I cherish my signed DVD of The Peaches Christ Short Film Collection. I bought it from Peaches herself in 2008, after Midnight Mass at The Bridge. The collection of hilarious horror parodies (one of which includes the late Heklina) serves as a primer on just how fertile the mind of Joshua Grannell (PC’s alter ego) really is. Directing the 2010 film All About Evil (starring Natasha Lyonne and Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson) further showed Grannell had storytelling ambitions at which short form only hints.
That’s how Terror Vault emerged. Every October, Grannell and company commandeer the old SF Mint to make it a literal house of horrors. It’s a scary (and unabashedly-queer) immersive walking tour that ends with specialty cocktails at Fang Bang, the vampire-themed bar and nightclub in the same building. Book your tickets for this year’s edition HEXED! now—unless you’re scared?
It’s not just the décor that makes Terror Vault an annual must-see, it’s the fact the immersive walking tour does more world-building in one hour than most Netflix series do in 10 episodes. A Terror Vault tour doesn’t just have extra-terrestrials, it has a detailed story about their long, violent history here on planet Earth; it won’t just have story cult members summoning demons, it’ll give those demons and cult members motivations for their madness. The stories are so intricate that it’s easy to forget details. And that’s fine—your job is to get from one end of the gruesome gallery to the next. Of course, doing so will likely result in you being rubbed-on by ghouls, shaken around in elevators, and occasionally squirted in the face by an enema.
I write these words one month ahead of the opening of Hexed, Grannell’s 2025 edition. I’m not sure what’s in store for this witch-themed walk-through, but after the horrors of 2025, at least these scares come with a finish line.
