Possession and exorcism escape rooms in Melbourne
There is one, and it is The Conjoining at our St Kilda venue. A demonic haunting, two paranormal investigators who went in first and did not come out, and no gore anywhere in it. Sixteen and over, sixty minutes, two to six players.
We are not going to pad that into a list of five. What this page does instead is explain why possession is the strand of horror that people find hardest to shake, what the genre is actually built out of, and whether this room is the one you want.
Why possession is the fear that does not let up
Every other kind of horror gives you somewhere to put the fear. A monster can be outrun. A haunted house can be left. A killer is outside the door and the door is the problem, which at least makes the problem a shape.
Possession removes all of that. The threat is inside somebody you care about, which means there is nothing to run from, nowhere for the tension to discharge, and no version of winning that involves getting away. You cannot flee a person. You can only stay, and the story becomes about how long you are willing to.
There is a second turn that makes it worse, and it is the one the best work in the genre is built on: you are never entirely sure it is real. Every symptom has an ordinary explanation available. Illness. Breakdown. Grief. Suggestion. The genre keeps that door open on purpose, because the moment a story confirms the demon it becomes a monster movie, and monster movies are far less frightening than the possibility that six people watched somebody deteriorate and told themselves a story about it.
That ambiguity is the single most useful thing an escape room can borrow from this strand, and it is what The Conjoining is built on. You are given evidence. What you decide it means is left to you.
The rite, and the part almost nobody knows
The exorcism half of the genre is procedural, and the real procedure is stranger and more interesting than the films let on.
The Catholic rite is a written text, the Rituale Romanum, and it was formally revised as recently as 1999. It is not something a priest can simply decide to perform: it requires the permission of a bishop, and the standing instruction is that ordinary explanations must be ruled out first. Medical and psychiatric assessment comes before anything liturgical. The traditional indicators cited in the rite itself are oddly specific, and they are all epistemic rather than dramatic: speaking a language the person never learned, strength beyond their physical capacity, and knowledge of hidden or distant things they could not have obtained.
Read that as a designer and it is a checklist for a puzzle. Every indicator is a claim that can be tested against evidence, which is why the exorcism strand produces better games than the pure haunting does. The priest in these stories is not a warrior. He is an investigator with a procedure, a form to fill in, and a superior to report to, and the horror is bureaucratic well before it is supernatural.
The genre's institutional furniture follows from that: the case file, the tape recorder in the corner of the room, the second priest present as a witness, the rule about not engaging with what it says, the demand that the thing name itself. Holy water, the crucifix, the salt line, the stole. Objects with rules attached, which is the definition of a puzzle.
It travels, too, and the versions that leave the Church behind are often the more unsettling ones. Folk ritual, ancestral practice and regional exorcism traditions replace the Roman rite with something the audience does not already know the rules of, and a ritual whose rules you cannot predict is far more frightening than one you have seen performed a hundred times.
What invites it in
The other half of the strand is contact, and it is the half people recognise instantly because almost every culture has a version of it.
The seance table. The ouija board and the planchette that moves and the argument afterwards about who was pushing. The medium acting as a channel, which is the oldest job in the genre and the most dangerous one to hold in a story. The occult diagram somebody copied out of a book without understanding it. The summoning that was performed on purpose, by somebody who thought they knew what they were doing, and cannot be undone.
Then cursed objects, which is where the modern possession franchise gets its scale. A doll, a mirror, a relic, a music box: a thing that carries a presence from one house to the next and turns a single ghost story into a universe. It is also, structurally, the cleanest premise an escape room can have, because an object with rules attached is a puzzle, and a cursed object is a puzzle with a consequence.
If your reference points are The Conjuring and the Warrens' case files, Annabelle, The Nun, or the possession and exorcism of The Exorcist, this is the tradition The Conjoining is built out of. It is our own original story rather than an adaptation of any of them.
The room
The Conjoining, Rush St Kilda
Two years ago, two paranormal investigators went into what was meant to be a routine haunting and did not come out. What they left behind is a record. You have an hour to read it, work out what took them, and finish what they started before it turns its attention to you.
Our scariest and hardest room at that venue, which is an unusual combination. Most scary rooms go easy on the puzzles because fear costs you concentration. This one does not, and that is the point of it. Sustained darkness, sound that arrives before you can place it, and no blood anywhere in it.
If the demonic register is not what you want but you still want the top tier, It's Nightmare at South Yarra is psychological rather than supernatural, also gore-free, and also Terrifying. For the wider haunting strand, the house and the investigation rather than the rite, see haunted escape rooms.
What is never in the room
No live actors. Not in one of our sixteen rooms, at any venue, in any season including Halloween. Nobody is playing the possessed.
Nothing chases you and nothing touches you. Entirely hands-off, and you never have to touch anything you would rather not.
You are never locked in. The door is unlocked and you can step out at any second. Your games master watches the whole game and can talk to you, pause it or come in within seconds.
No gore. No blood and nothing designed to disgust you. The fear is atmospheric and psychological throughout.
The no-actor rule matters more in this strand than in any other, and for a reason worth stating. Possession horror works because the thing is inside something and cannot be located. Put a person in a costume in the room and it now has a location, a height and a pair of shoes, and the entire mechanism collapses. Building it out of darkness, sound and the set is harder, and it is the only version that survives a full hour.
Questions
Is there an exorcism escape room in Melbourne?
The Conjoining at Rush St Kilda is the closest thing to one. A demonic haunting with the investigation and the rite at its centre, rated at our highest scare tier.
Is it based on The Conjuring or The Nun?
No. It is our own original story, written by people who take the genre seriously, for people who know it well. If those are your reference points you will feel at home in it.
Is it religious, or offensive to anyone religious?
It uses the visual and narrative language of the genre, the same way the films do. There is nothing in it aimed at anybody's actual faith, and plenty of people who hold one play it and enjoy it.
Are there live actors or anything that touches you?
Neither, in this or any of our sixteen rooms, in any season. Nothing chases you and nothing makes contact.
How scary is it really?
Our top tier, and one of the two rooms people rank as the scariest we run. It works on sustained dread rather than shocks, which is the kind of fear that stays with you afterwards. See the head to head comparison if you are choosing between our terrifying rooms.
Can we leave if it gets too much?
At any second. You are never locked in and the games master is watching the entire game.
What age is it suitable for?
Sixteen and over. Under-16s only at parental discretion with a participating adult, and we do not recommend it. For a younger group at the same venue, Alice in Wonderland is rated Spooky and Treasure Island has no frightening content at all.
Finding us
Rush St Kilda is at Level 1, 100 Barkly Street, a few minutes from Luna Park, the Esplanade and the foreshore, and simple on the tram from the city. Easy from Elwood, Elsternwick, Balaclava, Windsor, Prahran, Brighton, Caulfield and the bayside suburbs.
Three other rooms sit in the same building across the full range of our scare scale, so a group who cannot agree can book two rooms in the same time slot and compare notes afterwards.
Sixty minutes, two to six players, seven days a week, instant confirmation and free rescheduling up to two hours before your start time.