2005

---

Marvel at the macabre at Shocktoberfest 2005: "Sissies Stay Home!"

By Michael Leaverton
SF Weekly, Night and Day Published: Wednesday, October 26, 2005
In 1920s Grand Guignol productions, audience members entered theaters stealthily, much as you would the Lusty Lady, and were sent atwitter by "shock plays" awash in blood, inventive killings, and ribald humor, sometimes clutching one another inappropriately as they were egged on by the risque themes.

Decades later, Russell Blackwood brought the genre back, forming the Thrillpeddlers theater troupe dedicated to staging original and modern Guignol. Although the title of Shocktoberfest 2005: "Sissies Stay Home!" contains a command that can be safely ignored (Hellraiser it ain't), there's bawdy wickedness and a good quart of fake blood in these satisfying short plays. Here, bar wenches writhe on the stage and receive proper spankings; Blackwood, dressed as a schoolboy, flogs himself while reciting an anonymous ode (reportedly from Algernon Charles Swinburne) concerning the pleasures of teacher-student flagellation; autoeroticism is taught, demonstrated, and almost completed in a classroom; and a man dies by hanging, causing his sizable wang to rise to the occasion, resulting in a rousing bout of post-consciousness copulation with a formerly chaste lady beset by a limp. But the night's real fake-blood extravaganza, A Slight Tingling, mocks the era's medical nutters, with various metals (dental fillings, bullets) and a lady's entombed penis (!) being ripped through flesh by "electro-magnetism." It will definitely turn your stomach, as will the sight of Blackwood covered in gore, wearing women's clothes, and hysterically killing everyone in sight. Capping the night is the Spook Show finale, an innocent lights-out operation with special effects on a par with a neighborhood haunted house -- you might not scream in horror, but you should rise to nostalgic giggling.

Special Halloween-weekend productions feature additional delights: the macabre parlor music of Jill Tracy & the Malcontent Orchestra, Thomas Truax and his odd instruments (such as the "Hornicator," a Victrola gramophone horn fixed with assorted add-ons), and mentalist Bob Taxin.

The Guardian, 8 Days a Week

Boo-tiful stranger Toss aside those fun-size Snickers (for one night, anyway). Far more delicious treats are in the bowl at Halloween at the Hypnodrome. This festive evening features the terrifying Grand Guignol talents of the Thrillpeddlers, "mad musical scientist" Thomas Truax, mentalist Bob Taxin (free your mind!), and spooky chanteuse Jill Tracy, performing with her Malcontent Orchestra. Thrillpeddlers devotees will recognize Tracy from her 2004 guest stint with the company, which saw her playing the mistress of a monster-haunted manor and a doomed flapper with appropriately eerie aplomb. For these Halloween shows, expect cool 1920s flair (with a touch of goth glam) when Tracy sits down at her piano and shares her macabre melodies. If you can swing the cost, the Hypnodrome's "Shock Box" seating is worth it for the, um, heightened sensory experience. Tonight, midnight; Sun/30-Mon/31, 7:30 and 10:30 p.m., Hypnodrome, 575 10th St., SF. $20-$69. (415) 248-1900, www.hypnodrome.com. (Cheryl Eddy)


Oakland Tribune, Preview Cover story

Thrillpeddlers warn 'Sissies Stay Home' Shock and aw, gross!

LIKE CHRISTMAS at a cathedral, Halloween at The Hypnodrome is a sacred occasion. By Chad Jones, STAFF WRITER
Tucked away under a freeway in San Francisco's South of Market District, The Hypnodrome is home to the Thrillpeddlers, a troupe dedicated to spilling blood - stage blood - in the name of preserving and promoting the art form known as Grand Guignol.
Bloody, scary and even a little bit sexy, Grand Guignol emerged in late 19th-century Paris when Oscar Metenier opened Le Theatre du Grand Guignol and put on what he called "slice of death" dramas. Patrons would routinely pass out from shock at the gory, sometimes kinky goings-on at the theater, which finally closed in 1962.
Ever since he discovered Grand Guignol in books as a kid, Russell Blackwood has aimed to keep the art form alive and bleeding.
"He was always creating haunted houses or having seances or formulating blood capsules in the basement," says Jim Blackwood, Russell's father and designer of The Hypnodrome's sets. With Daniel Zilber, a childhood friend from Missouri, Blackwood formed the Thrillpeddlers and put on his first Grand Guignol show, "Laboratory of Hallucination," in San Francisco 14 years ago. After successful shows like "Frankenstein in Love" and "Mondo Andronicus," Blackwood and his peddlers came up with "Shocktoberfest," an annual Halloween showcase full of thrills and chills. And last year came the ultimate triumph: the creation of The Hypnodrome.
You can't miss the place. In addition to a sign, there's a well-lit guillotine in the parking lot.
Just inside the former warehouse space, past the tapestries and the bar designed to resemble Abraham Lincoln's funeral cortege, is an Aeolian player piano. On this foggy October night, the scroll is spinning and the keys are pounding out an almost in-tune version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."
With stage fog swirling through the 46-seat theater, and with paintings of skeletons hung on the wall, the place looks decked out for Halloween. But this hyper-spooky, artfully haunted atmosphere is always in vogue at The Hypnodrome, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary.
Now onstage is the sixth annual "Shocktoberfest," subtitled "Sissies Stay Home." The show comprises five short plays including a blood-free chiller by Pulitzer Prize-winner Doug Wright ("I Am My Own Wife"), a very funny spanking piece called "Arthur's Flogging" (from 1888 no less), the wonderfully lewd and morbid "A Wedding of the Member" and the blood feast known as "A Slight Tingling." Jonathan Horton, who helped turn Jeff Goldblum into The Fly in the movie of the same name, works with the Thrillpeddlers on creating gruesome make-up effects and says he has long been a Grand Guignol fan.
"It's the combination of horror and humor that appeals to me," Horton says. "If it was just horror, you'd be de-sensitized to it. But with the humor element, the horrific is set against a heightened sense of reality."
Some of the effects Horton has helped create for the Thrillpeddlers include a severed ear, the aftermath of an acid burn, an eyeball gouging and an acid burn that takes place onstage. In real life, Horton admits to a low tolerance for gore.
"If it's real, chances are I can't handle it," he says with a laugh.
For Blackwood, the appeal of Grand Guignol-style gore is the heightened nature of the bloodletting and the audience's more-than-willing suspension of disbelief.
"There's nothing we do onstage that can't be created in someone's basement," he says. "It's not terribly complicated. But people show up wanting to be shocked and thrilled, so a condom filled with KY jelly and stage blood becomes an eyeball pulled from someone's head and squished."
The Hypnodrome is attracting a diverse audience, from pimply young men who pore over special effects magazines to Grand Guignol historians from as far away as Wales or Rio de Janeiro. There are also couples attracted to the "shock boxes," the private boxes at the rear of the theater. One is decorated as half a psychiatrist's office and half a padded cell with bloody scrawling on the white walls. Another is what Blackwood calls a "voluptuous panic room."
After the final play of the evening, the lights go out, and the theater is plunged into pitch blackness. That's when what Blackwood calls the "spook show" begins. Ghosts, skeletons, chain saws, buzz saws and all sorts of manic mayhem breaks out. Audiences members scream with glee and maybe a little fear. It's the grand finale and just another night in The Hypnodrome. As one of the characters says in Wright's suspenseful play about the murder of a family: "If God gave me the chance to see evil, I would look. And that's a terrible thing to know about yourself."

