Humanism in the Dark
When you make it to the end of Blackout, you are forced down a dark hallway, often restrained and blindfolded, where at the end of it you are pinned down by two performers, one of which is holding what looks like a tattoo needle. Here the you are to receive their brand, that signifies not just that you took part in Blackout but that you are a part of Blackout. After which, you are shoved out of as roughly as you were pulled into the specially disclosed location where Blackout takes place, sometimes without your pants. Once the mental haze clears, you will soon notice that the brand is actually three small black dots, a somewhat appropriate ellipsis, placed on the face or neck. One post-Blackout participant proudly points to the brand on his forehead. The spare minimalism of the gesture, not slight but pointed and confident, only intensifies its visual impact. That is until the participant admits that the “brand” is applied by Sharpie. That makes sense from a legal liability standpoint, though it was still disappointing to hear. Much about Blackout is.
This process is depicted in The Blackout Experiments, a 2016 documentary that goes behind and directly into the scenes that take place in Blackout. The acts undertaken are many and perhaps not easy for all to stomach: suffocation, visual and aural sensory overload, simulated burial, simulated drowning, simulated murder, manhandling of all varieties, and an inescapable sense of dread right before and well after a Blackout has been completed. Yet one Blackout turns into another, and then into several. Soon it assumes something approaching a lifestyle with group meetings and private invitations to more exclusive, and of course more extreme, experiences. If you, obviously normal well-adjusted person, cannot tell if this is good or bad, you can rest easy knowing that the participants can’t seem to tell either.
Blackout at first is similar to the extreme haunted houses that dot the national map every October. And like extreme haunts, Blackout has a complicated admission process. Prospective participants are prescreened physically and psychologically. Those selected are required to sign a release form absolving Blackout of responsibility for any injuries sustained during the experience. Then they are sent an email providing only a time and a location. Once they arrive and are pulled behind the door everything is out of their hands. But unlike extreme haunts, Blackout’s Los Angeles and New York City-centric experiences waive the Halloween-exclusive aesthetics of made-up monsters in favor of the tools of everyday horror: plastic wrap, duct tape, restraints, wooden boards, and black hoods. The experience is something of a tapestry of voluntary brutality: the immersive theater of Sleep No More, the in-your-face performance art of Chris Burden, a little Gestalt therapy here, a little BDSM there, and you start to get the general idea. Blackout does not utilize fear for thrills, as an extreme haunt might, but tries to reach a point that goes beyond fear, and beyond pain, for a deeper purpose.
The Blackout Experiments has been poorly received by critics and online commenters. Part of it being from confusion as to whether or not it is real. These days anyone can whip up “found footage” with nothing more than fake blood, bad lighting, an eyeless doll, and a GoPro. Certainly some of the stunts depicted during filmed Blackouts tax credulity. There’s something that is at once so awkward and stilted in the setup and so unhinged in conception as to give the impression of being staged at every point. Among the most extreme acts is putting participants in a room with a half-naked, sobbing woman. Another man comes in and restrains the participant while giving them a pistol and screaming at them until they shoot the woman. Especially committed participants (who call themselves “survivors”) also live under the belief that Blackout tampers with their daily lives, leaving things in their homes and putting words like “ABANDON” into their phone contacts. The documentary goes to some length to suggest that their paranoia is valid. Survivors even come to believe that the documentary itself is another experience concocted by Blackout.
But Blackout is real, and you don’t need to consult Wikipedia or its many, not always kind, press write-ups, to confirm it. You can see it on the survivors’ faces.
When it comes to recreational pain, there are those who seek it out for its own sake, which is straightforward and probably understood more widely than is admitted; but there are also those who need pain in order to alleviate pre-existing pain, which is a more complicated matter. Blackout, at least as the documentary presents it, derives its controversy and its intense following by attracting those who are decidedly the latter type. One man has both lingering anxiety from being jumped and robbed by three men and dependencies on following the rules and the validation of others. One woman is a recovering inhalant addict. Another woman has a history of sexual abuse. Another man has obsessive-compulsive disorder. These survivors have experienced Blackout so often as to develop an obsession around it.
