Julia Everitt’s Spooky Town comes to the Days of the Dead festival at Frigid New York. Originally written in 2019, it is an experimental comedy-horror, aiming to alternate scary scenes with humour.
Despite its title, Spooky Town isn’t haunted by the traditional ghosts and spooks, but by the sound of laughter. When students X (Abby Mulligan) and Z (Julia Resnick) notice mirth rates increasing, it doesn’t seem sinister until residents start to die off, exhausted by their amusement exertion.
What the play conveys in an audience isn’t exactly fear – although Spooky Town contains more of an average quota of high-pitched screams. Instead, it is the creepy phonemonon of laughing so hard it’s fatal. It’s almost mundane: we all laugh (and we have heard tales of people dying because they have laughed so much).
As new student Y (Megan Gwyn) becomes more erratic and unsettling, the town settles into a bloody, disturbing and downright peculiar reality. Aside from the power outages, the contagious giggles, and creepy goings-on, there’s a sweet queer romance that threads through Spooky Town and adds an additional layer.
Written in a surrealist, absurdist style, Spooky Town‘s plot and characters flirt with the paranormal, the unsettling and the tense. The drama considers the line between joy and despair, essentially presenting a ghost story without ghosts, or at least not the ghosts you might expect.
Bradly Valenzuela directs this unusual and promising piece – it doesn’t quite come off on the screen, perhaps needing the atmosphere of being in the room to really connect with the ideas being shared.
I’m giving this 2.5 stars. There’s definite fun to be had, and the writing is often sharp, but it needs a bit more work to rise above the average.
Spooky Town played at Frigid New York as part of their annual Days of the Dead festival.