Delusion: Harrowing of Hell ascends to horrific heights by descending to infernal depths

Downtown L.A.’s Variety Arts Theater has been transformed into Hell on Earth, creating what may be the most nightmarish Delusion yet.

Does Halloween 2025 offer Delusion‘s most nightmarish interactive theatre piece to date? It is hard to choose among the many highs that make even good years seem relatively “low,” but for us the peak was 2016’s Delusion: His Crimson Queen. Since then, there has been an interesting diversion into science fiction (The Blue Blade), an entertaining three-year run at the Phillips Ranch ending with Nocturnes and Nightmares, and last year’s The Red Castle. All enjoyable but none a new highwater mark.

This year, Delusion: Harrowing of Hell scales new heights by, ironically, descending into the lower depths, offering a depiction of Dante’s Inferno as imagined by a cult of “virtuous pagans.” The theme opens great possibilities – such as seeing the floor crack open up like a wound in concrete – and the narrative presents its myriad mysterious settings, enigmatic characters, startling monsters with streamlined efficiency. There is much of madness and more of sin taking place within downtown L.A.’s Variety Arts Theatre, and yet there is method to all of it – orchestrated Pandemonium, as it were. Or putting it less poetically, the new Delusion is a harrowing hell of a good time.

Delusion: Harrowing of Hell Review: Waiting in Purgatory

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Arriving at Variety Arts Center, you check in and receive a buzzer that will summon you when your entry time rolls around. Meanwhile, you can check out the bar in the high-vaulted entry room, branded as the “Virtuous Pagan Lounge.” When summoned, you are directed upstairs where you walk through a room filled with decorations recalling past Delusion shows and/or hinting at what’s to come. This leads a narrow room with what looks like a long bar, used as a performance space for a magician. Here, you wait to enter a roped off area where your group is given instructions on what to expect and how to behave (stick together, don’t interrupt the actors, don’t touch anything unless told to do so).

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The wait times are not onerous, but they do add up. First, you wait in the downstairs bar, then in the performance area, and finally in the instruction area. The magician helps pass the time, but the long, narrow layout of the room makes it hard for more than a few people at a time to get a good look at his closeup magic. After awhile you may find yourself wishing you were back in the Virtuous Pagan Lounge, where you could relax over a themed cocktail instead of craning your neck to glimpse a card trick while waiting to advance to the next area and then wait some more.

By the time the door opens for you to enter Hell, you may be thinking This better be worth the wait…

Spoiler: It is.

Delusion: Harrowing of Hell Review: Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

Descending a staircase, your group has its first encounter with a denizen of this Inferno, a strange mystic espousing some twisted form of redemption that seems to involve embracing sin. Is she sincere or deliberately leading you astray? It doesn’t really matter. The Cult of the Virtuous Pagan is ultimately just a plot device to launch you on your journey.

It gets off to a great start when the cult leader’s opening spiel ends with the ground seemingly opening up beneath her feet, revealing an ominous glow of perdition. It’s not the first time the Delusion has front-loaded a show with an effect that prompts you to think, “That’s great, but can anything top this?” The answer is yes. And more than once.

From this point, Delusion: Harrowing of Hell often feels like an intense thriller moving through a world of damnation. The pacing is brisk but never rushed as you are herded through hallways and rooms by a series of helpful guides, each handing you off to the next one. Although there is much back and forth (going repeatedly up and down both stairs and elevators), the action always flows smoothly toward the next infernal encounter, and the narrative thread is easy to follow.

More of an adventure than a drama, the show avoids the confusion that arises when interactive theatre overloads audience participants with exposition, leaving them floundering like actors who haven’t been allowed to memorize the script. Easily understood goals make it easier to volunteer with confidence, which is important because actively participating in Delusion is more fun than simply going along for the ride. There are several opportunities to jump in and find a protective talisman or bestow a coin upon the Ferryman of the River Styx. There is even a sardonic moment involving a request for a brave volunteer, which leads to unexpected results.

Along the way, you encounter several demons of darkness, at least two of which make you think: They really did top that opening scene. The first is an oversized arachnid that appears in a most unexpected way. The second is legendary mythical creature whose amazing appearance here owes more to Clash of the Titans than her origins in Greek mythology. Either one would have been enough to justify the price of admission.

Delusion: Harrowing of Hell Review: Conclusion

Delusion: Harrowing of Hell does what Delusion does best: merge the interactivity of immersive theatre inside a haunting environment with the kind of stunts and special effects that you won’t see anywhere else. The Variety Arts Theatre is a great location – grand and old enough to suggest a haunted house, with rooms and corridors that form the perfect refuge for lurking shadows. Harrowing of Hell fills these spaces in sinister and spectacular ways (including a giant, moving eyeball that turns red with rage), and the stunts are frequently startling (a guide, on the verge of escape, suddenly disappearing into darkness as if yanked by an unseen force).

This is probably the least plot-heavy Delusion to date. Basically, you’re trapped in Hell and trying to escape, moving from scene to scene and accomplishing goals along the way, almost like a videogame mission. That simplicity yields benefits: you never enter a scene wondering: Am I supposed to know this character and her role in the story?

In fact, the Cult of the Virtuous Pagan barely registers after the initial encounter (except to account for Hell being located inside an earthly building). You don’t need an appendix and footnotes to understand their motivations and beliefs. Just run with it – in some cases literally, as this frequently feels more like an adventure than a mysterious horror story (although mystery and horror rear their fearsome head as well).

One word of warning: Late-night entry times offer discounted prices, but if you start too late, the bar might be closed by the time you finish. Our journey began at 9:55pm, and the bar was untended when we emerged just before 11pm. This was an irritating disappointment, since part of the fun of Delusion is hanging around afterward and comparing notes with fellow participants over a drink. It’s always nice to find out what happened to members who got pulled from the group to go on a solo tangent.

In the final analysis, we probably extracted more dramatic satisfaction from our old Delusion favorite, His Crimson Queen. However, Harrowing of Hell feels bigger, almost like a quest from an epic Greek poem, in which mythical monsters provide obstacles to overcome rather than jump-scares to avoid (and the depiction of the netherworld owes at least as much to Hades as Dante’s Christian Hell).

Aside from the awkward wait to start our descent into Hell and the fact that the bar was closed by the time we escaped, Delusion: Harrowing of Hell is a great example of how a straightforward narrative can be crafted with flare – formed into a canvas for fantastical imagery that lingers in the mind’s eye long after the last word is spoken.

Delusion: Harrowing of Hell Photo Gallery

Click any image to scroll through the Inferno…