A dead bride leads me down a pitch black hallway, covered in cobwebs and smoke. Her face is a shock of white and she sings like a lost lover as we pass other creatures of the night. Wolves howl, black cats hiss behind corners. Finally, we enter the black box, the stage of the The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers, or as the cast calls it, “The Shivers.”

Aside from a Beauty and the Beast performance when I was six, The Shivers was the first interactive play I’d been to. I went the drizzly Friday night before Halloween and it was the perfect opening for the spooky weekend.

Upon my arrival, I was led to an elevator where I was asked to smell herbs. As the elevator descended we arrived at the “wrong floor,” where three ghostly brides screamed at us. At the final stop before entering the black box, my friend and I were given knight head-gear that fit the theme of the show. These were only a fraction of the interactive experiences.

Black box theater offers the unique opportunity for the audience to step a little closer to the world behind the curtain. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, literally a foot away from a sleeping, soon-to-be prince, there was no choice but to be immersed in the show.

Particularly impressive were the actors, including Free State’s Morgan McReynolds and Eli Bjork. Bjork played the lead as the boy who traveled to a haunted castle in search of being scared for once and McReynolds starred as the head bride. Despite my front row seat and familiarity with the two, neither broke character.

As I watched Bjork battle with a werewolf and a zombie, lunging and spinning across the stage, I could have reached out and touched him. The Shivers was not a movie. I hesitate to even call it a performance because it was more intimate than that. I don’t need to review the incredible makeup and costumes, the theatrics, or the actors—interactive plays are a category unto themselves, for everything else is just detail.

There is tradition to walking into an auditorium, sitting in your chair politely, and clapping softly at the end. But when I walked into the black box the night before Halloween, I found myself being pushed off the high-dive into the story. I’m afraid of heights, but The Shivers did not scare me. It let me in.