Heretic tears up the rules and creates a deeply unsettling experience

“To realize that all your life—you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams there’s a monster at the end of it.” – Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective

The end is the beginning.

Ugly fluorescent lights illuminate a graffiti-splattered, piss-soaked-tunnel under a major street in Los Angeles. The rank smell is impossible to escape.

A line of bloodied men, heads against the wall, silent.

Where am I? I know this place, I’ve been here before. I shouldn’t be here.

I emerge from the tunnel and am rushed into a building.

Goggles are placed over my eyes. Vision blurred.

They are posing me for pictures, sick pictures.

Blood sprays down on me, a naked woman(?) is posed on top of me.

I hear Lucy. I see a ghost.

A piano plays a discordant song somewhere in the room. Single key strikes creating a haunting, disturbing melody.

I’m numb.

They stand me up and remove the goggles. I’m surrounded by figures. An old man with a knife, a witch, several masked men and women. Adrian is there, he tells me to leave, but it is too late.

– Rewind

I’m back in the tunnel. The smell rips into my nostrils.

A man in a black mask crouches in the tunnel. I’ve seen him before. A dream?

I’m rushed back into the dark building at the end of the tunnel. Everything is different, yet somehow the same.

A naked, bloody woman in a bunny mask stands in front of me. I’m told to grab her shoulders.

I’m pulled backwards roughly and slammed onto the filthy cement.

What is she doing to me? What am I doing to her?
I would never do this. They’re making me do it.

Snuff.

She vomits on my face, into my mouth.

I’m torn off the ground and pushed down a hallway.

It’s dark, lit by flickering light.

I see the witch, the masked man. They grab and pull at my flesh.
Frantic, I have no control.

– Rewind

I hear someone speaking over a loud speaker, somewhere. The director.

They make me keep doing this, I don’t want to.
Hands violently twisting grabbing my sides and stomach.

Suddenly it’s dark, pure black– and cold. Painfully cold.

A man asks, am I ready for the next scene?

– Rewind

Diving.

I’m inhaling something. Hallucinating.

It’s time to jump into the pool.
A fall backwards.

– Rewind

I see Adrian.
What are they doing to him? I need to stop it.

I can’t, they won’t let me.

The bunny woman watches, laughing.

Spinning.

Megaphone. The director is proselytizing, creating, recreating.

– Rewind

They take me to where the dead people live.

I see her, Lucy. Eyes dead, a cataract stare into nothingness.

She tells me of a long dark road, a cold walk. I feel like crying.
Pain, so much pain.

I can’t breathe.

The depths of the ocean.

– Rewind

I see the witch.

The masked man.

Something is placed over my head. I’m blind.

Injection.

Eastern Europeans, where am I now? We dance.

Reflection, suddenly I see my own face. It’s floating in front of me, impossible to see anything else.

– Rewind

I’m auditioning for a role. The director wants to see anger. They say things to make me angry.

Recording, the camera stares blankly.

…………

Once again, darkness.

–Rewind

Bound. Spinning. Spiraling. Fire.

Evil beauty.

The bunny watches.

The witch watches.

The masked man watches.

They all watch.

Hundreds of candles.

I shouldn’t have come here.

The beginning is the end.

“Someone once told me, ‘Time is a flat circle.’ Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again and again and again forever.”
– Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective

Devotee of Evil has proven that Heretic’s ambition to create challenging horror theater is boundless. This was a devastating thrill ride and perhaps the world’s first post-modern haunted house. Through clever production and writing, the show managed to bend and twist time itself. Certain parts of the story were repeated and used to illustrate how you were navigating the story in reverse, like a live action combination of Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Gasper Noe’s Irreversible.

Adrian Marcato, Heretic’s mastermind, created a puzzle-like structure with characters and events connecting to experiences that happened in earlier shows this season and even Heretic shows from the past few years. This was a dense show, packed with meaning and symbolism and the repetition created some devastatingly emotional moments.

Hiding just underneath the surface was the personal connection Adrian shares with this story. The entire Heretic mythos is based on the horrific murder of Adrian’s friend, Lucy. She is a tragic figure who haunts the entire world of Heretic, perpetually doomed by her violent end. The most powerful moment of the show came when time stopped, and Lucy, lit by haunting greenish blue light, told the story of her abduction and murder.

Like all great art, Heretic is not for everyone, nor should it be. Heretic is not afraid to make you stare into the void and place you precariously close to real danger. The experience is like being in a car speeding at 150mph down an empty desert highway with no headlights. You are in the passenger seat and Heretic is behind the wheel. They are in complete control and you are powerless to change the direction or speed of the car.

However, Adrian and the Heretic team continue to deliver on their promise of safety. Though they pushed me to my limits a couple times, I never felt like I was in danger of being permanently injured. There were two safe words, and I was evaluated by a medic before and after the show. Heretic also had multiple safety personnel employed to make sure everyone, both cast and audience, was safe– even going to the lengths of having a fire safety manager.

Through the repetition and the reverse structuring of Devotee of Evil, Adrian has asked us to ask ourselves how we, as the viewer and participant, are complicit in creating cycles of violence. The director character, who appeared throughout the show, is trying to create a never ending stream of art in depravity. Are we causing Lucy to be permanently stuck in time by viewing her in this show, caught amidst the torture and violence? Why and how can we as humans find beauty and create art in such immorality and evil?

Adrian has tried to find where a single cycle of violence, the murder of Lucy, began and give us a way to see through the looking glass into evil. When we get to the beginning we realize that time is just a circle and we are the piece of the puzzle that connects the circle. Our viewership, and participation, is part of what sustains the horror.

In Devotee of Evil and its sequences, Heretic has created a singular work of art that few got to experience and, perhaps, the rarity of a Heretic show is part of what makes it important.

In our current media and art world, we are too often constantly bombarded with content and not asked to contemplate what we are experiencing, or we are too busy figuring out how to share what we are experiencing with the world, rather than just live in the moment.

With this challenging show, Heretic has given the world a once in a lifetime experience that can’t be recreated. A work that stands in time as it was, but that I will reflect upon for years to come. Like Lucy and Adrian, the show itself is trapped in time, part of a fixed loop that will keep spinning endlessly through space in a dream and the monster at the end of the dream is me.

The next show will be Riot Violence: Transmigration on 10/19. I believe tickets are sold out, but there is a chance at general admission on the night of the show.

For more info and tickets to future shows visit heretichorrorhouse.com