Callback to 2003: Slumber Party Slaughter

cast of Slumber Party Slaughter

Roy here.

Welcome to the inaugural installment of Callback, a new series of posts looking back at shows that happened somewhere in the recesses of The Hideout’s 11 year history. Improv is such a temporary, ephemeral art form, that I thought it would be nice to try and relive some of the highlights of the past.

We begin with a gruesome tale.

Ever since I started taking classes at the Hideout, I’d hear occasionally about Slumber Party Slaughter, a special Halloween show put on in 2003. I could never quite tell if the people involved thought it was the best thing ever, or a terrible, terrible idea. This all went down when the Hideout’s house troupe was still called The Heroes of Comedy. So naturally I asked an old-school Hero, Kevin Miller, to clue me in on the details.

Take it away, Kevin:

In 2003, the Heroes of Comedy—feeling confident enough to vie for a piece of Sixth Street’s favorite holiday—hosted a special Halloween-night improv show with the gruesomely awesome title “Slumber Party Slaughter.” Just as you’d hope and dream of for such a show, it was advertised to be very heavy on the comedic blood, guts, and gore; the first two rows of seats in the downstairs theater were designated the “splash zone,” and long sheets of clear plastic were laid out for audience members to protect themselves.

Prior to the show, Sean Hill hit up the meat counter at the local Fiesta market for as many sickening butcher’s cuts as he could find. Backstage in a cooler, the performers had access to hearts, kidneys, intestines, and even a skinned goat’s head. (You know, just in case.) We also manufactured a solid gallon of corn-syrupy blood and rigged up impromptu blood packs ready for the squirting.

It was a predictably wacky affair. The long-form show took the form of a Clue-style murder mystery set at the afore-mentioned slumber party, though to my recollection the cast of characters would have been more well-suited at a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening. (Why yes, there was a bloody priest.) One by one, characters would find themselves alone onstage, telegraphing their imminent demise as much as possible (and more often than not, with a cow’s organ stashed up their sleeve). A second cast member would don a cape and mask and waltz up behind the poor victim, disemboweling them in as extreme and bloody a manner as possible, and spraying arterial sugar-blood over the entire stage. (It got rather sticky and slippery up there as the evening went on.) Late in the show, we realized the goat’s head had not yet been used, and so—abandoning all connection to the improvised plot—I donned the villain’s costume, grabbed the head, walked out into the audience, and simply handed it to an innocent-looking girl in the front row.

A good time was had by all. The Halloween tradition was relatively short-lived, perhaps in part due to how impossible the blood was to clean up; months later, when we disassembled the downstairs stage, we found the concrete underneath spattered with an icky layer of it. But it was worth doing, if nothing else, for the bizarre set of publicity shots we got afterwards.