Not since I was in an Amsterdam theatre on a Contiki trip more than half my life ago had I been covered in a mysterious substance that came flying from the stage until I was in the audience at Evil Dead: The Musical a couple of weeks ago.
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Those who have been to Amsterdam on a Contiki trip will know exactly what I’m talking about.
Those who haven’t, probably don’t want to.
Evil Dead wasn’t that kind of a party, but my friends and I still left with stains.
My brother-in-law and my ex-husband both love the cult classic movie, but neither are fans of musicals, so would never go.
Whereas, I could take or leave Sam Raimi’s over-the-top 1980s horror franchise and Bruce Campbell’s cheesy one-liners, so I might never have gone to the movies to see it.
Put them in a musical though, and, all of a sudden, I’m there for it.
I’m quite partial to a dark musical, like 2008’s futuristic gothic rock opera Repo! The Genetic Opera, in which organ failures wipe out 99 per cent of the population and clients who miss payments on their transplant payment plans have their organs repossessed.
Or, dark musical thriller Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which, through a catchy theatrical musical score, tells the story of a barber exiled unjustly by a corrupt judge who has eyes for his wife, but later returns for vengeance by killing customers and baking them into meat pies.
Writing those brief synopses made me slightly nauseous, so you’d think watching the movies would be worse, but somehow everything becomes sunshine and roses when you add music.
Evil Dead: The Musical’s plot line was the same as the movie’s.
Five college-aged friends visit an isolated cabin where they discover an audio recording that, when played, awakens demonic spirits.
One-by-one they become possessed by evil forces, aka ‘Deadites’, while the hero of the day, Ash Williams, battles them in an attempt to survive until dawn, amputating his own possessed arm to stop it taking over his whole body in the process.
This, on stage, was also over the top, but in the best possible way.
With songs titled What the f*** was that?, All the men in my life keep getting killed by Kandarian Demons, and Do the Necronomicon — the latter performed by the demons — you can imagine how hectic the show was.
I think I spent a solid 50 per cent of the performance laughing on cue, and there were many, many cues.
For another 45 per cent of it, I was still smiling.
The remaining five per cent, however, I was recoiling in shock and trying to keep my grinning mouth closed as fake blood squirted toward us.
It shouldn’t have been a shock, given we intentionally purchased tickets in the ‘splatter zone’, three rows back from the stage, that came with a well-advertised warning “you will be covered in blood”.
In fact, our tickets even came with ‘souvenir’ ponchos (which weren’t actually souvenir ponchos, just cheap unbranded ponchos that were surrendered into the bins ushers held after the curtain fell), so we had a rough idea of what we were in for.
We didn’t wear them though.
Instead, we wore white.
As cheesy as Bruce Campbell’s one-liners were, I still pulled out the Cricut and put them on T-shirts alongside a couple of ‘blood’ drips I’d also ironed on, to add effect just in case the promoters were exaggerating.
“Groovy”; “Hail to the King, Baby”.
If you know, you know.
If you don’t, again, you probably don’t want to.
We did place the ponchos across our knees to cover our jeans and shoes, but we let the ‘blood’ rain down on us to see just how red our white shirts would turn.
We weren’t in the front row – we were in the third – so we had a bit of a human shield from the crimson-coloured cornstarch when the chorus got to its most chaotic.
My friend Brad was in the aisle seat next to me, so plenty caught him as it was flung through the gap created by the walkway.
My friend Jo, on the other side of me, remained fairly untouched.
I was somewhere in between.
Other friends who’d declined offers to come along because neither musicals nor immersive horror were their thing did not change their opinion when I recounted my experience after the fact.
But nor did I.
Whatever inner voice had compelled me to buy those tickets knew me well.
Plus, I’d sooner be showered in prop blood than whatever the heck came at me in Amsterdam all those years ago.