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4 stars<\/p>\n
“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<\/a><\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Paloma Nazario as Petra Sterling in Terror Vault’s “Slashed.” (Jeremy Gable\/Terror Vault)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In a Halloween twist, the event’s creeps and serial killers are more organized.<\/p>\n Subscribe<\/p>\n There’s more to San Francisco with the Chronicle. Subscribe today for just 25\u00a2.<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Paloma](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/san_francisco_chronicle_hearst_178\/5231b16b414ed38daf45a2ecb5021433.jpg\"\/)
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