These days it’s a rare occasion that children get an authentic experience. Halloween has been tainted by paranoid parents sifting through their children’s candy and Santa’s lap since #MeToo is a no-go. But in Scotland, thanks to some bad actors, a half-inflated bouncy castle, and an AI-generated script, your children can be truly traumatized once more.
The Facebook event called it Willy’s Chocolate Experience, and the company running it, House of Illuminati, described it as “extraordinary and immersive,” and collected $50 per ticket. What Scottish children were left with was a largely empty warehouse, a handful of jelly beans, and a “quarter cup” of lemonade to polish off while they cried. Willy’s Chocolate Experience has been compared to the infamous Fyre Festival after angry parents begged for refunds and even called the police.
Like with every public shaming, the shambolic episode has done some good. It united the internet in hysterics, and it has given the poor “actors” hired to play Wonka and the Oompa Loompas a platform. Since the news broke, they have done multiple interviews, and two Oompa Loompas even spent Friday morning on Britain’s most popular breakfast show. Paul Connell, one of several poor guys who played Wonka, has spoken out and defended his performance, putting it down to being sent “15 pages of AI-generated gibberish” ahead of time.
As an AI denier (all talk of it is banned from my house), I didn’t know quite how bad it could be. But it seems that AI technology has come along in ways that I never thought possible: It has gained an ego. The 15-page Willy Wonka script was littered with smug stage directions such as “Audience members will offer compliments” and “the audience are now relieved and rejuvenated by the whimsical turn of events.” If only it felt shame, too.
Not only did it predict audience reactions, but the AI script also wrote in a bizarre new character, a villain called the Unknown. Paul Connell’s Wonka speech went as follows, “There is a man we don’t know his name. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.”
At one point during dress rehearsal, Connell was told to “suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner,” but since there was no vacuum available, he was instructed to “just improvise.” The Unknown has now become an internet favorite after a video emerged of the mysterious masked figure terrifying children, and one mother who was interviewed said that because of the Unknown, “Some kids were scared and crying.” Less than one week after the event, there are now the Unknown-themed cards being sold on Etsy.
Complaints aside, maybe the House of Illuminati’s event was meant to be exactly how it was. Children are shown a magical, sparkly invitation to a big event, and they turn up and have a pretty horrible time? Sounds like something straight out of a Roald Dahl novel.
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The House of Illuminati did end up canceling the event halfway through and posting a statement on its website saying, “Unfortunately, last minute we were let down in many areas of our event and tried our best to continue on and push through and now realize we probably should have canceled first thing this morning instead.”
You think? To top it all off, it turns out Willy’s Chocolate Experience was missing something crucial: chocolate.
Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.