Drums of fake blood, pressurized hoses, and other effects help make Evil Dead: The Musical a gory good time

Leo Weiser knows he’s done a good job when he sees Evil Dead fanatics staggering away from a night at the theatre looking like they’ve just lost a fight with a Candarian demon. The special-effects designer and his team are charged with making fake blood spurt out of chain-sawed heads, shotgunned chests, walls, ceilings, and the odd appendage in Evil Dead: The Musical. The hottest seats for the show, which has been a cult hit in New York, Toronto, and Calgary, are in an area called the Splatter Zone, and come complete with complimentary Evil Dead rain ponchos—although the hard-core horror fans tough it out in T-shirts.

The twisted ode to the gory artistry of Sam Raimi—and the three movies in his The Evil Dead series that launched in 1981—finally hits the Vogue Theatre next Thursday (October 22) to October 31. Interviewed in the appropriately creaky historical venue, Weiser points high up to little hoses running through the ceiling rigs. It turns out Splatter Zone ticket holders won’t just take hits from the carnage on-stage, but will also get bathed in blood from above, Carrie-style. On the stage, where crews are erecting a replica of the rickety cabin where the mayhem took place in the first two cult flicks, hoses point at the audience from between the cracks in the wall boards.

How much blood are we talking about? Weiser, a movie and stage special-effects veteran whose company Bleeding Art Industries also staged the show in Calgary with Ground Zero Theatre and Hit & Myth Productions before joining with Keystone to come here, smiles and says: “I’m on a budget. In Calgary we were doing around five to eight gallons a night; the Vogue is bigger, so I’ve upped the pump size here and we’re looking at about 15 gallons a night. There are four 45-gallon drums sitting behind the stage right now—and that’s just the stock blood for spraying.”

It turns out one of his biggest challenges is aiming the fake flood properly; pressure gauges all have to be set so that the spray hits the same targets night after night. “It’s hard to sing and dance in puddles of blood,” explains Weiser, who tries to keep most of the gore off the stage. “We’ll have a full day set up for water tests to get the pressures right.”

As outrageous (and, of course, hilarious) as Weiser’s effects are, he takes his job seriously. The Calgary-based artist has been in the business more than three decades, collaborating in the early ’90s with Ronnie Burkett’s darkly artful puppet theatre. More recently, Bleeding Art Industries has worked on everything from a Calgary Opera version of Tosca to sequels for the cult Canadian werewolf film Ginger Snaps (where Weiser got to work with FX icon Howard Berger, who did both Evil Dead sequels). For this show, he’s had to come up with a stable, nonstaining blood concoction made from industrial food-dye powder. ”You gotta leave [the theatre] happy and coated,” he says.

Not just a campy ode to one of the world’s most famous horror franchises—choice song-and-dance numbers include “What the Fuck Was That?” and “All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons”, Evil Dead: The Musical is a show that breaks new ground in melding film-style effects with live theatre.

“You’re part illusionist, part magician, and part technician,” says Weiser, who also oversees the fog machines, silicone demon masks, confetti cannons, and even a singing moose head.

Vancouver actor Cailin Stadnyk, a zombie-movie nut who’s thrilled to be joining the cast for the local run, is amazed at the quick changes and eye-popping effects the team is able to pull off in front of the audience’s eyes.

“They’ve come up with some very clever things,” she tells the Straight over the phone from Calgary, where she’s enjoyed terrorizing the Alberta cast with stories about the Vogue being haunted. “There was a part we were rehearsing the other day, and there’s a scene where something shocking happens to me—and I knew it was coming but I didn’t know exactly what it would be like—and it scared me so much that I screamed and actually welled up!”

Stadnyk is also amazed at the energy she’s had to pour into the show. A veteran of musical theatre, from Theatre Under the Stars’ Little Shop of Horrors to the Playhouse’s Fiddler on the Roof, she also splits her time as a motion-capture artist at Rainmaker Animation—where she’s worked on a few zombie video games in her day. But nothing, it seems, compares to being chased by Candarian demons unleashed by the reading of a human-flesh-covered Book of the Dead in a remote cabin.

“By the time I get home from rehearsal I am dead. Usually after shows I’m an insomniac,” says Stadnyk, who plays both Shelly, who ends up possessed, and, later, Annie, the daughter of the professor who first discovers the demons. She says she’s still learning how to pace herself, especially for a Vancouver run that will include four shows over the course of Friday and Saturday. “I’ll need to get cleaned and showered and get ready to go again.”

Still, for Stadnyk, who even as a kid was obsessed with ghoulish delights—in elementary school she ran creepy haunted houses out of her parents’ Regina basement each Halloween—this is just about as good as it gets. Speaking about Evil Dead: The Musical’s two-show-marathon weekend splatterfests, she says, “Six hours of getting drenched in blood and getting attacked by zombies: it doesn’t get much better than that!”

Part of the appeal, of course, might be that she doesn’t have to clean up at the end of the night. So who has to wipe up this mess after the show? Explains Weiser: “In Calgary, we had a crew of six people doing cleanup at the end of each night, and they got it down from six hours the first night to one-and-a-half or two.”