“We didn’t fit into any clique,” Geraldine Quinn said of friends from Noble Park and Dandenong who drove to Ferntree Gully, hung around an old haunted house, and talked about music and films. That shared outside-ness runs through Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical, a slasher comedy musical taking aim at the tidy conventions of horror and musical theatre.
Quinn created the original show, set in 2008, about friends who reunite to finish an amateur slasher film they began while camping. During the earlier filming, one friend turned up dismembered in the bush. Now the group faces a grim, practical question: can they complete their camcorder project before more people mysteriously disappear?
Making a movie outside the clique
The show draws on Quinn’s memories of growing up around Noble Park and Dandenong, where friends bonded over music and films. She wanted to represent people from lower socio-economic outer-suburban areas and the way those interests bring them together. The film-within-the-show belongs to amateur makers, not polished professionals: Quinn wanted to capture the “auteur” period of the ’90s, when filmmakers took risks with cheap camcorders.
Nostalgia doesn’t get a free pass. The show’s tagline is “Nostalgia is a killer,” and Quinn said she also wanted to examine the “rosy-eyed” memories people attach to that era. The group’s homemade project becomes a horror story about looking back while trying to make something with the tools at hand.
The score refuses to stick to one genre. It includes a “balls-out rock” song about services clubs, a Sondheim-esque number about 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. One slasher character even sings about not bringing your own food into a services club, closely related to an RSL.
The stage has limits. Quinn uses them.
The production has no blood. Instead, “very gory flesh-crunching sound effects” and a data projector show deaths from the killer’s perspective, as if seen through a ’90s camcorder. Quinn said most theatres don’t have a “splash zone,” a practical restriction that opened creative possibilities for staging a singalong horror.
Casey Bennetto (Keating!), the writer and musician behind the show’s musical dramaturgy, said practical restrictions help explain why slasher comedy appears more often on screen than on stage. Live musical theatre, he said, can heighten both peril and comedy because audiences invest in characters and their destinies.
“Some of those films are determined to not have characters open up too much because they want to be able to kill them,” Bennetto said. “But the musical asks you to lean into a character and their destiny, which can heighten both the peril and comedy.” Familiar happy endings collide with slasher deaths; Bennetto said the show “revels” in that contrast, sometimes upending convention and sometimes dovetailing into it.
A musical that writes its own rules
Quinn said people had teased her about writing a musical since she started in cabaret. “You should just write a musical because it’s so easy,” she recalled sarcastically. “I wanted to challenge myself … And it felt like the right time.” Her inspirations included The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, American Movie, Phantom of the Paradise, Houseboat Horror, Evil Dead The Musical and American Psycho: A Musical Thriller.
Bennetto hopes audiences leave reconsidering the limits of musical theatre and thinking, “if they can do that, why can’t we do this?” Quinn’s survival rule is less subtle: write the story yourself and make sure your character is the surviving “bookend” narrator. She followed that approach herself. Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical is showing at Trades Hall as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival from October 7 to 11.