Tickets and merchandise are being resold… Why the eerie “Missing Exhibition” has become a very popular date spot

Missing Exhibition” Attracts an Unprecedented Number of Visitors
Special interview with the organizer who aimed to “transcend the barriers of horror fans

This summer, the most popular date spot among young men and women was neither a summer festival nor a fireworks display, but an eerie exhibition. ……

The name of the exhibition is “The Missing Exhibition. This exhibition, which focused on “missing” people, things, whereabouts, memories, and all other kinds of things, attracted a lot of attention through social networking services, and tickets sold out in no time. It quickly sold out, attracting an unprecedented 65,000 visitors.

How did Mr. Nashi, a horror writer, and Mr. Tokio Omori of TV Tokyo, the organizers of the exhibition, feel about this enthusiasm?

–Did you expect the response to be this strong at the beginning?

Omori: “We are happy that the response has far exceeded the number of visitors we originally expected. However, as a result of the rush of visitors to the exhibition, we were forced to wait our turn to see any of the exhibits, and we regret that some people may have felt dissatisfied. ……”

Pear: “I heard that there was sometimes a 90-minute wait for exhibits where visitors had to put on headphones to listen to the sound. …… It was also our mistake that we could not prepare a venue with sufficient capacity, but we realized once again the difficulty of an event that the excitement of an exhibition is inversely proportional to the value of the experience.

–What do you think was the reason why so many people paid so much attention to the exhibition?

Nashi: “The first goal I set with Mr. Omori was to ‘break through the wall of horror fans. We thought that if we could reach horror fans throughout Japan, we would be able to achieve our goal, but if we wanted to attract even more people, we had to get people other than horror fans interested as well. That’s when we turned to TikTok.

Omori: “The main battleground for horror content and horror fans is X (formerly Twitter), so just being excited about X is not enough to ‘go beyond the wall. So how do we reach the general public on TikTok?

To answer this question, we decided to include elements that would attract people just by looking at them at a glance, so to speak. For example, a huge pile of dirt, or a large pile of old mobile phones.

There were many visitors who took selfies with these “attractive” exhibits and uploaded them to social networking sites, and it was very interesting to see them go viral on social networking sites,” he said.