Mick Napier has always been a sucker for slice-‘n’-dice, hack-’em-up movies. Over the years, he says, he’s seen plenty of antisocial psycho-killers (sometimes already dead themselves) slash up their onscreen victims (often horny teenagers) by the dozens. He’s seen critical classics (including the work of David Cronenberg and George Romero), popular classics (Friday the 13th, Halloween), and nonclassics (Happy Birthday to Me, My Bloody Valentine).
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So when Napier, an improv teacher at Second City, learned that Lewis had also produced splatter theater–the Blood Shed Theatre opened on Wells Street in 1967–he liked the idea so much that he decided to imitate it. The result, a show called Splatter Theater, is currently running at Cotton Chicago.
In true splatter-movie tradition, Napier’s show is weak on plot and strong on special effects. The action revolves around a party, thrown by a new kid in town, where one by one the guests are killed off by various grisly means: throat-slittings, multiple stabbings, even disembowelings.
The most troublesome gag to work with, says Gusler, was a scalping. The victim wears a fake piece of scalp, a prop several layers thick with a complicated bleeding apparatus. Because it’s so intricate, it can’t be slapped on right before the gag, Gusler says; instead, the actor has to wear it all night, and “it was hard to find something that would attach these layers to skin without tearing or harming it.”
On the other hand, he admits, no one really comes to see the show for its laughs. They come for the same reason splatter movies always draw big crowds, for “the same reason people slow down for a car accident”–a sort of dark curiosity. “Most people are intrigued by this,” Napier says. “It’s just an uncomfortable thing to admit.”
