Geraldine Quinn’s Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical brings a tale drawn from outer-suburban childhood memories to the Melbourne Fringe Festival, playing at Trades Hall from October 7 to 11. The original slasher comedy follows friends who reunite in 2008 to finish an amateur horror film they began while camping a decade earlier. One friend lost limbs in the bush during the first shoot. Now the group must decide whether they can finish their camcorder project before more people vanish.
A story from Noble Park and Dandenong
Quinn said she drew on experiences around Noble Park and Dandenong, where she and friends drove to Ferntree Gully, spent time near an old haunted house, and talked about music and films. “We didn’t fit into any clique,” she said. The show also aims to represent people from lower socio-economic outer-suburban areas, and the way shared interests can bring them together.
The story looks back to amateur filmmaking in the 1990s, when people took risks with cheap camcorders. Quinn said she also wanted to examine the “rosy-eyed” nostalgia often attached to that period. The tagline makes its point plainly: “Nostalgia is a killer.” The friends’ old project, and the danger of returning to it, bring nostalgia into the slasher story.
Quinn, a cabaret performer and self-described horror buff, wanted to mix song and dance with horror comedy. “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.”
Songs, scares and stage limits
The score shifts between styles: 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 wanted an original story, including a scene where a slasher character sings about not bringing your own food into a services club, described as closely related to an RSL.
There’s no blood in the production. Instead, the show uses “very gory flesh-crunching sound effects” and a data projector to show deaths from the killer’s perspective, as if through a 1990s camcorder. Quinn said the practical limits of staging a singalong horror—most theatres don’t have a “splash zone”—created room for fresh ideas.
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 make audiences invest in characters and their destinies, he said, intensifying both peril and comedy. “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.
Convention turned inside out
Quinn named Evil Dead The Musical and American Psycho: A Musical Thriller as examples of funny musical horror. Other inspirations included The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, American Movie, Phantom of the Paradise and the low-budget Australian slasher Houseboat Horror.
Bennetto said Campervan plays with the gap between musicals’ “happy endings” and slashers’ deaths, sometimes overturning convention and sometimes dovetailing with it. He hopes audiences will leave reconsidering the limits of musical theatre and asking, “if they can do that, why can’t we do this?” Quinn’s survival rule for a musical slasher is to write the story yourself and make sure your character is the surviving “bookend” narrator. She used that approach for herself.