Little Snot of Horrors: A Retrospective

I’ve written a couple of things for Freshly Squeezed now, and am on the writing team for their own foray into monster writing. I’m flattered and delighted that they trust me to help create exciting new work. 

This piece however has made me question my credentials. Why can’t I talk about my 10 month long passion project that fulfilled every creative outlet I pursue? I’ve redrafted this at least five times and I can’t get it right, so this meandering waffle will have to suffice. 

Let me start with what it was as a piece of theatre.

“Little Snot of Horrors” was my attempt at immersive theatre, using a community Dungeons and Dragons group as the linchpin. It wrapped up over 10 months of storytelling through a mixture of improvised theatre, horror acting, puzzle solving, multimedia presentation, tabletop roleplaying, and pure hubris on my part.

I was at a pub with some friends after a highly-anticipated game of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD from here on in). I got to talking about how I would love to stage a play in our setting. I even had a premise cooked up - a screwball horror romp based on one of my favourite musicals, “Little Shop of Horrors”. 

This was all pipedream talk, but as I got into running games myself, possibility morphed into a plan. A live, fully immersive final encounter where it all goes wrong. If you read my article on the Ghostwatch TV special, you know how much I adore it. It was a perfect base model, and I was going to make it happen. 

The practical aspects of the show were the easiest to acquire. I work in a Performing Arts department so I was able to rent a venue free of charge, and had access to all the sound and lighting equipment, props, and costumes I needed. Any additional props and costumes I designed and constructed myself.

I had a pair of willing victims who were happy to be my additional actors; my eternally patient husband as the impartial Voice of the Theatre (the Help Menu for the experience’s mechanics) and Clown Photographer Jack as a walkaround character who would guide the adventurers through the story. I also had a House Manager to ensure everything ran safely and smoothly, and graciously co-ordinated the fundraising collections for Chichester Pride. 

Setting that up was all in a day’s work.

My biggest task was selling the concept to a group of people who can recite textbooks of rules and mechanics. A lot of our number are neurodivergent, or infrequent theatregoers, or just shy. I had to ease them into the idea gently; to show them that fear could in fact be fun.

I started small; running in-person encounters in costume, adding props, sound effects, and later I ran a prototype encounter in our usual venue. 

Then it was laying my trail of breadcrumbs through online story encounters, audio files, and documents to spread my web of confusion. I also roped in two other Dungeon Masters to run two “prelude” episodes to the finale, which would get everyone in the right place ready for me to strike. I was editing the script mere hours before the show to ensure that all the internal lore was as accurate as possible. Though most of the dialogue was improvised, I had a road map of where I needed it to go.

It was a big leap of faith, but I gathered fourteen willing souls to join me for the experience. I split them into two groups; one encounter for each “act” of this event. They would each have to interact with and then fight one of my monsters, but they did not know which two they would be encountering. 

I had everything set.

And then the doubt kicked in. 

As the show inched closer, I began to panic. I had never produced my own show before, let alone something of this scale. I had no idea how the big twist was going to land, I didn’t feel qualified to be offering this experience at all, and I didn’t know whether people were even going to like it. I just told a story that I would have wanted to have been a part of. 

Two weeks’ before, a friend said something that completely reframed my perception on the whole thing. 

“Had you not been so active, we would have given up on this [the Dungeons and Dragon group] a long time ago,” 

I cried. I hate crying publicly, but I blubbed like a woman possessed because I realised that I wasn’t simply being tolerated. People cared about my story, and they cared about me. 

So the show had to be good.

I should tell you about the show itself, but in all honesty it’s a blind spot in my memory. That’s terrible considering this is an article for a theatre company’s blog.

I know it happened. My first clear memory after the house opened was me in the loos, some four hours later. I was panicking because I was stuck in my 5kg costume and felt incredibly claustrophobic. I could barely speak as my husband half-carried me home. I spent the next morning in bed, then shuffled to the venue to tidy up. It wasn’t until Jack showed me his photos that it started coming back to me. Several months on I still have to refer to the photos to jog my memory. 

I know it wasn’t a seminal piece of theatre. Nothing revolutionary in terms of plot structure, design, or my performance to be frank. My two villains are tropey at the best of times, and their delivery on show night was dialled up to 11. I funded the whole thing myself, so the set and costumes had a very quaint home-made quality to it. I lucked out with my guest performers, who gave me something to bounce off of in those terrifying first fifteen minutes. Even the DnD gameplay aspect was not my most complex. 

But the audience were entranced. They were so keen to talk to these creatures, make themselves known, and solve the mystery. People came in full costume themselves, or actively participated to feel part of the story. After months of wondering, they finally got to know who the evil mastermind behind my entire arc was.

I have never heard a silence that loud as I prowled around her lair as a bulbous half woman/half spider, the distorted form of one the group’s favourite characters. As I finished my monologue with, “Any questions?” I was half expecting a riot. Nothing. Just a mixture of dumbfounded silence, anger, fear, and horror. 

My audience was what made it magical theatre. Their willingness to submit to the fantasy of it all, and believe that my skulking around in a thrifted wedding dress and some padded-out tights really was a spider horror, was so unexpected. They flinched when I passed them, avoided my glances, or glared with unrelenting determination to not show weakness. When I “attacked” Jack’s character, there was a chorus of horrified gasps. Afterwards one attendee said they had to show restraint to not tackle me to the ground.

So it seems that I obtained what I set out to do. I wanted people to see, touch, talk to, and then defeat a monster. For so many people there are monsters we simply cannot vanquish, but simply co-exist with. I never attempt to change the world with what I do - that’s a vainglorious and frankly unattainable goal. But if I entertained some friends with a bit of something different that made them feel powerful, or scared, or anything at all, then I’ve done my job as an artist.