Toeing down the lobby’s darkened steps toward the aromas of popcorn, must and rust, amid a swirl of neon patterns from DJ lights, audiences to “Slashed: Return to Hellville” might have a peculiar sensation.
Terror Vault – the eight-year-old walk-through haunt at the San Francisco Mint – has officially codified into an annual San Francisco tradition, announcing a holiday season a la San Francisco Ballet’s ” Nutcracker.”
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4 stars
“Slashed”: Created by Peaches Christ, aka Joshua Grannell, and David Flower. Through Nov. 1. One hour, 15 minutes. $60-$80. San Francisco Mint, 88 Fifth St., S.F. www.terrorvault.com
Just don’t bring your kids to this one (unless they’re at least 13 years old and seeing nude in-person actors get gorily violated fits in with your family’s usual mode of quality time).
For “Slashed,” which I saw Friday, Oct. 2, creators Peaches Christ, aka Joshua Grannell, and David Flower drew inspiration from 1980s slasher films to create the overriding feeling of a stomach knot that keeps tightening over the course of an hour. Each room’s various scares – a puff of air in your face, a ground-level hand clasping your ankle, a masked killer sidling up to nudge your arm – give only momentary relief to suspense. Something even worse surely lurks around the next corner.
Theoretically, the small groups winding through the labyrinthine space are on a quest to disable a “fear engine” and free the town of Shellville, which has been “shut down” by a killing spree. But the plot is beside the point.
Attention is better spent on each tiny chamber’s meticulously constructed, heebie-jeebie-inducing environment. A scientist’s office has a brain diagram, a jar of eerily large Q-tips, an ash tray and a specialized kind of historical forceps with cupped tips, presumably for scooping out brain lobes like ice cream.
Paloma Nazario as Petra Sterling in Terror Vault’s “Slashed.” (Jeremy Gable/Terror Vault)
A movie theater lobby, entered from a staircase that smells like cat pee, features a tarantula crawling over candy bars, a spiderwebbed hot dog roller, moldy popcorn and a bloodied concessionaire (Kim Larsen) who enjoys getting in your face.
Actors’ makeup, by Jason Henricks, features flaky skin flaps that feel impolite to stare at, much as instinct might urge it, to place whether an almost-face is really a human face. The gore looks real even close up, turning stomach knots into near-retches that might later erupt during a school cafeteria scene. Here, a lunchlady (Alexa Joseph) bids a volunteer to kneel down so she can ladle a warmed-over body part into waiting lips.
Grannell and Flower revel in the era’s cinematic tropes – the wholesome high school or frat party gone wrong, the villain who breaks out of the safe confines of the movie screen – while only amplifying the camp.
“Darren strangled me with videotape – the thing I loved most,” one of the undead (Samar Nassar) intones, speaking of the show’s killer who pops up in scene after scene, wearing a rubber mask in the mode of Michael Myers. That love is clearly shared by the creators themselves.
Audience members who choose to wear glow-stick necklaces get singled out for extra touching, including one scene where they can get separated from the rest of the group for a few minutes.
“It felt like a really long time,” the chosen one in my group, who declined to be named, told me afterwards, recalling being thrust into a dark closet and holding as still as possible amid various sensations from various substances.
Another pre- or post-show add-on solitary confinement experience, the Escape Tomb, was not available opening night due to technical difficulties. But the bigger, only real problem with “Slashed” is its front of house.
Different attendants give conflicting advice. One might suggest buying a drink, only for the next to instantly command its disposal before the show, without mentioning it doesn’t start for another 10 minutes. You might get corralled from the line to a holding room and back when you could be exploring the lobby’s nooks and crannies. It has all the charm of queuing for TSA.
In a Halloween twist, the event’s creeps and serial killers are more organized.
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This article originally published at With ‘Slashed,’ Terror Vault has officially become a must-see S.F. tradition.