It’s Halloween night and you’re looking for a place with some music and laughs, but you don’t want to miss out on that once-a-year spook factor. You need horror and you demand nothing but demon blood and lots of it.
Luckily, you can get all this and more at Mostly the Moment Theatre Company’s production of Evil Dead: The Musical.
For those of you who don’t know, Evil Dead is a series of three horror movies which came out in the 80s. The plot follows a gang of college kids vacationing in an old cabin in the woods. One by one the group becomes possessed and starts wreaking gory havoc. The Evil Dead trilogy quickly became a cult-classic.
The fun thing about Evil Dead: The Musical is is still reads like a horror movie that just happens to have some musical numbers crammed in. These are two styles which shouldn’t work, but prove to be hysterical.
“We were looking at the show and couldn’t get over how funny it was that they can basically make an entire musical out of one-liners almost all the way through,” said director Kyle Peters.
“The convenient thing about Evil Dead is that it’s notorious for being terrible. The budget of the first movie was pretty embarrassing. What they set out to do was something scary and then it came to be quite not scary.”
When MTM Theatre Company started up three years ago, Evil Dead: The Musical was one of the first shows the group looked at doing. They’ve been waiting for just the right time to bring the gory musical to life. When École Sainte-Anne called and said their theatre was available on Halloween night, the cast couldn’t resist.
“We had to bring Evil Dead to Fredericton on Halloween,” said Peters.
“I love this play so much. I kind of grew up knowing these movies because my mom was a huge Evil Dead fan so getting to do this show was a lot of fun,” said Amber Carroll. Carroll plays Cheryl, the main character’s little sister, who only speaks in bad puns throughout the play.
“It’s also a challenging role because there is a lot of body humour and it’s just very different from anything I’ve ever had to do before, it’s a lot more raw,” said Carroll.
MTM Theatre Company’s mandate is they are a theatre for grown-ups, so this won’t be your typical Disney musical. The group likes to do edgy shows which push the limits of “acceptable.”
“What I’m most excited for is a specific song which is called ‘What the Fuck was that?’ When we decided we were doing Evil Dead months ago I posted this song on the Facebook page. I was very surprised at how quickly people were like ‘Whoa Fredericton is doing evil dead?’” said Peters.
“So, I’m hoping that when they say that phrase for the first time that people will react as strongly as I hope they will.”
For those of you who really want to indulge in the whole Evil Dead experience, there will be a splatter zone. There are 10 seats front row and centre which are guaranteed to get soaked with demon blood and guts.
“There will be so much blood everywhere. There’s one scene where one of the characters gets stabbed and instead of leaving by crawling across the stage, I have the character stabbed and then fall into the splatter zone and drag his bloody corpse across people,” said Peters.
“I was surprised with how quickly Fredericton wanted to get wet, within two days all Saturday night was gone and half of Friday’s.”
It’s a little extra cost-wise to get dirty, but a t-shirt and photo with the cast are included in the price.
“I cannot wait to hear people’s reactions to things that they are familiar with.There’s a lot of recognizable scenes from the original movie so it’s important to keep them in there,” said Carroll.
Evil Dead: The Musical will be performed at the Bernard Poirier theatre and will be run from Oct.31 – Nov.2 at 7:30 p.m. and a special midnight showing on Nov.1. Tickets can be bought online or at the Joy of Framing.
