Imagine having your arms bound to a wheelchair, your body immobilized, and your mind trapped inside a derelict mental institution. Pushed by a nurse, you are ushered down the corridors of the psychiatric wing, turning your head from left to right, witnessing the horrors in each room you pass. The madness builds around you; patients dance, scream, and drool, and you may even see one masturbate if you’re lucky. This climaxes with a final confrontation with a doctor and his syringe. This is the story of Catatonic: a new Virtual Reality (VR) experience by director Guy Shelmerdine for Vrse.works.

I first heard about Catatonic after its debut at SXSW in March of 2015. I had read that a new five-minute VR horror short was screened, and that audience members were physically restrained in a custom-built wheelchair by live nurses dressed in 1940s uniforms. For a haunt-fan, this sounded like heaven. I had used VR for video games and even to explore the surface of Mars, but at that point, I had never experienced horror using it. In a normal experience, you can momentarily escape by covering your eyes, looking away, or even running—but not having control of your hands, not being able to look away—well, that sounded horrific (and fantastic).

Now you can understand my excitement when I was walking outside of San Diego Comic Con and saw two nurses dressed in 1940s uniforms standing behind two custom-built wheelchairs. I immediately ran over, ready to jump into this virtual world, but they inform me they are going on break. So we wait. Twenty minutes past the time they are supposed to be back, we see a single man in a bloody lab coat pushing a wheelchair. My girlfriend darts up and chases after him, eager to be first in-line, but he keeps walking past their previous spot. “Are you with Catatonic,” I yell after him. “No sorry, my friend sprained her ankle and I’m going to get her.” Dammit! Well, we went back to waiting, but a few minutes later, we see those white wheelchairs being pushed out.

We were the first in line. We were fitted with our Catatonic patient ID bracelets, sat in the wheelchair (sadly, no arm-binding this time), and the Samsung VR goggles and headphones placed over our heads. I open my eyes, and I am in the waiting room of a 1940s psychiatric ward. I look down and see my hands strapped to the chair (they weren’t really my hands, but a great phantom effect) and then I begin to move.

I look behind me and a nurse is pushing me. This is already creepy because I feel like I am moving and I can’t look away. I pass patients in their rooms, a very obese man strapped to an operating table, and arrive at the edge of a flight of stairs. As I look down, I start to feel a sense of vertigo as I forget I am in a simulation. The chair starts to actually shake as a hooded man runs from behind and pushes me down the stairs one by one—thanks to the ButtKickerTM installed into the base of the wheelchair. In the basement, floating girls surround face a solitary wall, lights flicker, and reality starts to shift. Am I going crazy? Or am I already crazy? A doctor stares me in the face—flash—he is gone and inmates dance around me—flash—now he’s back with a syringe—flash—the inmates are still dancing, drooling, taunting—flash—the doctor is now putting the syringe into my arm. I feel it going in (phantom pain is a really weird phenomena). He laughs. I die.

I won’t spoil what happens from there for you, but it’s truly a unique and wonderful experience.

Keep an eye on Catatonic, and if you can see it in its full glory, go see it (check http://www.catatonic.co/ for locations). If you have no way of ever catching the full experience, you can still see it by downloading the Vrse app on a newer phone and picking up a VR headset or even a Google Cardboard. Either way, it’s definitely a novel experience that will influence others to utilize VR for horror experiences. VR has the ability to transport the viewer to places that traditional haunts previously could not. With VR horror games, like Allison Road, and three different VR experiences at ScareLA on the horizon, I foresee VR being a novel and relatively unexplored medium for horror to take residence.