Stabbed in the Heart

Cody Lindley (Me) and Nate Hall have a mutual love for spooky movies, especially the classic Slasher genre. When the air turns cold and pumpkin this and that start appearing in store (earlier and earlier every year), they both love to start putting watching scary movie marathons, both together and separate. It was during one of these movie marathons involving a cabin, a weekend getaway, and horny teenagers, that an image flew into my head.

What if in the climatic scene where the killer bursts in and starts their first massacre, the final girl and him make eye contact and everything falls into slow motion as a romantic song starts to play. He brought the idea to Nate and they both quickly settled on the same thought. Let’s explore this inherently opposite, silly idea through the medium of our other mutual love – musicals. What other genre allows for such high stakes, boundless emotion, and spectacle? The year was 2018 and we met in Nate’s bedroom apartment with a keyboard, an acoustic guitar, and skeleton of the idea.

Throughout the process, we thought about how the slasher genre has often meant something through its symbolism. While we didn’t quite strive to make everything mean something else, we did ask ourselves what we wanted this piece to say. We settled on the themes of friendship, isolation, fate, and toxic relationships. The show’s grown a lot in the last 6 years and we’re so excited to see this production go up in collaboration with The Factory Theatre! We hope you enjoy it!

How do you define “camp”? A simple question that I posed to our cast at the beginning of this process. As a society, camp has become an incredibly widespread term with references to queer culture, fashion, cult classics, and even a moniker for well-known personalities. John Waters built an iconic and disruptive empire embodying this style, making it the forefront of his storytelling, and if you have read “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag, then you found the influence that sparked the MET Gala’s illustrious carpet a few years back. In the end, Camp is a feeling based on one’s perception. It can range from tacky to extravagant and stick the landing all the same.

Rather than trying to fit all of the guidelines that were thrown at us, we decided to take control of our own narrative. When you think about movies like Scream, my favorite horror franchise, you begin to work with the idea of commitment. Leaning in as far as you can to the absurd, the boisterous, the painful, the heart of a story, and embracing it from the lens of the outsider. It takes a tremendous amount of courage, and will typically cause a bit of discomfort as you let yourself get lost in a world of play and unrestrained choices. Tonight, I hope that you will take a deep breath. Inhale and exhale. Letting yourself sink into our little sandbox of chaos, and find a beautiful story about relationships, supernatural mischief, and the fight to find one’s self.