Darren Lynn Bousman—a native Kansas Citian and film director best known for SAW II, SAW III, and SAW IV—brought his flock to Bonner Springs and seemingly pulled EXILED: Crooked Rose Woods from the earth itself.
Many Kansas Citians have been to the EXILED haunted trail in Bonner Springs. But there’s more to it now. Namely, after surviving the trail, you emerge into a doggone carnival. A real backwoods carnival with simple games, greasy treats, and characters who seem like they’ve always been there.
At EXILED: Crooked Rose Woods—an immersive horror experience that runs until November 3—your task is simple: Engage with the characters around you. Grab friends, or go it alone, and pursue the story. If you do, a disturbing adventure will unfold—and fold you into it.
The Redcurve Carnival
The haunted trail is a mile long and bounds up wooded hills, down bare root declines, and across dried-up streams. It’s impressive and fun, but the Redcurve Carnival is like nothing else.
The carnival and trail are run by the fictional Redcurve family. Dig into the online lore, and you’ll learn that they owned the land many years back, then lost it—then yanked it back using force and, they say, the Old Gods. Now they work the games, concessions, the novelty tents. They have a certain woodsy charm. Many are covered in blood.
The Redcurve girls skip around under the low-slung string lights and stop to marvel at the city folk in their woods. If they like you, they might just pull you in deeper. Cletums, the young troublemaker, might challenge you to a dance-off on the tiny wooden stage, or he might ask you to help him bury something in the woods. Dorothea, the patriarch, might sit down to tell you how his family got its power.
Then there are the Elites. They dress in black, much too formally for the woods, they regard the Redcurves with disgust. The two factions have an agreement that’s not entirely clear. If you ask them about it, odds are you’ll get different answers.
Every weekend, they live their fictional lives at the carnival, and their lives intersect with yours. You’re only differentiated by the light around your neck and, at least for a time, the lack of prop blood on your skin. You’re in it with them.
The Minds Behind It
Bousman and his creative partners, Morgan Rooms and Stephanie Hyden, didn’t pull this story out of the earth. The setting pulled it out of them.
Last year, Bousman came home from Los Angeles and went through the haunted trail. The creative process started about 20 minutes later, Rooms says. “Our standards are sky high, so we don’t often call each other to say, ‘You’re not going to believe what I’ve just been through. … Darren called me instantly and said, ‘You’re simply not going to believe where I am.’”
Soon, they had a concept for a new immersive experience. Today, each character in the experience has a backstory that Bousman and Rooms say required upwards of 90 pages of writing and rewriting.
Rooms says EXILED super fans, who return each weekend, have discovered things others will never see. Their stories continue each weekend. But he says there are reams of story that may never be discovered.
“I take a lot of pride in knowing that you can only ever skim the bits of the iceberg that you can get your knife close to,” says Rooms. “We don’t have much ego in this in terms of wanting people to see everything. If you host an art gallery, you have to accept that some people won’t understand some of the paintings and some people just walk past others, and that’s fine. We’re very proud of everything people do and don’t see.”
Step into Exile
If you let it, EXILED becomes your world for a night.
Of course, you’ll feel the artifice of it at times. You’re marked as real, and the actors aren’t. But go sit at the picnic table by the stage late in the night. You are in a clearing in the woods. That music is hitting you just right. That woman—is she a Redcurve or a guest?—really is dancing on that picnic table, and Cletums really is plucking from a funnel cake after a long day at the carnival.
And just when you feel like you can live there, that this wacky atmosphere is to your liking, Molly, a Redcurve girl, is over your shoulder. Blood cakes on her forehead.
“What are you writing?” Molly asks. “Do you want to go see my spot in the woods?”