Now that I’ve had a nap….

Halloween can be a stressful time: wake up at nine in the morning with a headache, leave the house forgetting to turn off any lights, end up downtown for the first of two shows, end up across town in a headache coma for a couple hours, turn on the laptop only to have it fry its own motherboard, call the fire department to deal with the tree in the backyard after the electrical lines have set it on fire, go back downtown, and do the film again at midnight. Or, maybe that’s just me.

The film is of course The Rocky Horror Picture Show—a travesty of filmmaking with the general appeal of mediaeval dentistry, the advertising presence of Ron Paul, and a fanbase lacking in the education to become trekkies. Which raises the question: why do people go to this thing?

Not always an easy question to answer.

Most honestly, it was huge in the eighties. Which to some of you would be as meaningless an idea as Beatlemania. But, over the last couple decades, things have slowed down. Videogames and smartphones and whatever have functionally replaced the idea of going outside, and ending up at a party established sometime in the seventies, involving a film rendered impossible in a world containing videogames and smartphones—nevermind that the film is ultimately about a gay alien building a frankensteinian creature capable of singing like David Bowie; the basic plotpoint is that a castle on a hill in Ohio is closer to the inoperable car than any phonebooth.

It’s not about the film. If it were, then people would stay home and watch it on disc.

It’s about the party, which began sometime in the seventies, arguably peaking in the eighties, still ongoing today.

To that end, some changes have been made in recent times. The film itself is still the backdrop to the cast on stage pantomiming the action; but we’ve been adding a couple layers over the summer: a massive soundsystem with a professional DJ, robotic lights, and so on. The audience are becoming involved again, dragged up onto the stage before and during the show to dance the night away; Animal [the DJ] dug out a couple beachballs to throw into the audience as a rough analogue of crowdsurfing.

In short: the scene is returning to its optimal state—the audience as part of the show itself. You show up, find a seat you won’t necessarily return to, and rush the stage for some reasonably harmless anarchy.

There remains the general idea of screaming at the film and trying to make it cry for sucking so much; you can do that too. But we’re done with sitting otherwise quietly and behaving.

Here are a few hundred shots, lumped together from both of the last two nights, illustrating that point: Halloween2011.

Incidentally, the next show is a special offsite thing, up in Thornton, at 10001 Grant Street; Thornton, Colorado; 80229. You can get tickets in advance at fandango.com; the Cinebarre have set a hard start time of 10PM, since November the Third is a Thursday and therefore something of a school night.

And then, in November, the show returns to its home at the Esquire at 590 Downing Street; Denver, Colorado; 80218 at about 11.59pm on the twenty-fifth.

See you there….

So, that hunch that the show could survive going all semimonthly got tested a bit, with…some results.

It wasn’t the perfect test; a couple of silly variables crept in and made things a little weird. One was the cold, worse though it could have been; the other was of course Anonymous.

For those not following along at home: last night’s show accidentally coincided with the first night of real opposition in Occupy Denver, as characterised by a couple of cops telling a couple of hipsters to stop living in tents at Broadway and Colfax. Unfortunately, meagre though that reality was, it didn’t prevent those couple of cops from functionally sealing off the entire downtown area, which tends to include Sixth and Downing, making it a little difficult to get to the cinema. So, all other elements being equal, the show only sold about halfway out.

This of course is not a political platform. Which is why it’s safe to talk about Anonymous, who are only as political as Rawn Pawl Lawl and are otherwise a ragtag Island of Misfit Toys collecting to ask rude questions and mock the answers of an establishment they simultaneously admire and lament…so, tell me whether that sounds like a direct competition for RHPS.

The simple fact is that the show sold only halfway out. Whether that was because the target demographic were tweeting that corporations suck from iPhones, or because the temperature dropped down toward forty, or simply because no one did a huge amount of advertising to let people know that something other [?better] than Human Centipede Two was playing at the Esquire on the fourteenth.

None of which matters much, immediately. Two more shows remain this month: Friday and Saturday nights, on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth; those, by precedent, will be sold out—likely by the middle of the preceding week. You can get tickets to either or both online, starting around the twenty-third, from the cinema’s website. You really might wanna do that.

At least one of those nights [possibly both] will be all about a costume contest. So, last night’s show being a time for CEI to play dressup [not technically uncommon], it’ll be a couple weeks from now that the audience will be judged [and potentially punished accordingly] for their wardrobes. So, plan ahead; and remember: friends don’t let friends go anywhere dressed as The Fucking Crow. Seriously: just…don’t; it’s played.

Incidentally, last night’s show being CEI’s costume party, here are a few hundred shots of how that wound up looking.

See you again in a couple weeks….