This slasher story has no blood whatsoever – but it does have a killer soundtrack

Horror comedy is having quite a moment on the small screen. From Emmy Award-winning hits like Widow’s Bay to upcoming local absurdities like Gnomes, there’s clearly growing appetite for chuckles with a side of chills. This delights Geraldine Quinn, renowned cabaret performer and self-professed horror buff, but she feels there’s something missing from today’s spooky slapstick: song and dance.

So, naturally, she created a Gen X-slasher-horror-comedy-musical.

“I’ve been teased about writing a musical since I started in cabaret 20 years ago. ‘You should just write a musical because it’s so easy’,” the Green Room Award-winning performer says sarcastically. “I wanted to challenge myself … And it felt like the right time.”

What resulted was Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical, her own absurd take on the slasher genre which will show at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Set in 2008, it follows a group of friends who reunite to finish an amateur slasher movie they’d begun while camping a decade earlier. The last time they filmed, however, one of their friends was found dismembered in the bush. Will they be able to complete their camcorder project before more tragic souls mysteriously disappear?

Sprinkled throughout is the all-important song and dance, including a “balls-out rock” piece about services clubs, a Sondheim-equse number about the practicalities of making a movie in the bush, a folk-indie tune about good people doing slightly evil things, and a “Donna Summer disco” ode to horror.

It’s mad, but so is Quinn’s collection of inspirations: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, American Movie, Phantom of the Paradise, the infamous low-budget Australian slasher Houseboat Horror. It’s a mash-up of genres rarely seen live on stage. But while it may give some people stylistic whiplash, it makes perfect sense to Quinn.

The cabaret star craved a fully original story, and you can’t really get more original (and absurd) than a slasher in which someone sings about how you can’t bring your own food into a services club (closely related to an RSL).

“The line between horror and comedy is quite close because it’s all dependent upon surprise and subverting expectations – both a joke and a gory kill,” Quinn says, noting other examples of funny musical horrors like Evil Dead The Musical and American Psycho: A Musical Thriller.

She wanted to capture the “auteur” period of the ’90s, when amateur filmmakers would take wild risks with crappy camcorders, while simultaneously pointing to the “rosy-eyed” nostalgia with which people oftentimes reflect on that era. As the show’s tagline goes: “Nostalgia is a killer.”

But most importantly, she wanted to represent the diversity of those from lower socio-economic outer-suburban areas, and the way many of them unite through a shared love of something.

“It developed from the stuff we used to do when we were kids around Noble Park and Dandenong. We’d drive up to Ferntree Gully and hang around the old haunted house. We’d talk about music and films. We didn’t fit into any clique,” Quinn says.

Granted, bringing a singalong horror to life on stage comes with practical limitations. Quinn couldn’t splatter the audience with blood and guts – most theatres don’t have a “splash zone”, after all. However, working on a Fringe production meant being able to lean into the limitations, subsequently discovering an entire avenue of creative possibilities.

For example, Campervan contains no blood whatsoever. Instead, they rely on “very gory flesh-crunching sound effects” and a data projector to show each death from the killer’s perspective – as if the audience is watching the murders through a ’90s camcorder.

Casey Bennetto (Keating!), the writer and musician behind Campervan’s musical dramaturgy, says it’s usually because of these practical restrictions that we see more slasher comedy on screen rather than stage. However, he believes productions like Quinn’s heighten the stakes more than a movie, given its exploration of character.

“Some of those films are determined to not have characters open up too much because they want to be able to kill them. But the musical asks you to lean into a character and their destiny, which can heighten both the peril and comedy,” Bennetto says.

Campervan luxuriates in the juxtaposition between the “happy endings” of musicals and the death galore of slashers, he says. “You get the joy of upending convention, but then also sometimes dovetailing into it.”

He hopes those who see Campervan rethink the limits of the musical genre, leaving the theatre thinking, “if they can do that, why can’t we do this?”

They’ll also hopefully walk away with a better grasp of how they themselves could survive a musical slasher. According to Quinn, the golden rule is to write the story yourself, and ensure your character is the surviving “bookend” narrator. She would know – that’s precisely what she did for herself.

Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical is showing at Trades Hall as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival from October 7 to 11.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.