# The theatricality of the dark ride

*Essay by Diede Tap, 2026. Canonical version: https://diedetap.com/en/essays/the-theatricality-of-the-dark-ride/*

When I'm at the Efteling I usually walk past Symbolica on my way to the Droomvlucht, a ride from 1993. The palace sits on a rock with its doors invitingly open, and I walk on anyway, to an older ride with no story, fewer show effects and a jerkier ride system.

It isn't a boycott and I'm not holding a grudge. If the board at the entrance says under 20 minutes, I get in. There's little I can actually put my finger on, and that's exactly why it nags at me that the ride doesn't quite work. With most rides I don't like, I can point at what's wrong: a scene that doesn't land, effects where it's a bit too obvious how they're done. With Symbolica I can't. No clear flaw, no one bad scene, and I'd still pick any other dark ride in the park. So I went looking, not in Symbolica itself but around it. What works and what doesn't elsewhere, and how does that compare?

## Do they see me?

About 400 kilometres south of Symbolica, Pirates of the Caribbean opens quietly. We drift through a dark lagoon, a wrecked ship on our left, countless fireflies on the other side, and then we're hoisted up into the fort. By the time we get there the siege is well under way: sword fights in the distance, and a cell where prisoners are trying to coax over the dog with the keys in its mouth. We drop back down into the bay, where a galleon is trading fire with the fort. On deck the captain shouts orders that aren't meant for me.

We drift into town just as the mayor is being lowered into the well on a rope, pirates trying to get him talking. Further on there's an auction, the pirates are drinking like there's no tomorrow, the looting is under way, a town is burning, and somewhere in the flames "Yo Ho A Pirate's Life For Me" is being sung with real cheer. After a second drop we're in the caves, where the treasure lies there for the taking, the skeleton of the pirate who wanted it still among the gold.

Through all of it, nobody has caught my eye or deliberately looked my way. No figure turns towards the water in surprise. No scene waits for my boat to arrive before it starts. The message is clear: I'm not supposed to be here, or rather, it makes no difference whether I am.

At first glance Frozen Ever After shares a lot of that. I get into a similar boat and sail through the dark, and everything about it is different. In the queue Oaken waves at me from his sauna. At the start of the ride Olaf asks the boat whether they want to build a snowman. Further on, the head troll tells the circle of junior trolls the plot of the film with a sort of PowerPoint, though they'd know it already. I'm the one it's being summarised for, and nearly every character looks me straight in the eye. Every scene feels built as a stage, with the boat in its flume as the auditorium.

Hardly a single figure has its back to me; the composition is built so they can address me. At the top of the mountain the doors open and Elsa sings "Let It Go" straight at the boat, as though the whole thing had been waiting for me. Even the snow giant who sends me down the drop does it head-on. Back in the village Elsa, Anna and Olaf are singing again, and I can feel that they'll do exactly the same for the next boat twenty seconds from now.

It's not for lack of craft. Everything looks superb, the animatronics could have stepped out of the film, and there's no sign of anyone cutting corners, as long as you don't go and look up the Tokyo DisneySea version. I don't think the source material or the length is the problem either. Eddie Sotto describes the feeling well: "you are usually familiar with the story already and just reliving the best moments that you would have 'chapter searched' on the DVD". Two dark rides, both boats, both drifting past show scenes, and a completely different feeling.

Look at who lives in that world. The pirates want gold, rum, and the key to their cell. Those wants exist inside the world they live in, and every one of them has something in the way: the mayor they're dunking won't talk, the dog with the key won't come closer. Everyone has something to do and none of it needs me. That town would burn tonight in exactly the same way if I'd never drifted past. In Pirates I'm an intruder nobody notices; in Frozen everyone is waiting for me to show up.

There's a tension in that, and a question I think you can put to any dark ride: does this world live for me, or does it live for itself?

Going by Pirates alone, the rule would be that a good ride ignores you. That's too easy, though. In Baron 1898 the witte wieven warn you, and the baron presses you into service as a miner to bring up his gold. If being addressed were the problem, Baron 1898 wouldn't work. But the baron wants something of his own: the gold is in the ground, and your labour is the cheapest he can get. Everything he says to you comes out of that. You're the workforce.

