CryCryKillKill - Review of Brighton Festival show

CryCryKillKill is a wild and whip-crack smart look at the putrid conventions and cliches of all too many horror movies.

Louise Orwin has created an hugely intelligent multi-media piece which deconstructs all the tropes and grimy sexual politics of horror on the big screen.

The sold-out Brighton Festival performance at The Old Market in Hove (May 23) was visually arresting, with just Louise and two other woman dressed, in true US horror exploitative style, in nighties, with video cameras recording every expression relayed in close up on three large screen TVs.

Behind the actors a bigger screen bombarded the audience with short descriptions of hoary old horror movie concepts, evocative moods and styles, and brilliantly observed visual signifiers - ‘Slow dances under mirror balls’, ‘grass lawns’, ‘an empty swing’ , ‘a glistening knife’, and familiar horror movies locations: an silent ice rink, a remote motel.

Initially the actors were in an almost reverie, perhaps reflecting the dream-like and semi-helpless state of legions of female horror flick victims.

This gave way to silent screens, and then a succession of acted out (on stage in front of the audience and in close up on the screens) death throes - suffocation, strangulation and all sorts of unpleasant ends. Straight after Orwin chided the lack of humour of generations of male movie-makers who have offed so many female characters in lurid and awful ways.

Throughout the piece there were long close ups of the actor’s faces and lips (‘the gaping O mouth’), a reminder of the years of visual exploitation.

The remarkable production was completed by a frenzied finale, which, to avoid spoilers, can best be described as a memorable combination of flesh, feathers and feedback. And of course, oodles of fake blood.

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