CHICAGO — Not gonna lie. The jump scares found in the region’s haunted houses have been both adrenaline and fuel for many Halloweens past. But this time around, I wanted to merge my love of puppetry with the proverbial act of clutching my imaginary pearls. So I went to Steppenwolf’s Merle Reskin space to partake of the fifth installation of Rough House Theatre’s Halloween show. Be you a fan, follower or newbie when it comes to “House of the Exquisite Corpse,” the horrific performances are as head-scratchingly eerie and off-kilter as ever this year, with blood the focus.

Before their timed entries, ticket-holders can enjoy libations at the bar or take a figurative blood oath with friends and add it to a wall of oaths on red ribbons that hang on a wall in the lobby area.

When it’s your turn to go behind the curtains, teams of artists will act out six micro-dramas, or chapters, each five-and-a-half minutes in length. Get ready to pop on the headphones and peep through cracks, holes and makeshift viewing panels to enjoy the scariness within.

“The form is something that we are inventing,” co-director Corey Smith said. “I don’t know of anyone else doing a peep-show haunted house that operates as this machine that brings groups of 12 people in and around a room. How do we get the room to speak?”

Once inside, bloodletting is mixed with miracles, transformation, ruin, memory and corruption. As co-directors Felix Mayes and Smith say about the show, “You might find in these pieces echoes of colonial extraction, the divine feminine, folkloric circulations of life and death, or the prison of subjective experience.”

The environments include scenes with babies, art, dance and lore.

“There will be objects, and those objects might be alive,” Smith said.

As for the Chicago artists who create their work in the world of puppetry, they are people who do this because they can’t not do it.

“That’s true about all of the little pockets in Chicago — experimental music, experimental theater, people doing weird art — all of us are incubating this culture, which I think is about to blow up. … It’s about to be Chicago’s moment. These are the people who are going to push the envelope. We have to think about this medium and take it seriously, and also not take it seriously, because that’s part of the joy of it. It’s both alive and not — both things at once,” Smith said.

Mayes and Smith were performers in Rough House’s past shows; this season marks their first time directing the experience. And their enthusiasm comes across vividly in the production.

“We never want you to know everything,” Mayes said. “We don’t want you to walk away going: ‘Oh yeah, beginning, middle, and end — it’s over. I fully know it.’ I think ‘horror et al’ pushes people toward seeking jump scares and relying on gore and body horror, but we want a horror that sticks to your bones, runs through your veins, or that when you leave three, four days from now, next month, you wake up and go, ‘Oh my god, I feel what they were saying now.’”

According to Mayes, the details of each scene are so intricate, you’ll hear one of three different audio tracks depending on what side of Room Four (aka “Blood & Memory”) you’re standing, for example.

“Everything is puppets. If you can give it breath, opinion and focus, it’s a puppet,” Mayes said. “The accessibility is so exciting to me, that anyone can be a puppeteer. It’s an old high-art tradition that you see all over the world. I love that I get to grab a hold of this tradition that I still see as a really complex and tricky high art, and remind people that it still is, that it’s still full of humanity and our stories, and it really sucks you in.”

Ingrid Richter came with her friend, a fan of puppetry.

“I was so intrigued,” she said. “There were some creepy elements … it was great. This was so perfect for the month of Halloween. It was perfect to get you in the mood for the spooky season.”

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“House of the Exquisite Corpse” runs through Nov. 1 in Steppenwolf’s Merle Reskin Theatre, 1624 N. Halsted St.; tickets $21-$46 (recommended for ages 13+) at roughhousetheater.com.

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