Phantom Manor runs the other way. After the stretching room, almost nobody speaks to you at all. The house doesn't hand you a role and doesn't welcome you either, but your position is clear enough: you weren't expected.

Most dark rides give you no role at all. You get into your car with no idea how you stand towards that world. In Fata Morgana you're a passer-by at best, sitting in a boat for no particular reason.

## The rules of the theatre

What matters is something else, and it's an old rule from the theatre. Depending on who you ask it comes from Aristotle or from Ferdinand Brunetière. Either way, we've known it for over a century: give someone a desire, put an obstacle in front of it, and you get drama, which is to say a story. The law holds for dark rides too. The pirates have to fight for what they want; something's at stake and something's in the way. With Elsa, far less so. Once you're welcomed into the palace she has nothing much left to want.

The art historian Michael Fried gave the two sides names. Absorption: figures so caught up in their own world that the viewer doesn't matter. Theatricality: work that acknowledges the audience and, in doing so, admits the audience is the point. He was building on Diderot's rule for the stage, which is to play it as though the curtain never went up.

The problem is worse in Frozen than in Symbolica, because there's a motivation problem underneath it. If you ask why a scene is happening, why on earth Elsa is singing in that palace right now, the answer certainly isn't that she wants to. Sotto puts his finger on it: the ride doesn't tell a new story, it runs a highlight reel of one you already know. Familiar moment after familiar moment with nothing joining them up, because you've seen the film and can join them yourself.

What the ride does add is a party in your honour, with you as guest of honour, which is roughly the role you already had at the ticket booth.

The climax makes the problem plain. Elsa is alone at the top of the mountain, for the first time in her life with nobody watching. That's precisely why she finds the nerve to stop holding back and throw a palace up out of the ground. A boat, however you look at it, is an audience, so in the ride she sings the song at you, and the most famous absorption scene of recent years turns into a theatrical one. Cutting it was never an option either: a Frozen ride without "Let It Go" is Titanic without the iceberg.

It could have been staged differently. The film shows the scene without getting in her way; there, the camera isn't a character.

The ride could have let the song simply happen. Elsa at a distance on her balcony, not looking at you. Or turned away from you altogether, the palace rising around her, your boat an uninvited witness down in the water. The Tokyo DisneySea version handles it better, and the two ride-throughs are worth watching side by side.

## The story world

There's another well-worn way around this: "and then it all went wrong". The moment something genuinely goes wrong in the plot, the characters get a job besides entertaining you, which is saving you. The textbook case is the original Star Tours. You board a routine flight to the moon of Endor and the trip comes apart. "Disneyland had always been known as the place where nothing could go wrong," Tony Baxter said of that choice. "In this show something would go wrong."

Fully drawn characters aren't a hard requirement either. A ride can work on looks alone, if the looks are good enough. It's allowed to be a show, a painting, a game. It only starts to grate when something passes itself off as what it isn't. That's why It's a Small World works: hundreds of figures sing straight at the room, but the ride never claims to be anything but a show, and it reads as sincere because of it. Baxter called that sincerity, "something that feels so genuine that you want to believe all the things that happen to you". The rule for characters, then, is that they have to believe their own story, however thin it is.

But what happens if we put the same question to the world instead? Does it live for me, or for itself?

Back to Pirates, this time looking past the scenes. Large stretches of the ride are too dark to make out what's there, which implies the world holds more than you can see: noises round the corner, shadows whose source you never find, a route with so many turns and drops that halfway through you've lost track of where the station is. The rooms behave the way the characters do. They act as though they aren't there for you, or at least as though you're only seeing a slice of something bigger.

Phantom Manor does this at its most literal: a corridor of shut doors, the occasional hint of something behind them, and not one that opens for you.

Closer to home, Fata Morgana does it with inhabitants and windows. In the city there are merchants, beggars and guards you never get to know, and more figures than the ride strictly needs. Universal's Jaws ride did the same with a little church by the water in Amity. The church was never in the film, but a working fishing village would have one. Set against that, Frozen Ever After looks thin: leads and little else, then rocks, trees, snow and ice.

