'A little Rocky to Winchester's Horror Picture Show'

Tell us about your piece without giving too much away

I wanted to write a piece about mental health and self-harm and bugs, that’s the main gist. And so, for me, the real horror is being a teenager, and obviously a lot of teenagers are now going through an experience of having to experience mental health alongside just growing up which is rough enough. And I kind of wanted to try and physically embody that horror of living with things like depression and also discovering it in your loved ones and learning to cope with that… also bugs, there are bugs.

With the inspiration for your piece, was it mostly the mental health aspect or was there other reading sources?

I think, gosh, if I had to think of actual reading sources, it was kind of built upon other horror I liked. I found, the biggest influence was Carrie by Stephen King because that’s obviously kind of the experiences of a teenage girl and most of that horror is coming from the experience of being a teen and isolating an outcast teenager. I’m very into like H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, kind of the classics of horror. So I imagined kind of a Lovecraftian look at kind of gross insectile bodies, also had an influence there.

How was your writing process for this piece? Was it different from other pieces you’ve written?

It was different in that sense that I deliberately put myself in a very uncomfortable mindset because I kind of thought the best way I could write authentic horror was to freak myself out as much as possible. I don’t know if I’d recommend it but where I was dealing with very sensitive material, like, I obviously did my research. I actually sat and looked at autopsy pictures and self-harm and that was not a pleasant experience and like I said, I don’t know if I’d recommend it. But, I both wanted the description of the experience to be accurate, so to put myself in a position where I am uncomfortable, I feel like I could better portray the tone I was going for in the really horrible scenes. Like I said, I don’t know if I recommend doing that but my mind was like, yeah let’s make myself as uncomfortable as possible and I’ll know exactly what to write.

Do you know how your piece got chosen for the event?

No, Glenn emailed me and was like ‘can we use yours?’ and I was like ‘yeah’, so I don’t know why it was chosen but I assume it’s for good reasons.

What did you think of the show?

"I was extremely impressed with the performance of our horror stories. It wasn't what I'd expected at all: I'd imagined a cast acting out each story and wondered how this would be achieved, so the minimalistic approach to the pieces was a pleasant surprise. I felt that such faithful readings really did each piece justice and left the audience (myself included) hanging on every horrible word. Another unexpected joy was the gallows humour injected into the performance. I loved the ghostly figure hanging around the theatre seats during readings and cracking jokes between deaths, it added a little Rocky to Winchester's Horror Picture Show."

Back to blog