When Joshua Grannell’s day involves signing for deliveries of fake blood, painting a torture dungeon, and auditioning vampire cabaret dancers, you can be sure October is just around the corner.
Grannell’s immersive haunted house, known as Terror Vault, is back for its fourth installment, on September 29. Since its 2018 debut, the Vault has been a can’t-miss Halloween tradition for the Bay Area’s bravest denizens. This year, it’s set to once again take over the bowels of San Francisco’s historic Mint building for a cult-themed experience ominously titled “The Initiation.”
For Grannell, perhaps best known by his drag persona, Peaches Christ, launching a site-specific, queer-friendly haunted house with coproducer David Flower was a dream—or, perhaps more fittingly, a nightmare—come true.
Professionally, it’s afforded the pair a chance to employ upward of 200 local artists and creatives each season. Creatively, it’s allowed them to craft plotlines near and dear to their twisted hearts, including one centered on the Mint being a secret prison and another spotlighting a family trafficking in occult antiques.
Of course, indulging creativity always comes at some cost.
“For us, as creatives, the problem is that we always want to create new things,” Grannell explains. “The reason that’s a problem is that it’s not good business. It means tearing everything apart and starting over every year.”
That’s the plan once again, and in an effort to keep the coffers full, Terror Vault is introducing a new add-on for those who seek more quality time with the “family.” Dubbed the “R.I.P. Experience,” it will allow ticket holders to enter another, special secret section of the show with its own bar and the chance to mingle with the show’s cult leaders.
Cults have long been a topic of obsession for both Grannell and Flower.
As part of “The Initiation,” attendees will encounter familiar California faces like Charles Manson, Reverend Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, and Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey. The show’s main storyline also incorporates contemporary elements, like the ongoing saga of Shelly Miscavige, the missing wife to Scientology leader David Miscavige. A lesser-known outfit, the San Francisco–based “orgasmic meditation” group OneTaste, also makes an appearance. Ultimately, it’s all shades of the same color to Grannell, who sees our collective obsessions with cults as a natural reaction to modern times. We all feel a need to belong; there’s always some charismatic leader who will swoop in and serve that need for their own ends.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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“The main story is very much taken from real-life horror,” Grannell confirms. “The cofounder of [our] cult is a woman. She’s the good one. The man is the evil one, and she’s gone missing, and nobody knows where she is, but the cult is acting like nothing happened.”
To properly execute this vision, Into the Dark Productions will once again transform the labyrinthine layout of the Mint’s vaults into an array of atmospheres, scenes, and unexpected shocks that play out over an hour-long performance. Visitors can also grab preshow or postshow libations at the Fang Bang, a separate, vampire-themed bar open to the public while Terror Vault is running. It’s a business, certainly, but one overwhelmingly guided by a passion that’s consumed Grannell all his life.
Inside the office he shares with Flower several floors above the Mint’s vaults, Grannell’s obsession with the macabre is everywhere. His office decor includes a table stacked with back issues of horror magazine Fangoria; posters for terrifying films, including 2010’s All About Evil, which Grannell wrote and directed; and innumerable spooky props, including a plastic tombstone bearing the name of Heklina, Grannell’s best friend. A longtime fixture of the San Francisco drag scene, Heklina died in April of this year while the pair were on tour in London.
“What’s funny is that Heklina actually had a tombstone in the show before she died,” Grannell says. “It was a tombstone for her mole because she had it removed. We love doing stuff like that, for the people who are deep into our world.” It’s also one way for the artist to own the true horrors he’s experienced and turn them into art.
Reflecting on the early days when Peaches Christ hosted midnight screenings of cult films like Evil Dead II, Pink Flamingos, and Showgirls (the last included complimentary lap dances) at San Francisco’s now-defunct Bridge Theatre, Grannell believes those raw, raucous, joyfully cathartic nights have carried over to become the bloody heart of Terror Vault.
“With those performances, we were exorcising all this shit that we had absorbed and, in a way, acting it out,” he says. “Turning it into something entertaining and wild and fun provided this deep catharsis and release.”
It’s safe to say that an attraction to the darker sides of organizations and sects is no pose for someone who counts not snapping a photo in front of LaVey’s infamous Black House before it was demolished in 2001 as among his biggest regrets in life.
“Cults are in the zeitgeist, I think, because we are a country that is actively watching a cult leader face all these indictments while also running for president,” Grannell says. “Terror Vault is a way for us to deal with the horrors of the real world: to create fantasies around them where we have more control.”•
Zack Ruskin is a freelance reporter living in San Francisco. His regular beats include weed, music, literature, comedy, and drag. He’s written the cannabis column “Chem Tales” for SF Weekly since 2016 and reviews new music releases for Variety. His byline has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Merry Jane, the San Francisco Chronicle, Alta, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, Cannabis Now, and Marin Magazine.
