Thrillpeddlers' 7th annual pageant of terror and titillation.
October 13 - November 11*
Thursdays / Fridays / Saturdays - 8pm
http://www.hypnodrome.com/

Sex farces and horror classics collide in a bill-of-fair inspired by the notorious Le Theatre du Grand Guignol (www.grandguignol.com). The Halloween season starts on October, Friday the 13th with the debut of three new tales of terror and taboo from Thrillpeddlers. The fine arts of public execution, taxidermy, surgery and revenge are all displayed live onstage at Thrillpeddlers' ghoulish and grandiose show palace, The Hypnodrome (575 10th St. between Bryant and Division). Like the taste of blood, Shocktoberfest!! 2006 lingers on after Halloween with performances through Saturday, November 11.

Playwright Rob Keefe, known for his how-to's and helpful hints on the PBS series REAL SIMPLE, has penned two original comedies that top the Shocktoberfest!! bill. Keefe's curtain raiser, First Day, plumbs the dark reaches of retail sales - nearly severing the salesman's rule of thumb to "know your product." When the new girl arrives on sales floor for her first day of work at a high-end department store, she's walked through the inventory of shawls, ponchos, wraps and guillotines by a floor manager with a hidden past.

Next up, The Taxidermist's Revenge. Shunned by the cabal of critics that dictate turn-of-the century artistic tastes, a delusional taxidermist teams up with a buxom chemist who weigh lay their critics and "hold the mirror up to nature" in a grotesque still life of blood-draining zombification.

After the interval, when patrons take turns being photographed in a replica of an 18th Century guillotine, there's no escaping The Laboratory of Hallucinations. Playwright Bill Selby (writer for THE NEW TWILIGHT ZONE and cover illustrator for Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine) has reanimated this horror theatre classic based on the 1916 sci-fi shocker by The Grand Guignol's "Prince of Terror", Andre de Lorde.

Thrillpeddlers' co-founder Russell Blackwood first chose to adapt The Laboratory of Hallucinations, a mainstay of The Grand Guignol's repertoire for decades, as the company's inaugural production in 1991 (with décor and special effects designed by MythBuster - in - waiting, Adam Savage). The revival of Hallucinations fully exploits The Hypnodrome's special effects capabilities and commemorates Thrillpeddlers' fifteenth anniversary.

"Thrillpeddlers have produced theatre of fear and terror for fifteen years," said Blackwood "The White House has only been at it for the past five years!" But does the War on Terror really have something to do with Thrillpeddlers growing success and popularity? Blackwood thinks it does. "Theatre audiences come to grand guignol to be shocked and terrified, but above all they come to be delighted by their own fear and the fears of people around them. It's an idea as old as Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who first connected horrific theatrics on-stage with the purgation of fear and pity in the spectators. "When I see a Hypnodrome audience giddy with fear rather than being traumatized or immobilized by it, I know Thrillpeddlers has done its job."