Fata Morgana is full of doors and windows implying the world carries on. The original design went further: palace guards chasing the boats mid-ride, whose openings are still there, and a second boat just visible through the mist as an illusion. Neither got built, but they say enough about what the team was after. The line back to the pirate town isn't a coincidence, though Ton van de Ven deliberately avoided imitation. Of his 1974 visit to Disneyland he said what struck him was the possibility of stringing a series of rooms together.

What all of it has in common, the dark, the shut doors, the extras, the noises from further off, the edges dissolving into mist, is that the ride holds something back. Baxter, lead designer of Disneyland Paris, said it about castles: "the last place on Earth that would appeal to you... is one that was efficient. I can only think of factories and things making widgets". And on what does make a castle interesting: "your eye is caught by somewhere else you might be able to get to go, and you're very curious... so you're drawn on and it's unfolding that way." Nothing unfolds unless part of it stays folded.

Two conditions come with that, I think. First, you mustn't be able to prove it's fake. The spiral staircase on the first floor of the castle at Disneyland Paris visibly goes nowhere, which turns it into a prop. The same craft shows in the painted distances: the suggestion is kept deliberately soft, the way real distance loses detail. You read the size of a room where the wall meets the floor, so John Hench hid that seam behind plants, rocks and whatever else came to hand.

Second, the larger world can't be there for you. Behind the windows of Fata Morgana lives somebody with no bearing on your story. It's why the banners in Symbolica advertising tours that don't exist ring false. Holding something back assumes there's something to hold.

One more wrinkle, because figures and rooms play off each other: where people look. A figure who wants something from you looks at you. Sometimes intention and staging come apart. In The Little Mermaid, Sebastian is technically singing to Ariel; he's trying to talk her into staying under water, not you. But every figure in the room is arranged to sing the whole number in your direction, which cuts against what he's saying.

## Where the narrative sits

Then there's the Droomvlucht, probably one of the best-loved rides in the Efteling, and it needs no plot whatever. Castles on islands drifting through an endless sky, elves swinging under the trees, trolls playing in the rain as you descend. No scene builds on the one before it. Here's the counter-example, then: if a ride works without heroes, without drama and without inner lives, a world clearly doesn't have to live for itself at all.

Which points to a second question alongside whether the world believes itself: does the ride hold your attention? Droomvlucht answers that one with gusto. There's so much detail you can't take it all in, and the scenes vary, big to small, dark to light, near to far. Quantity alone won't do it; you can cram a ride with detail and still bore people if it all sits at one pitch. "We don't really have a story, with a beginning, an end or a plot. It's more a series of experiences building up to a climax," Marc Davis said of the rides he built, and Droomvlucht is one of the best versions of that.

The abundance also means you're still finding new things on your tenth ride. Baxter did the same sum out loud: "think about the tenth ride through the experience and design for that tenth ride. Don't design it for the first one - that's easy". Every room holds more than one pass can take in, and what you spot next time was there all along.

It works the other way round too. The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror runs on its story: a hotel struck by lightning, a lift full of guests that vanished, and the question of what happened that night. Everything hangs off that, the building, the queue, the preshow, the lift. Not that the design is beside the point, the dusty lobby where the clock stopped is superb, but the design comes out of the story and needs no explaining.

Phantom Manor does both. The scenography carries it, and the bride's story sits underneath: the house, the mourning, the wedding that never happened. Come back often enough and you'll find her in almost every scene, which turns the ride into an account of a single life that stopped one evening.

There's a middle form too: the vignette, a story told in one image. In 1960 Marc Davis set two foxes facing each other along Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland, one nodding, the other shaking its head. "I was creating storytelling tableaux," he said, meaning a story one picture long. The cell with the dog and the keys in Pirates is another well-known one.

Characters and world each fail in their own way. When a character's story doesn't land, you're left with an empty ride. When the scenography is doing the work it goes differently, as in Na'vi River Journey. The walls are tidily hidden behind foliage and rock, and yet every scene is visibly shallow. The projection screens make it worse, because a screen claims depth while you're plainly looking at a flat wall. On top of that the whole ride sits at one intensity: same light, same surroundings, same plants, never a shift in scale or a view that makes you want to know what's further on. What you get is a compact river straining to look bigger than it is. Not a disaster, but not worth the trip either.

