By Contributor,Simon Thompson

Copyright forbes

Fear grips all your senses for ‘The Willows.’
Jeremey Connors/JFI Productions

Described as “LA’s creepiest dinner experience,” The Willows is one of the hottest tickets in the city right now. The two-hour immersive experience, housed in the iconic Beckett Mansion, offers only a handful of performances each week for a limited run with even more limited capacity. Each show allows just 25 people.

This emotionally gripping, dark, and sophisticated production follows a single key story that guests, divided into smaller groups, experience through multiple narrative lines. The audience is gathered in the Willows family home to celebrate the life of the recently departed Jonathan, the eldest son of matriarch Rosemary. However, things quickly become dark and weird, and attendees, split into smaller groups, are soon caught in a chaotic and creepy maelstrom where they experience the unfolding events from multiple different perspectives.

Following sold-out runs in 2023 and 2024, The Willows is back and once again the must-do experience of the season.

“Right now, in the LA market, there’s a need for this type of immersive, intimate, fully scripted experience,” explains Stephanie Turek, one of the producers. “This new venue that we’ve been able to sort of take over and revamp has really lent itself to such an amazing backdrop for The Willows. It has created the perfect backdrop for the story that has existed for many years.”

“We’ve had one guest come through our doors around 22 times,” adds Justin Fix. He and his husband, JT Swierczek, founded JFI Productions, the company behind the experience. “There are literally enough scenes in the production that if you wanted to flip over every Easter egg literally, you can keep coming back and uncovering them. The average guest may come across seven of them during one sitting.”

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‘The Willows’ Is A Uniquely Immersive Experience

In traditional theater, everyone has the same shared experience. That’s absolutely not the case with The Willows.

“As a team, in the very beginning, we all talked about how we deconstruct that,” Swierczek says. “As a company, we always like to foster human connection through intimate storytelling. You would not believe the number of people who have come through our doors and have said they met at The Willows, then all went out to dinner or drinks afterwards and shared stories of the different things they saw. That brings us so much joy. The show is so wonderful, but hearing those stories makes us even more delighted.” Due to the nature of how The Willows is executed, it’s also perfect for anyone who wants to go solo, as you are likely to be split up in random groups with people you don’t know, regardless.

As you might expect, a premium experience comes with a premium price tag. Tickets for The Willows are $250 a pop, but the cost is justified.

“We always like to say that we hope to create cinema for the stage. This is multi-sensory storytelling, a story built just for you. Over the last seven years, we’ve had nearly 6000 people through our doors,” Fix explains. “The Willows is something different. You can sit in it for two hours. We’ve learned that we see our guests and they have value in our space. Audience members, when they are not in a passive state, sitting back and spectating, become engaged when they are interacting and present. There is an emotional recall that engages them. I think that’s why it lingers with people and leaves a lasting impression. It is worth the dollars to get those once-in-a-lifetime moments, be up close and personal, or to witness something that no one else does.”

Swierczek adds that some of their success is fueled by the fact that their runs are short, their audience sizes are limited, and they always try to over-deliver.

“That’s something that we really take pride in. We hope that each person gets seen in every single show,” he explains. “So many times when you’re looking at it from a business perspective, everyone just looks at the top line and the bottom line. How much revenue can we generate as quickly as possible? We will never compromise, and we always strive for a great guest experience first. Truly, if a show loses money but our guests leave ecstatic and wanting more, that keeps our business going. We take that much more to heart than how much it brings in. We all feel it’s about the right number of guests and the right atmosphere.”

Fix continues, “We wanted to build something that we would want to go to this whole. This whole project was conceived back in 2017, and when it hit our writers’ room, it was based on Clue: The Movie. It’s the idea of strangers showing up at a home, and then everything falls apart. Year after year, we’ve been adding to it, beefing it up, and learning. Our initial run was only meant to last three months, but it actually lasted nine. We had to shut our doors because the space we were occupying was a real person’s home, so they needed it back. We keep evolving. We hold ourselves at a really high level, and I think if we continue to do that, hopefully the tickets will continue to sell.”

