This week’s Dragons’ Den featured an unusual solicitation from a gasmask wearing nurse and some bloodied mental patients.  They were part of a team bidding to raise £200,000 for a live horror experience in central London, a consortium of people active in a scene I’m tangentially aware of through a somewhat exhibitionist friend with cybergoth tendencies.  He’d been involved in a smaller scale interactive horror experience that seemed to be about freaking out the straights to use sixties parlance: ooh, people with body piercings eating flames, kind of thing.

I didn’t realise that there was a larger version of the live horror experience that traffics in six figure sums of money, but it makes some kind of sense.  Horror as a genre seems to be doing pretty well overall, if you take into account not only the constant stream of horror films appearing at cinemas, but the number of computer games based on a horror premise, and the amount of bookshop space devoted to horror.  You could arguably include misery lit within its orbit, though I hope we’re some way off from paying for live experiences where people vie to be the runner’s up prize in a domino tournament for OAP swingers.  We have, after all, got Jeremy Kyle for such titillation, and it’s all the better for the screen it puts between us and its subjects.

The live horror experience the medical mutants on Dragons’ Den were pitching was a very particular sort of horror, familiar to people who’ve heard of emo and Silent Hill.  Which is another way of saying teenagers, or people whose teens featured those icons.  It’s all very Slipknot; people with randomly bloodied costumes and hints of BDSM gear.  And I can see how such an experience would be enjoyable and could indeed make commercial sense, given the number of horror fans looking to drop disposable income on having the bejesus scared out of them.

What’s interesting is the range of experiences at the moment being offered to the live event fan.  I’ve spoken to a couple of people who’ve been massively impressed by the walking dinosaurs of, err, Walking With Dinosaurs, coming to an arena near you soon.  The show is a technical triumph; basically a beauty parade of animatronic dinosaurs ambling around while an excitable Steve Irwin type provides some sort of commentary as they frolic, fight, and fart.  And why not?  No surer way can have been devised of introducing children to the world of live entertainment than a show populated by monstrous reptiles with matching merchandise.  Ker-ching.

And that’s just the start.  Down in London recently I saw posters for what promised to be yer actual chariot races.  Like what they had in Rome.  I salute the logistical ambition of someone creating a show based on real horses pulling real chariots with real riders round indoor arenas given contemporary health and safety legislation, something the Romans never had to contend with.  Has a risk assessment ever been done on those cool scythes that come out of the wheels to hack at opponents’ legs?  The horses that is: presumably this is not thoroughbred stallions they’ll be using in these shows, more the equine equivalent of an Aldi 3 for 2 offer.

Where chariot races are in the air, gladiator battles are not far behind.  And yes, there are some of those coming up.  Jousting is fairly well established in the British summer holiday calendar, but I’m looking forward to seeing men marinated in olive oil prod at each other with short swords, tridents, and nets in the interests of entertainment.  Maybe put a few ASBO offenders up on crucifixes at the entrance to set the mood.

If all of this stuff was seen as evidence of the decline of the Roman Empire, what does it say about our own culture that we’re embracing simulacra of what a previous civilization did to get its kicks?  Are we too wedded to reproducing what has gone before, branding it with the name of something known and trusted, to come up with something new?  Or have we indeed reached the end of history, and all we have to look forward to is variations on a theme, starting with Obama’s plan to put America back on the moon, and ending who knows where and when…