## Symbolica

Back to Symbolica. The search has turned up two questions: does this world believe itself, and does it hold my attention? Laying Symbolica alongside them, something else surfaces. It's really two rides in one, and they answer differently.

The first is strong. The queue walks you through the etiquette of a royal visit, instructions over the speakers, mirrors to check yourself in before you enter the court. It casts you as a courtier and gives your visit a reason, building towards the audience with the king. That queue is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the best build-ups the Efteling has ever made, and up to here the world believes itself.

Then Pardoes hijacks the visit and offers a detour around the protocol. He isn't only doing it for you; he's a jester, entertaining is his nature, and the court had something else in mind. Up to this point the ride has what works elsewhere: a character who wants something, and surroundings with an opinion about it. What goes missing afterwards is resistance. Nobody stops Pardoes as he tears through the castle against every rule with three vehicles in tow. The attempt is already there: O.J. Punctuel, who reads out the rules in the queue, turns up in disguise halfway round. Let him actually give chase, farce-style, and the jester has an obstacle.

Once it nearly goes wrong, and that's the most interesting moment in the ride. In the Botanicum greenhouse a far too large Fabelvis appears and the glass starts to crack. Suddenly Pardoes has a reason to want you out of there: a spell gone wrong gives him something to fear. It stays at nearly, though. The glass holds and you're away in time. Had the glass actually broken, or had Pardoes had to hold it himself, the second half would have had an engine.

As the tours split off, the second ride appears. Not in the scenery, but in how the world treats the visitor: the car carries two tablets for triggering effects, so the chain of cause and effect now ends at your hand. In Pirates everything happened without me. Here nothing happens until I touch it.

The interactive stretch runs out into a closing celebration, which feels unearned after we've broken protocol by following Pardoes. That's where the story stops adding up for me. Why would a court this precious about etiquette throw a party for someone who slipped out with the jester against the rules? A small reframing would fix it: the same party could have been the one you crash uninvited.

None of this is about how the ride looks. It looks wonderful, dense, varied, technically a feat. It's about order, and about the small print of telling a story.

## So what does work?

Mystic Manor shows the same materials handled differently. It opened in Hong Kong Disneyland four years before Symbolica.

The parallels are striking: a mascot with magic, a house full of showrooms, a group of trackless cars weaving through it, magic bringing everything to life. Same ingredients, but the narrative joins up better. Even the cars belong to the story, since Lord Henry Mystic had them built to take visitors round his museum. Henry appears, greets his guests and leaves to find Albert, his monkey. Albert opens the enchanted music box, which he isn't supposed to do. The magic gets out and runs through the house, waking the collection as it goes.

The difference with Pardoes is that Albert would have opened the box whether your car was there or not. He opened it out of curiosity. What follows is a disaster in every room with Albert in the middle of it: he did something he shouldn't have, he knows it, and he has to put it right. It's his story. You're the witness.

The magic flies from room to room with you chasing after it, until the Monkey King statue in the Chinese salon nearly brings the house down, Albert gets the lid shut, and we're back in the hall where we started.

The hospitality Symbolica goes in for is here too, but tucked into the ends: the hall where Henry greets you and later says goodbye. It's an elegant split. The welcome and the farewell are addressed to you; everything between them is free to get on with itself. Symbolica inverts that, spreading the hosting across the whole ride.

The whole argument fits on a beer mat. Ask whether the world lives for you or for itself, and ask it twice, of the people in it and of the place. A character with an agenda does the same work as a mysterious corridor you never go down: both say this world carries on with or without you. Then a second question: does the ride hold you? Visual richness on its own can be enough.

If a ride wants to be a show and nothing more, that's fine, as long as it's honest about it. It's a Small World never pretends otherwise.

Between 2007 and 2024 the Efteling built three large dark rides, and the one that doesn't quite believe its own world is my least favourite of the three. In De Vliegende Hollander, Catharina's song warns you not to leave harbour on a moonless night, so what happens next is on you. In Danse Macabre, the newest, you take a choir bench and watch the orchestra of Joseph Charlatan, devoured long ago by something unnameable: a performance with its own reason to exist, playing with or without you. After all of the above, that reads as a course correction.