But obsession does not always confer devotion. The Blackout Experiment is light on views from the experience’s detractors, but there is enough ambivalence to go around from its friendly subjects. The pistol stunt, and other instances where subjugation becomes perpetration, though leapt at by their exclusive invitees, leaves them visibly disturbed, even betrayed after the fact. These are not the typical costumed thrill-seekers who pour into McKamey Manor every Halloween season. At some point, you begin to wonder if this functions like a kind of harem of violence, wherein the producers of Blackout string the survivors along, goading them into more intolerable extremes. Such seems the case when they invite the documentarians to film a newly developed experience, the location of which is “unique.”
That “location” is the survivors’ own homes. Each one sits in their darkened living room and waits for the performers to arrive, clad in black and wearing balaclavas. They put a hood over the survivor, lay them on the floor, yelling “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” right into their faces. For every inevitable wrong answer, they waterboard them. For the better part of a night, they taunt and threaten the survivor all over their home, largely in their shower, until they lay them on their bed, have them recite the original disclaimer while having them add that they no longer need Blackout because Blackout has cured them of the very condition(s) that brought them there to begin with. Then it’s over. Mixed feelings abound yet again, followed by the quiet acceptance that, yeah, maybe they are.
The twist reveal of “snuff therapy”—or perhaps “learned wellness”—should not have surprised. We are well past the point of complaint for how therapy infects everything or that no one involved in Blackout appears to have anything approaching a therapeutic qualification. It is nonetheless not what I would consider an ideal use of its resources, its imagination, or its energy.
An interesting thing about the human spirit is that it doesn’t take much effort to break it. Loneliness breaks the human spirit quite well, as does deprivation, abandonment, isolation, and rejection. All of which have a very passive, low-key style but which may have farther-reaching consequences than anything dreamt up by Blackout’s theater kid vanguard. And that is only the foundation.
Not-caring is the marrow of evil’s skeleton. Not that horror has ever found much inspiration from it. Fair enough. It was always of greater advantage to reach those for whom every day is Halloween as opposed to those for whom one day of Halloween is not enough. Blackout’s therapeutic torture porn merely echoes the dismal tedium of its fictional Bush-era predecessor. But morally aware torture porn, if it may be so-called, is more eager to dine on this marrow and gain its precious nutrients. I have said this all before, though the faults of Blackout inspire me to revive what I said. When I proposed the “empathy room,” I had the deprivation-sourced horror firmly in mind, as provided by the asylum system of old, an oft-exploited but not completely understood phenomenon in the genre:
We cannot, of course, reproduce the effects of mental illness, but we can reproduce the schematics with which abnormal behavior has long been contained. Here one will not find recreations of brutal quackery, but instead the ever-present habits of institutional indifference such as clerical incompetence, negligent quality of life, impossibly disproportionate workloads, treatment as discipline and convenience rather than rehabilitation, extended isolation, and all the psychological effects that flow from them. At any given time patrons will either experience this from the view of the patient or the caretaker, not unlike the Stanford prison experiment but with the institutional rot more or less built in.
Horror has always been a bit solipsistic. It’s always about what’s haunting you, what’s pursuing you, what’s dismembering you. This “experience” focuses instead on the horror of them, whoever they are. Consider the waterboarding incident in the at-home Blackout. It was not in itself objectionable, just ill-used. Volunteering for such an act, even by implication, has a diminished value when others were subjected to it for far longer, to no clear practical end, in the name of millions of faraway people, and without their consent or any guarantee of trust or safety. Maybe the entire extreme haunt industry loses potency when one remembers all the tax dollars that have gone into the building of extreme haunts in less friendly markets but with far more rigorous amenities. Where some people are doing too much, you find others are actually doing too little.
This is to imagine a mode of horror that maybe stretches the limits of our mental, bodily, and moral capacities: one that brings people together in bondage of suffering. This is not so much pushing beyond fear as turning its flesh inside out. Fear as a shared experience; humanism in the dark. The sadism of not-caring is repelled by the liability-protected sadism of caring.