Shocktoberfest!! 2007: Maker of Monsters

This year’s edition of Shocktoberfest!! opened with a revival of Maker of Monsters, Daniel Zilber’s adaptation of the Grand Guignol sideshow shocker first produced for Shocktoberfest!! 2001. The premiere of three original works: Mel Gordon’s Google;Fetish, Jonathan Horton’s bone-chilling drama The Colossus and Rob Keefe’s comedy The Bloody Con rounded out the bill.

Hypnodrome Head Trips (2007)

Deviating from the more traditional Grand Guignol fare of our annual Shocktoberfest!!, this spring offering featured composer John Zorn’s improvisational Cobra, a rotating repertoire of gospel tracts by Jack T. Chick dubbed Chick Habit and playwright and F/X master Jonathan Horton’s cycle of weird science one-acts, The Juliet Drug, The Glass Womb and The Chaos Masquerade. Eddie Muller’s new adaptation of the 1958 Grand Guignol thriller Orgy in the Lighthouse and the premiere of Rob Keefe’s The Empress of Colma topped the bill.

Shocktoberfest!! 2006: Laboratory of Hallucinations

To celebrate Thrillpeddlers’ fifteenth year we returned to the first Grand Guignol play we produced, The Laboratory of Hallucinations. Using both Andre de Lorde’s original 1921 Grand Guignol play and Russell Blackwood’s 1991 free adaptation as source material, playwright Bill Selby reworked this classic into a Shocktoberfest!! centerpiece. Two new comedies by Rob Keefe, First Day and The Taxidermist’s Revenge kicked off the festivities.

Titus Andronicus (2006)

Thrillpeddlers opened the Bay Area’s otherwise traditional summer Shakespeare season with a June run of the Bard’s bloody black comedy. This full-scale production was a welcome return to the play that inspired Thrillpeddlers’ 1997 Titus redux, Mondo Andronicus.

Shocktoberfest!! 2005: Sissies Stay Home

Thrillpeddlers’ second year at the Hypnodrome featured two Grand Guignol-inspired comedies by Rob Keefe (A Slight Tingling, held-over from Blood Bucket Ballyhoo, and A Wedding of the Member, a revival from Shocktoberfest!! 2000), a dramatization of the Victorian-era spanking poem Arthur’s Flogging, and Wildwood Park, a contemporary Grand Guignol from the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of I Am Own Wife and Quills.

Blood Bucket Ballyhoo (2005)

A springtime version of our popular Shocktoberfest!! concept, Blood Bucket Ballyhoo featured two original Grand Guignol-style farces by Rob Keefe (“Lips of the Damned” and the uproariously blood-soaked “A Slight Tingling”), as well as the Grand Guignol classic “The Final Kiss” adapted by Richard Hand and Michael Wilson, authors of the book Grand Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. Mel Gordon, author of Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror was on hand as guest director.

Shocktoberfest!! 2004: Welcome to the Hypnodrome

In an ambitious expansion of our popular Shocktoberfest!! extravaganzas, we debuted adaptations of three Grand Guignol classics never before performed for American audiences (The Beast, Bearded Assets, and Lover of the Dead). We aslo debuted our brand new, exclusive-use performance space, The Hypnodrome. Donated by a private benefactor, The Hypnodrome is large enough to accommodate intricate lighting, special effects and sideshow rigging, without sacrificing the intimacy that has given us a reputation for “in your face” spectacle.

Shocktoberfest!! 2002

For this “Best of” edition of our annual blood feast, we moved from the relative comfort of our long-time EXIT Theatre venue to the wild and wonderful (and now defunct) Odeon Bar in San Francisco’s Mission district. Thrillpeddlers’ loyal audience mixed with unsuspecting bar patrons for performances of two Shocktoberfest favorites: The Victorian spanking drama “A Visit to Mrs. Birch,” and the Grand Guignol classic “A Crime In A Madhouse.”

Shocktoberfest!! 2001: Carnival of Hallucinations

The third edition of our annual “Pageant of Terror and Titillation.” This time around we offered two new adaptations of classic Grand Guignol plays never before performed in English (Maker of Monsters and Kiss of Blood), and an original play based on Puccini’s opera Tosca (The Torture of Cavaradossi). And back by popular demand, Thrillpeddlers’ lovely, leggy, foot-fixated playmates, The Barefoot Beauties, were on hand (and knees) performing two new fantasy vignettes.

Shocktoberfest!! 2000

Thrillpeddlers return for a second year with three world premiere adaptations of classic Grand Guignol plays: Andre de Lorde’s bizarre mystery Brush With Death; the outrageous Grand Guignol sex farce A Wedding of the Member; and finally, Orgy in the Lighthouse, one of the most popular pieces from the Grand Guignol’s later repertoire. This year also marked the debut of Thrillpeddlers’ foot fetish femmes fatales, The Barefoot Beauties (and the untimely end for some unfortunate earthworms).

Shocktoberfest!! (1999)

Thrillpeddlers begin what is to become a San Francisco Halloween tradition. Three incredibly strange plays in one unforgettable evening. From the porno-centric morality play The Celibate, to the Victorian girls-school spanking adventure A Visit To Mrs. Birch, to one of the Grand Guignol’s most popular dramas A Crime In A Madhouse, this show stunned unsuspecting audiences night after night. Like the Stones’ concert at Altamont or The Talking Heads’ first show at CBGB’s, it seems that just about everybody tries to claim “I was there.”

Mondo Andronicus (1997)

For the 1997 San Francisco Fringe Festival, Thrillpeddlers turned to Shakespeare’s revenge powerhouse Titus Andronicus. Deconstructing the play with a Mondo-film/Faces of Death aesthetic, we sliced the script down to a lean 60 minutes and turned up the blood and gore to 11. Adding fuel to the fire was a live-mixed Drum-n-Bass soundtrack. The entire run was sold-out, and the production was voted “Best of the Fringe.”

Clive Barker’s Frankenstein In Love (1996)

The U.S. premiere of horror/fantasy writer Clive Barker’s necro-political thriller. Barker personally selected Thrillpeddlers as the theatre company best suited to tackle his dark and complex work. Our production featured several of our favorite Bay Area actors and choreography by legendary nude dancer Carol Doda.

Laboratory of Hallucinations (1991)

Thrillpeddlers original adaptation of the quintessential Grand Guignol drama. Our production was based on the play by France’s “Prince of Terror,” Andre de Lorde, which thrilled audiences in Paris for over forty years! SOMA magazine wrote, “San Francisco has recently been treated to a play which dares to give the audience the horror and melodrama they crave rather than the stultifying naturalism they are too often told they want.” — John H. Harvey, SOMA Magazine