CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Amongst the haunted houses and spooky bars, a local puppet theater is offering a different type of scare this Halloween season.
Rough House Theater is once again presenting the immersive puppet show “House of the Exquisite Corpse III”, which haunts visitors with an anthology of horror stories told through puppets at Steppenwolf’s Merle Reskin Garage Space, 1624 N. Halsted St.
There are six performances that each run five and a half minutes. Spectators view the shows through a peephole and listen with headphones as they walk to each display in a group of 12.
This year, the performances are inspired by chapters from the 1883 book “Our Homes and How to Keep Them Healthy” by Robert Brudenell Carter.
“The chapter titles themselves, just like, they felt like they were already horror puppet shows,” co-artistic director Claire Saxe explained.
Among those featured in the six performances are “Difficulty of Proof in Some Cases of Arsenic Poisoning,” “Dangers from Re-breathed Air” and “Advantages of the Removal of the Sick.”
This is the third year that Rough House, which specializes in puppetry arts, is doing an iteration of this project.
The group is made up of artists from a wide range of backgrounds including sculpture, visual arts, theater, clown performance and experimental music. There are 45 artists who contributed to the show this year.
Saxe said that over the past decade, Rough House has accumulated puppetry artists.
“We have found that if you tell people we're a puppetry arts organization, people come out of the woodwork and they're like, ‘I've been secretly making puppets in my basement for the last ten years!’” Saxe shared.
To keep drawing in members, Rough House hosts events over the course of the year like Puppets in Progress, known as PiPs, which are free and open to the public to come and collaborate with other puppetry artists as they make and design their puppets.
“House of the Exquisite Corpse” is the theater’s main event of the year and takes months of planning.
Performances of the horror show have been extended. The show was originally set to close on Halloween after performances this weekend, but it has been extended through Nov. 4.
Tickets for the show can be purchased on the Rough House Theater website and range in cost from $16-42 on a Pay-What-You-Want scale.