In the face of the familiar holiday sap seeping into every mall and living room window across the city, Trepan Theatre is taking a fresh stab at Christmas this year. Forget wreaths, Scrooge or even merry men, in the basement of the Unitarian Church of Calgary, they’re going to try to scare the pants off you.

Co-directed by Alice Nelson and Aaron Coates, Tinsel and Terror is an evening of macabre absurdity inspired by the Theatre du Grand Guignol — a defunct French theatre specializing in visceral horror — and punctuated by the gore and screams of an insane asylum. Along with puppets, The Cecil Community Singers and a farcical but still violent Guignol work titled These Cornfields, unwrapping Trepan’s unconventional Christmas present begins with laughs and ends with horror that’s a cut above the average Hollywood thriller.

“To see this stuff onstage is so much different, because even though you can close your eyes or turn away, it’s still there live,” says Nelson. “To watch someone tortured in front of you is different. You know it’s safe, you know it’s not real, but it’s almost too real.”

Though the Grand Guignol itself closed its doors in 1962, it lives on as a performance style practised by modern devotees like Nelson, who is currently mounting Tinsel and Terror in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Guignol, a French puppet that inspired the theatre’s name.

In addition to offering an upcoming workshop on the Guignol style, Nelson also produced last season’s A Night at the Grand Guignol at Loose Moose. In the vein of holiday-appropriate (or inappropriate) premières, Nelson’s last Guignol show opened on Valentine’s Day.

Nelson discovered the genre while studying at California’s Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre, where she attended a workshop on creating Guignol stage effects. Producing fake bodily fluids, including blood and placentas, from common household items opened her eyes to the horrifying potential of the stage.

It bears noting that theatre tends to favour the representational when it comes to blood, everything from dramatic lighting changes to long, red handkerchiefs. Not for Trepan — a company appropriately named after the bloody task of burrowing a hole in a living human skull. In Tinsel and Terror, blood, eyeballs and even noxious bowls of rat poison are flung around the space.

For Nelson, there’s a direct relationship between the sticky quality of the blood and the quality of an audience’s terror — even if it means an occasional drop might spill on the audience. “Whenever we were at a workshop at Dell’Arte, watching someone getting stabbed in the head with scissors, I’d have to turn away and gasp,” she says. “I just love the [affect it has on] the audience, and I think it’s very similar to horror movies. We love the feeling of being scared. I think you feel that more intensely if there’s something more real.”

Thankfully, if horror is a dash of cold water (or at least tepid blood), Trepan’s evening is already perfectly calibrated for the current chilled Calgary climate. In recognition of the original Guignol’s “hot and cold showers,” alternating doses of comedy and horror, the evening errs on the warmer side — its most violent and disturbing piece, A Crime in the Madhouse, comes after a liberal warm-up that includes a screamingly hilarious puppet show about a failing gym student, her beaver and the devil.

Featuring a complement of actors, including Heather Kolesar, Evan Rothery and Jacqueline Russel, with comic chops as sharp as the show’s horror (Rothery’s lanky frame is exploited to fantastically grotesque effect), Tinsel and Terror keeps chilled audience members warm until the final act. When it comes time for the blood to fly and the screams to rise, however, Trepan has no interest in diluting the fear, even for the holidays.

“We’re aiming for scaring audiences,” insists Nelson. “We’re going for the original. But by doing it so big and committing so fully, you can’t help but laugh. It’s kind of insane. [It’s] nervous laughter, like if you see someone in a horror movie getting their heads sawed off. We try and avoid the camp, though we do make fun of the style in the puppet shows.”

“This is definitely not for the faint of heart,” she adds. “Definitely for those with a sense of humour.”

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[Sidebar]

Recipes are an important part of the holidays, so here’s two more for the cookbook, courtesy of Trepan.

Edible blood (for coughing up... or a midnight snack!)

One cup of dark corn syrup

Three tablespoons of red food colouring

Add chocolate syrup to help with opacity

One drop of green food colouring for “iron-y” tint

Non-edible blood (for blood that might get sprayed in your face!)

One cup of Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo (cleans and smells best)

Three tablespoons of red food colouring

Add chocolate syrup to help with opacity

One drop of green food colouring for “iron-y” tint