore the self through ritual. “The way a ritual performs for us intersects art and psychology really heavily, because you have the theatre side of ritual, and that plays into this unconscious part of our psyche.
“Where you have a group ritual, you have people filling certain roles,” he continues. “You might have somebody who takes on the role of the shadow, the trickster, and so on and so forth. You can use those archetypes to push the audience into these spheres of the psyche.”
Jones’ and De Palo’s appetite for the interactive began in 2022, when they created a Halloween maze for kids in their garage. “It just kept getting bigger and bigger [each year],” Jones says. “It turned into a five-minute house walk-through with hired actors and food trucks.”
Taking things up another notch this year, Ritual will be hosted at the Latvian Hall in Wayville, South Australia. “It’s a Georgian style manor, so it leans towards something that’s a bit horror and grandiose,” Jones says. “Inside the hall, there’s lots of smaller breakaway rooms as well, so we can have intimate spaces with smaller groups.”
In these groups, audience members are invited to slip away from themselves into darker realms of their personas. “We symbolise [personas] in the show by having our audience wear masks,” Jones says. “When you come to the door, you’ll be given a mask to wear, and that mask is symbolic of the mask of the persona that we wear every day.”
While they play an important role in how we present ourselves in public, personas obscure the truth. “We can lose ourselves in personas and forget who we really are at that deeper level,” Jones says.
“These smaller rituals inside of the space are going to be confronting different parts that hold us back in life, or fears.” Ironically, by hiding their faces, audience members can reveal their true selves – even the parts their subconscious might wish to keep hidden.
As for what these parts of the psyche are, Jones gives away very little. “Each space holds its own little story,” he says. “There are a few parts that make up something bigger at the end.”
This certainly contributes to the suspense of facing unknown inner fears, which Jones thinks is the main appeal of horror. “You might not know when you’re putting on a horror movie, but it’s like you’re resolving trauma inside yourself, or trying to discover these unknown parts of yourself, and you can do that through film and art.”
“With Ritual, the idea at the end of the day is the fact that, yes, the persona is important, but it can’t be more important than who your true self is.”
Ritual, Latvian Hall, until 23 March