Geraldine Quinn grew up around Noble Park and Dandenong. As kids, she and her friends drove up to Ferntree Gully and hung around the old haunted house, talking music and films. Now she’s turned those afternoons into Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical, an original slasher comedy showing at Trades Hall as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival from October 7 to 11.
Who Gets To Tell The Story
Quinn, a Green Room Award-winning cabaret performer, says she wanted to represent people from lower socio-economic outer-suburban areas and show how they unite through shared interests. The idea came straight from her own history. “It developed from the stuff we used to do when we were kids around Noble Park and Dandenong,” she said. “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.”
The show is set in 2008. A group of friends reunites to finish an amateur slasher movie they began while camping a decade earlier. During that first shoot, someone found one of them dismembered in the bush. Now the group has to ask whether it can finish its camcorder project before more people mysteriously disappear.
Quinn also wanted to capture the “auteur” period of the ’90s, when amateur filmmakers took risks with cheap camcorders. She’s examining the “rosy-eyed” nostalgia people attach to that era, too. The tagline says it plainly: “Nostalgia is a killer.”
Making Art On A Budget
The production contains no blood. Instead, it uses “very gory flesh-crunching sound effects” and a data projector that shows deaths from the killer's perspective, as if viewed through a ’90s camcorder. Most theatres don’t have a “splash zone,” Quinn said, and those practical limits opened up creative possibilities.
The score doesn’t hold back. 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. Quinn insisted on a fully original story, right down to a slasher character singing about not bringing your own food into a services club, a venue closely related to an RSL.
She says the move into musical theatre was a long time coming. “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’,” she said sarcastically. “I wanted to challenge myself … And it felt like the right time.”
Why Horror And Comedy Fit
Quinn argues the two genres sit close together. “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,” she said. She pointed to Evil Dead The Musical and American Psycho: A Musical Thriller as other funny musical horrors. Her inspirations also included The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, American Movie, Phantom of the Paradise and the low-budget Australian slasher Houseboat Horror.
Casey Bennetto (Keating!), the writer and musician behind the show's musical dramaturgy, says practical restrictions help explain why slasher comedy is more common on screen than on stage. Live musical theatre, he said, can heighten both the peril and the comedy by asking audiences to invest in characters. “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 said.
He said Campervan revels in the contrast between musicals' “happy endings” and slashers' deaths. “You get the joy of upending convention, but then also sometimes dovetailing into it.” Bennetto hopes audiences leave reconsidering the limits of musical theatre, thinking, “if they can do that, why can’t we do this?”
Quinn’s survival advice is blunt. Write your own story.
The golden rule for living through a musical slasher, she said, is to write the story yourself and make sure your character is the surviving “bookend” narrator. She followed that rule.
Why This Matters: Stories about outer-suburban Melbourne, and about kids who didn’t fit into any clique, don’t always get a stage. Campervan puts them front and centre, written by someone who grew up there. It also shows how artists work within tight limits. With no splash zone, no blood and a data projector standing in for special effects, the production turns a lack of resources into a creative choice. Bennetto’s hope that audiences ask “why can’t we do this?” points to a broader question about who gets to make ambitious work and where it can be shown. Festivals like Fringe give independent artists a place to try it. From a center-left view, that kind of access to the arts matters because it lets communities see themselves in the stories on stage.