The London Dungeon opens in Shanghai
The Shanghai branch of the London Dungeon, originally founded in 1974, has at last opened this fall on Nanjing East Road. Like all of the Dungeon’s other locations, the Shanghai Dungeon offers a trip back in time in a particular city—in this case, Shanghai at the turn of the 20th century. On this harrowing 90-minute-journey, audience members will feel goosebumps on their skin and cold shivers down their back as they walk through old Shanghai and see, with their own eyes, a gruesome rendition of old Shanghai.
As audience members arrived in groups, one after the other, spikes descended suddenly from the ceiling with a crack before retracting once more while spooky music played in the background. They were escorted over a skeleton encased in glass in the floor and into one of two elevators marked Loading Bay. With a tremble the doors closed; when next they opened, they were in a different world echoing with footsteps behind windows and monsters behind locked doors. When the clock struck, the audience shuffled forward, on tentative footsteps, into another room where a man in a hat stood. Flickering lamps barely penetrated the gloom as the man gave a brief introduction of what awaited the audience. Suddenly, all the lights died, and inky darkness descended. It would not be the last time this happened—the actors wielded the darkness like a weapon, and time and time again the lights flicked out, leaving the audience to stumble forward in pitch dark.
With a flourish, the man gestured for everyone to file into a large wooden lift. From there on, in groups of 36, the audience moved among ten horror stories, chased by a soft eerie tune that signaled the coming of a murderer whom no one had seen except his shadow. When everything was once again plunged into darkness, audience members would feel the quake of his knife thudding into wood and hear his soft voice beside their ear. It would be up to them to decide whether or not they could face the ultimate challenge—involving a brand new feature not yet seen in any of the other Dungeons, and sure to be absolutely terrifying—or suffer the consequences.
Past visitors of the Shanghai Dungeon have expressed their immense satisfaction at the experience. The engaging storyline and performance of the actors are often punctuated by jokes, taking the audience from one end of the spectrum to another—laughing one moment to screaming the next as some new horror pops up. The expertly decorated scenes also contribute to the spooky atmosphere. The Shanghai Dungeon is absolutely worth a visit for those in search of shivers and screams among the streets and alleys of old Shanghai.
by Esther Wu