Australian Horror Universe with 1M+ Participants Launches Kickstarter

There’s a lake in Australia that wants to know your deepest desires (and also maybe eat you).

An Australian horror outfit called The Shadow Council just launched a Kickstarter for something called Dark Lake: Sink Deep, and the pitch had me at “an ancient lake that whispers exactly what you want to hear before asking for something in return.” That’s not a hook, that’s a red flag with excellent marketing, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Turns out I’m late to this party by about thirteen years. Dark Lake isn’t a new IP cooked up to catch the current horror-romance wave. It’s been a real, physical, in-person nightmare since 2013, when it premiered as a live interactive horror experience in Perth. Since then it’s toured Australia, the UK, Singapore, and New Zealand, hit its 10th anniversary in 2023, and apparently racked up over a million participants who willingly walked into the dark to get psychologically unraveled by strangers in masks. A million! People keep going back to the lake on purpose. I respect the commitment.

Sink Deep is the next chapter, and the first time the mythology is being adapted into something the rest of us couch-dwellers can actually consume: a fully produced audiobook (four-plus hours, multiple voices, original score, the whole cinematic treatment) and a companion e-book. So if you, like me, do not live near Perth and are not interested in being hunted through the woods by costumed cultists, this is your way in.

So what’s the actual story?

The premise is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and doing it well. Professor Randal Brand shows up at the lake as an environmental scientist, all clipboard and curiosity, trying to catalogue an ecosystem that apparently does not want to be catalogued. The lake, being an ancient sentient horror-entity with main-character energy, decides it likes him instead. It listens to what he wants. It gives it to him. Years later he’s “no longer entirely human,” gorgeous, dangerous, and fully devoted to the thing that hollowed him out. Basically the platonic ideal of a dark romance love interest, except his boss is a lake.

Enter Salacia: psychology student, dominatrix, one of Brand’s intended victims, and the one person who apparently still has leverage on who he used to be. Their dynamic is described as a fight for dominance neither of them can walk away from, which, yes, tracks. That’s the genre. I’m not mad about it.

Meanwhile a paranormal podcaster named Chloe and her producer Zack roll into town chasing content and instead find centuries of disappearances and a slow-building will-they-won’t-they that the lake is very interested in exploiting. Because that’s the whole thesis of this thing: the lake doesn’t kill you outright, it seduces you first. Every desire it grants comes with a price. It’s basically a monkey’s paw with abs.

Genre-wise they’re stacking psychological horror, dark fantasy, horror romance, and supernatural mystery on top of each other, which is ambitious, but honestly the concept, horror built around place rather than a single creature, gives it room to actually earn all four labels instead of just slapping them on a Kickstarter page and hoping.

The Kickstarter itself

Here’s the part where I tell you it needs your help, because it does. As of writing, the campaign is sitting at a modest CA$93 of a CA$3,933 goal, with 26 days left on the clock. It’s all-or-nothing, so if it doesn’t hit the target by August 11, nobody gets anything and the lake goes back to sulking in the dark. Low goal, which is nice, but it still needs bodies.

Early bird pledges are cheap and a charming:

• On the Path – $4: your name literally gets added to their “devotees vine.” Immortality, but make it a vine.
• Wanderer – $9: desktop and phone wallpapers plus the vine listing, for the person who wants their laptop to look haunted.
• Visitor – $15: early access to the Sink Deep audiobook, plus the wallpapers and vine.
• Researcher – $30: all of the above, plus an exclusive Dark Lake taxonomy e-book and early delivery of the full e-book. This is the one for the lore-heads.

The team behind it, who call themselves the Shadow Council because of course they do, is also a small crew (the campaign currently shows all of two backers, one of whom I assume is a family member), so this really is an “every pledge counts” situation rather than corporate-Kickstarter theater.

Should you back it?

If you’re the kind of reader who likes your horror romance heavy on atmosphere and mythology and light on jump scares, something closer to slow-burn dread than a haunted house, this is squarely built for you. A decade-plus of world-building behind it means there’s an actual universe to sink into (sorry) rather than a one-off premise stretched thin. And a monster that manipulates you by giving you exactly what you want, rather than just chasing you with a knife, is genuinely the scarier pitch to me. Knives I can outrun. My own desires, less so.

You can check out the full campaign, reward tiers, and audio teasers here: Dark Lake: Sink Deep on Kickstarter.

The lake is calling. Some voices are impossible to resist. You know the drill.