2004

---

The San Francisco Guardian's Best of the Bay

Best Live Onstage Bloodbath

You'd have to take a time machine back to Paris, circa 1920, to get the kind of theatrical experience presented by the Thrillpeddlers. Company founders Russell Blackwood and Daniel Zilber worship at the altar of the Grand Guignol, the legendary, bawdy French horror theater known for its mastery of gruesome special effects: decapitations, scalpings, leprosy sores, and the like.With the battle cry of "Sissies stay home!" Thrillpeddlers routinely sell out their annual "Shocktoberfest" shows, held around Halloween for maximum spooky effect. Last year's program featured a trio of plays, bringing forth a thing living in an old dark house, a saucy bearded lady, a desperate suicide, a surreal skeleton dance, and a special audience section equipped with William Castle style tingling seats. And since the company owns its own theater - the cozy South of Market Hypnodrome - there's no need to worry about splattering on the walls. Visit Thrillpeddlers, offshoot Web site, www.grandguignol.com, for a frighteningly thorough look at Grand Guignol history.


SF Weekly, Chloe Veltman Review of BLOOD BUCKET BALLYHOO
brought together in Thrillpeddlers' summer shock show. Co-producer Russell Blackwood directs a game cast in a revue of side-show horror and kink that begins with Rob Keefe's Lips of the Damned (key terms include rats, poison gas, adultery, and guillotine fetish); followed by Eddie Muller's adaptation of the 1930 thriller The Drug, which opens an eye on a Saigon opium den; and finally pulls out all the stops (via electromagnetism) with Keefe's campy and especially satisfying A Slight Tingling, a piece combining preposterous medical flummery, haunted-house high jinks, and the worst excesses of 1950s sci-fi movies. Done up in semi-rigged surroundings with fervidly hokey fidelity to the Grand Guignol style (named for the famed Paris theater that staged impresario Oscar MŽtŽnier's gory "slice of death" melodramas when George A. Romero was just a red vein in his father's eye), Blood Bucket Ballyhoo is a platelet-heavy triplet of tawdry but tantalizing amusements. (Avila) story link

SFist, Karen McKevitt's On-Line Review
"Blood Bucket Ballyhoo," a triptych of Grand Guignol shorts adapted for schlock-horror impresarios Thrillpeddlers by Rob Keefe and Eddie Muller, explores the twilight zone of 19th-century French taste with the help of some of the most elaborate props you're ever likely to stumble across outside of a dominatrix convention. A rat-infested Museum of Horrors -- equipped with a real, working guillotine and a coffin for those unfortunate enough to be buried alive -- is the setting for Lips of the Damned, a story about a cuckolded husband's revenge upon his wayward wife and her lover, suggested by the 1906 French comedy La Veuve by Eug�ne HŽros and LŽon Abric. In The Drug (adapted from RenŽ Berton's La Drouge, first performed in 1930), a bored, high-class lady is forced to confront a hideously disfigured ex-lover one night in a seedy Oriental opium den. Blood splatters and prosthetic body parts fly, but the lady -- quite literally -- cannot keep her eyes off the man she once destroyed. And in A Slight Tingling (inspired by the 1907 comedy Les OpŽrations du Professeur Verdier by Elie de Bassan), a surgeon's daughter attempts to find a pair of lost surgical scissors in the bodies of three of her father's patients with the aid of an amazing magnetic contraption. Director Russell Blackwood and his cast of dedicatedly damned souls present a danse macabre of ketchup-red theatrics. "Blood Bucket Ballyhoo" is in the best of the worst of all possible tastes. story link