The cellar is just one of the locations guests may find themselves in ‘The Willows.’
Jeremey Connors/JFI Productions

‘The Willows’ Has An Impressive Hollywood Following

Attracting such well-known figures as Anna Kendrick, Cara Delevingne, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, Olivia Wilde, Brie Larson, Ted Lasso’s Jason Sudeikis, and Outer Banks’ Madylen Cline, everyone wants to be there for the scare.

“When Anna comes to the show. She’s not Anna Kendrick, she’s Anna,” enthuses producer JT Swierczek. “When Olivia Wilde comes, she’s Olivia. When Trent Reznor comes, he’s just Trent. Everyone is treated the same way when they come in through those doors, a childlike wonder gets to come out and play, and everyone’s on the same page.”

Fix adds, “We are in the entertainment capital of the world. For actors, directors, and showrunners, their favorite thing is being on set. Walking into this home environment, which is literally a live set that is a 360-degree world, is a unique experience. It blows people’s minds for a minute. Anna Kendrick’s a fan. Why? Well, because she’s in a state of play as an actress all the time. A lot of those people don’t get to let their guard down and escape, but when everyone in this social exercise is doing that, it’s allowing them as a group, as you all go in as something and come out as something, and really bond over that, it’s a leveler.”

“We have had some of the craziest buyouts by some of the biggest names in Hollywood with all their closest friends. It’s so cool to see that dynamic of how friendships come alive, and what that leaves them with. It’s a testament to the industry. For people who like escape rooms, nightlife, and culture, The Willows has a little bit of everything. You sprinkle that on this communal conversation about grief, and everyone can relate.”

Another reason for the premium ticket prices for the unforgettable, boundary-pushing production is that they hire professional actors to play the roles and rightly believe they should be paid a fair wage.

“A lot of these actors in The Willows have been with us since the founding of our company in 2015,” Turek confirms. “Actors like Misha Reeves, Mason Conrad, and Melinda deKay have been some of our tried and true actors for over 10 years. As we’ve grown as a company, our repertoire has grown. Our approach, including coaching and training, hospitality, and guest management, has enabled us to grow together. It’s been really great to see these specific actors take these characters that they’ve held close to their hearts for five or six years, and really develop them as well with us, which proves they are the real deal.”

“It’s a testament to us as a team, and a testament to their trust in us, that we’re going to create a really great product for them to put their name on. It really is this strange, dysfunctional family that we’ve created, and it’s really been a special thing to see all of them grow alongside us.”

Meet the Willows and their staff.
Max Baker/JFI Productions

What Lies Ahead For ‘The Willows’

The Willows is not their only successful production, with the acclaimed spooksperience Creep LA and the disco-themed Night Fever also drawing full houses. Having established themselves as the go-to in the industry for this kind of immersive experience, JFI Productions are no strangers to being called in on collaborations to create activations to promote films and TV shows, such as Halloween Kills, The Boys, The Traitors, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Nobody, Renfield, and Lore.

So, where does the company draw the line between collaborating and creatively selling out?

“That is such a good question,” Turek muses. “One thing that I love about our team is that we want to create things that we would want to go to, and that, in and of itself, is always going to be the driving force behind anything that we create. We’re never going to create something lame. It’s not in our vernacular to say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s throw spaghetti at the wall.’ We want to create something awesome that we’ll feel proud of, that we can send our friends to, and that we can hire our friends for. We’re trying to continue to raise the bar.”

While the majority of tickets for the current run of The Willows have already sold out there are still spots available in November and December so the scares are not just for Halloween. The experience will also return in Spring 2026.

“We’ll go dark and on hiatus after this run because LA gets pretty quiet during the winter, so we’ll take a little family vacation for about a month,” Fix confirms. “After that production, we hope to bring Stephanie’s creation to life in late spring or early summer, and that’s our big disco dance show called Night Fever. That thing was a big hit. It launched during the pandemic and has had two runs in the LA market, in 2021 and 2023, already. It’s a killer show with a different energy, but it’s everything that we do well.”

“We have been trying to gain attention and garner that respect. We’re going up against productions that have $18 million backing them. In 2017, when we launched this immersive experience, our goal was to achieve profitability within the first year, which we’ve done, and we’ve continued to do so year after year. A lot of people can’t do that.”

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