On this, the birthday of that macabre and malignant misanthrope, H.P. Lovecraft, Eldritch Theatre announces its 25th season of ghoulishly giddy grand guignol. Grab onto your gooseflesh before it crawls away, as we open the sepulchre door to show you what we have festering in our timorous tomb!

On the ghoulish and goblinny eve of All Hallows, we offer the world premiere of Phantasmagoria 3D!, running from October 30th to November 10th, 2024. In the 18th century, the audiences of Europe were gripped by a new form of horror theatre. Using magic lanterns, shadows, puppetry, and parlour illusions, artists created the “Fantasmagorie”, during which ghosts rose from their mouldering tomb, fiery demons and smokey phantoms cavorted, and rotting skeletons materialized from thin air. Using a never-before imagined process known as Live 3D!, Eldritch Theatre brings the Phantasmagoria Shows of the Gothic past into the cosmic terror of the 21st century. Performed and created by Kira Hall, Michelle Urbano, and Eric Woolfe, with fiendish designs by Melanie McNeill, we will send you off into the night a little wiser about the creeping dangers of the Deros who live beneath our feet.

To begin the new year, we reach far back to the very birth of Eldritch Theatre to delight and horrify audiences with The Strange & Eerie Memoirs of Billy Wuthergloom. Having survived the ghastly terrors of adolescence in the 1980s in daemon-haunted, suburban New Bosford, poor Billy Wuthergloom, played by Eric Woolfe, gathers together a tattered collection of ghoulish puppets and relives his horrific journey into adulthood. Under the glaring red eyes of Kathleen Welch’s Creepy Musician, he retells of his troubled stumblings into puberty, his fumblings with a succubus who’d rather rip off his head, and his relationship with his doomed best friend, Hirskill Fischmascher, an uncanny child-mystic who could see things that other people couldn’t. Join us as we dust off the cobwebs for the play that received Dora Award nominations for Outstanding Play, Outstanding Performer, and Outstanding Score, running from January 29th to February 9th, 2025.

“Mesmerizing MacBeth. Five Stars. Eric Woolfe’s mesmerizing adaptations takes his unique artistry to a whole new, bloody good level.” - Glenn Sumi

As the mournful spring rains reveal the rot and decay from beneath the melting snow, we bring you the return of Eldritch Theatre’s dementedly inspired, one-man MacBeth: A Tale Told by an Idiot!, running from May 7-18, 2025. Shakespeare’s blood-soaked king, with weird witches, viscera-sopped murders, nightmares of madness, and terrifying occult prophecies crash head on with our ghoulishly giddy bag of timorous trickery! Directed by Dylan Trowbridge, set and costumes designed by Melanie McNeill (Dora Award nominations for Set Design and Costume Design), and performed solo by Eric Woolfe, (Dora Award nomination for Outstanding Actor), this fiendish team uses a diverse range of multi-sized puppets, masks, and parlour magic, cosmic horror, and lowbrow pop to create a Mad Mackers production like no other!

Eldritch Theatre has two additional offerings for its fearsome audience, co-productions with artists Phil Rickaby and Carolyn Fe. As part of Eldritch Theatre’s fiendish management and demonic possession of The Red Sandcastle Theatre, Eldritch Theatre is pleased to put some of Toronto’s best ghouls on its stage as part of the 2024/25 season:

As the sickly sweet season of Christmas descends, Eldritch Theatre joins forces with Phil Rickaby to share It Sees You When You’re Sleeping from December 19th to 22nd, 2024 for five performances. A recently widowed father brings home an Elf on the Shelf at his daughter’s request, a grave mistake. This seemingly innocent elf is nothing but a malevolent force that will change their lives forever. Written and performed by Phil Rickaby and directed by joey o'dael, this solo holiday horror play is not a play for children, though it appeals to the scary-story loving child in all of us.

The Great Intermission (aka pandemic lockdown) of the recent past affected us in ways we could not have fathomed. For Carolyn Fe, her albums and voice, noticed worldwide, were silenced and buried deep in the worm-choked earth... until now. Accompanied by Juro Kim Feliz, Carolyn Fe’s haunting voice will rise from the earthly confines of her singer’s grave from March 28th to March 30th, 2025 in Grave Songs. See and hear familiar songs and her original material offered in a dark macabre fashion that sounds clear the stains on her moribund heart.

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