Who gets represented
Geraldine Quinn’s Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical brings people from lower socio-economic outer-suburban areas into a slasher-comedy story of friendship, filmmaking and disappearance. The original musical runs at Trades Hall during Melbourne Fringe Festival from October 7 to 11. It follows friends who reunite in 2008 to finish an amateur horror film they started while camping a decade earlier. During that shoot, one friend was found dismembered in the bush.
Quinn said the story grew out of the social world she knew around Noble Park and Dandenong. “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,” she said. The production puts people at its center who connect through shared interests, not clique membership.
Quinn wanted to question the “rosy-eyed” nostalgia attached to the era of cheap camcorders and amateur filmmaking. “Nostalgia is a killer” is the show’s tagline. The story, set in 2008, looks back at an earlier period of amateur filmmaking, while camcorder imagery makes the past part of the production’s form.
Making a musical under limits
The show turns its slasher premise into original songs: a “balls-out rock” number about services clubs, a Sondheim-esque song 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 absurd moment has a slasher character singing about not bringing your own food into a services club, which is closely related to an RSL.
Quinn, a cabaret performer and self-described horror buff, said people had teased her about writing a musical since she started in cabaret 20 years ago. “‘You should just write a musical because it’s so easy’,” the Green Room Award-winning performer said sarcastically. “I wanted to challenge myself … And it felt like the right time.”
There’s no blood onstage. Instead, the production uses “very gory flesh-crunching sound effects” and a data projector to show deaths from the killer’s perspective, as if through a ’90s camcorder. Practical limits shaped the staging, Quinn said: most theatres don’t have a “splash zone.” The article doesn’t identify production costs, ticket revenue or how the show’s workers are paid.
The stage and its constraints
Casey Bennetto, 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 can heighten peril and comedy, he said, by asking audiences to 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. But the musical asks you to lean into a character and their destiny, which can heighten both the peril and comedy,” Bennetto said.
Bennetto described the friction between musicals’ “happy endings” and slashers’ deaths: “You get the joy of upending convention, but then also sometimes dovetailing into it.” He hopes audiences leave reconsidering the limits of musical theatre and thinking, “if they can do that, why can’t we do this?”
Quinn drew inspiration from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, American Movie, Phantom of the Paradise and the low-budget Australian slasher Houseboat Horror. She also pointed to Evil Dead The Musical and American Psycho: A Musical Thriller as examples of funny musical horror. The article gives no details about government support, ownership, union involvement or a labor dispute around the production.