If you are among those who understand that Halloween is the best month (yes, month) and horror is the best genre, Rough House Theatre’s fifth incarnation of “House of the Exquisite Corpse” is a phantasmagoric must-see. This year’s theme — “Blood and Puppets” — offers an ambulatory journey that will enthrall non-horror fans as well.
Horror — good horror as opposed to splat-fests where copious quantities of blood are the main and only point — delivers a commentary on the terrors that surround us in the real world. 1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was about the fear of a Communist takeover. Last year’s “MaXXXine” was about femicide, the stigmatization of sex workers and the exploitation of young women. “Candyman” (1992) and “Get Out” (2017) tackled racism. 1978’s “Halloween” taught us that the bogey man is real and all-but impossible to kill.
Directors and Chicago puppet artists Felix Mayes and Corey Smith understand the assignment. They address 21st century fears with “Blood,” a jaw-dropping assemblage of puppet-led vignettes that spin real-world terrors into elaborate metaphors and eyeball-popping gore. These puppets are eerily human — the visuals have far more in common with “Pan’s Labyrinth” than “Kukla, Fran and Ollie.”
The audience begins in an “entry chamber” created by Jacqueline Wade. The chamber is dominated by the massive, disembodied head of a sorrowful Black woman and an equally outsized grasping fist painted with a fraying American flag. Here, the instructions are laid out: You’ll be walking through six installations, each one telling a roughly five-minute story that you’ll hear via headphones. You will peer through peepholes at the darkest corners of the imagination and the most horrifying aspects of humanity.
There are many ghoulish, provocative highlights.
“Blood and Miracles” (created by Casey Doe and Quinn Kempe) starts out creepy and ratchets up to a finale of face-melting, skin-peeling, full-on body horror that speaks to a medical system where humans are blood-sacrificed to feed those far more powerful. The tale’s tortured puppet heroine is cinematic, evoking both Linda Blair in the final third of “The Exorcist” and the iconic spectral twins of “The Shining.”
“Blood and Transformation” (created by Saskia Bakker and Emilie Wingate) features alchemy and resurrection, as well as bats pinned like butterflies and a chaotically flapping bird worthy of the deranged, predatory flocks of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”
“Blood and Ruin” (created by Justin D’Acci and Vim Hile) unfolds in a world as arid as bleached bones, where nature dominates and vultures peck the last remnants of humanity to death. It’s the myth of Prometheus — wherein the titular mortal is sentenced by the gods to having birds eat him alive for eternity — turned into an apocalyptic nightmare.
With “Blood and Memory” (created by Chih-Jou Cheng and Charlie Malave), the heart of a teddy bear is ripped out, an emblem of innocence lost to a world of inescapable brutality. In “Blood and Letting,” (created by madigan burke and Nina D’Angier) the audience ultimately becomes part of a story defined by floating IV bags, snakes of tubing and fetuses suspended in tanks of crimson liquid.
And in the eerie “Blood and Corruption (created by Pablo Monterrubio and Fletcher Pierson and performed by Lindsey Ball and Ruby Que), a disembodied head moves through a miasma of murky darkness while making increasingly menacing pronouncements.
In every scene, the storytelling is a near-perfect blend of immersive, atmospheric sound (by Mike Meegan), setting (environmental design and tech direction by Pei-Yu Hung and Melissa Schlesinger) and lighting (by Quinn Chisenhall and Brendan Marble). The result is a series of vividly alarming worlds, many of them framed by the eyeballs of the audience as they peer through gashes carved into the scenery.
The lighting design creates a visual thru-line, endless shades of crimson seeming to suffuse the very air with a deeply disturbing miasma. Meegan’s sound design augments the grotesqueries with bones that crunch like hammered plywood and liquid-y bursts that sound like exploding viscera.
You’ll want to arrive early to spend some time with the lobby displays. Here, you’ll be invited to come up with an idea for a five-minute horror story (Opening night ideas included “Pizza that bleeds a bunch” and “Chronic Pain.”) and add it to dangling streamers that evoke open veins. There are also “blood oaths” scratched out on oversized blood drops tumbling from the walls.
Halloween has become largely defined by sexy fill-in-the-blank costumes and the cheap schlock. “Exquisite Corpse” understands the real reason for the season: Delicious scares served up with a gush of social commentary and exquisite storytelling. It is bloody astonishing.