Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven’s ‘political ghost train ride’ ‘Phobiarama’ is one of the more attention-grabbing attractions in this year’s LIFT Festival – the show is now returns only.
If you’re worried that you’re missing out on an experience of unrivalled horror then, er, you’re not, but there are certainly some moments.
The show takes the shape of a fairly old-school haunted house ride: you sit, two to a car, and clank and chug through a looped circuit, over which various Things Happen.
At first, the course is fairly empty and the politics comes from the flickering television monitors in each room: recorded snarls of rage and screeds of hate from the likes of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins play out in the near pitch-black corridor.
Getting into spoiler territory – if you’re going to do the ride it might be worth looking away now, though the picture is kind of a spoiler too – after a while people dressed in bear costumes start appearing, at first half-glimpsed in the shadows, later looming menacingly over us. Quite what the bears *mean* is another matter. It is quite possible they mean nothing. But they are a foretaste for the most shit-scary segment. In it, the train flips into reverse at juddering speed, the bears shed their skin to reveal old school, ‘IT’-style clowns, which lunge and spin at us with a nightmarishly balletic precision.
Again, it’s hard to see this as particularly political, though Verhoeven’s intent is presumably to juxtapose horror movie tropes with the current climate of political fear. And certainly he succeeds in creating something that feels impressively like a horrific acid trip.
The final section is the most problematic one, as the clowns shed their costumes to reveal that they’re big, burly, tattooed men. The recordings stop and the meaning of the ride becomes tricker to discern: the men – who I guess look like prisoners – are presumably supposed to be objects of fear. But this is presumably also The Political Bit, and it doesn’t really land. They seem like the type of people that middle England gets nervy about, but at the same time they’re not exactly what I imagine the likely audience for this show would call figures of nightmares.
Without their point being couched and refined out a bit more, they bring ‘Phobiarama’ to an anticlimax, its final stab at profundity just a flail in the dark. Still, we’ll always have the clowns.