For those of you who have never been strapped to a wheelchair and then pushed through a haunted psychiatric ward while being accosted on all sides by unspeakable things ripped from the pages of Lovecraft—good news! You can do the next best thing at VIFF Industry’s Immersive Experiences showcase, taking place as part of its VR Rises program on Monday (October 1).

Included in the showcase of virtual reality tech is director Guy Shelmerdine’s pants-shittingly freaky short "Catatonic", which gives victims viewers the chance to experience what you’d get from a 10-minute dose of MKUltra as designed by that fucked-up woman from The Ring in cahoots with a masturbating psychopath.

“There are certain limitations and rules. You don’t want to make the viewer sick, and it’s very easy to disorientate them in a way that gives them motion sickness," Shelmerdine told the Straight, during a sneak preview of "Catatonic" on Friday (September 25). "I knew I wanted it to be a POV experience, but you can’t go from A to B walking, because to watch that could make you quite nauseous,” 

Fair enough; in lieu of nausea, the talented filmmaker—whose clients over the years have included  Virgin Mobile, Coca-Cola, and Honda—has opted for more of a paced-out minduck that had at least one other attendee screaming like a stuck pig. Not me. I just wept very softly after being strapped to the nightmare machine by a registered nurse from the ‘40s (I suspect she wasn’t a real registered nurse from the ‘40s) and then sent through the corridors of Shelmerdine’s asylum via a Samsung headset with a faintly Cronenbergian feel. The patented "Tingler" built into the wheelchair added to the experience, as would anything that sends a tremor into your prostate.

Later, Shelmerdine pulled up an app on his phone designed by for Vrse.works, explaining that VR shorts—like the music video he’s recently completed for a band “that I can’t talk about yet”—will eventually be streamed from your device through Google Cardboard, Sony PlayStation VR, and other market-ready headsets. In other words, all those articles you read about virtual reality in Mondo 2000 back in 1990 have finally come to pass.

Immersive Experiences will feature eight other shorts besides "Catatonic", including work commissioned for Cirque de Soleil, Jurassic World, and Montreal singer-songwriter Patrick Watson. More info on Immersive Experiences here. And if you think you're hard enough to handle the "Catatonic" trailer, go here.