Geraldine Quinn spent 20 years in cabaret hearing that she should just write a musical because it’s so easy. This month, she’s calling the bluff. Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical, her original slasher comedy, runs at Trades Hall from October 7 to 11 as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
The Show
The story takes place in 2008. A group of friends reunites to finish an amateur slasher movie they started filming a decade earlier on a camping trip. Back then, one friend turned up dismembered in the bush. Now they face a blunt question: can they finish their camcorder project before more people mysteriously disappear?
Quinn, a Green Room Award-winning performer and self-described horror buff, wrote the show herself. She didn’t wait for a commission or a ready-made property. “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.”
The score covers real ground. There’s 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, including the absurd scene of a slasher character singing about not bringing your own food into a services club, a venue closely related to an RSL.
Making Do With Less
There’s no blood in the production. None. The creators use “very gory flesh-crunching sound effects” and a data projector to show deaths from the killer’s perspective, as if seen through a ’90s camcorder. Quinn said the practical limits of staging a singalong horror opened up creative possibilities. Most theatres don’t have a “splash zone.”
Casey Bennetto (Keating!), the writer and musician behind the show’s musical dramaturgy, said those same restrictions help explain why slasher comedy appears more often on screen than on stage. Live musical theatre, he argued, can heighten peril and comedy by asking audiences to invest in the characters. “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.”
He said the show revels in the clash between musicals’ “happy endings” and slashers’ deaths. “You get the joy of upending convention, but then also sometimes dovetailing into it.”
Suburban Roots
Quinn wanted to capture the ’90s “auteur” period, when amateur filmmakers took risks with cheap camcorders. She also wanted to examine the “rosy-eyed” nostalgia people attach to that era. The tagline is “Nostalgia is a killer.”
The material draws on her own start in life. She wanted to represent people from lower socio-economic outer-suburban areas and the way shared interests bring them together. “It developed from the stuff we used to do when we were kids around Noble Park and Dandenong,” Quinn 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.”
Her survival advice for anyone in a musical slasher is simple. Write the story yourself, and make sure your character is the surviving “bookend” narrator. She followed her own rule.
Why This Matters:
The Fringe shows what individual initiative can produce with modest means. Quinn wrote her own show, set her own terms and turned a technical limit, the missing “splash zone,” into a creative choice. Nobody handed her the idea. Her story also draws on community ties formed informally among friends in outer-suburban Melbourne, without institutional direction. Bennetto hopes audiences leave thinking, “if they can do that, why can’t we do this?” That’s an argument for self-reliance and risk-taking, and it comes from artists rather than officials. Audiences will decide at Trades Hall whether the gamble pays off.