I opened a horror cafe to keep Blackpool weird

Blackpool Gazette

Inside Blackpool's horror cafe...  Owner, Kurt Walsh opened the horror-themed cafe which is decorated with a lot of scary waxworks from his old scare attraction on the prom.   Kurt, who has starred in horror films alongside Eileen Daly, and has composed soundtracks for Troma Entertainment, said he wanted to keep Blackpool weird and be a safe haven for alternative people.

Transcript

00:00Scream and Shake is basically a cafe slash bar.

00:15We have a lot of kind of horror themed decor, we have props from movies, we have wax works

00:18of characters.

00:20So initially I was working as an actor at Passage del Terror, which was a dream job

00:25chasing people around with chainsaws, lots of good times.

00:29And then one day I noticed that the old little horror crypt attraction had closed down.

00:33We kind of did it up, refurbished it, put lots of wax works in that myself and my friends

00:39had built.

00:40And that attraction did well for three years, but people mostly used to come and travel

00:44to it and they would buy cups of tea and coffee from around the corner and come and stand

00:49and talk to me about horror movies for like three hours.

00:52So one day I had a bit of like the tiny bit of business part of my brain, which is very

00:55tiny, sparked off and was like, if I was selling the cups of tea, I'd be making more

01:00money than selling admission tickets.

01:02We took all the props, we took the kind of social element of the cafe.

01:07Yeah, so we've got allegedly a strand of Charles Manson's hair, we've got an actual Life magazine

01:12that he's on the front cover of from 1969.

01:15We have a bit of Ed Gein's fence that was a birthday present one year from a friend.

01:20People know that I like weird stuff.

01:21People might say it's pretty morbid and it's pretty grim and like, oh, you should be ashamed

01:25of yourselves for making money off murder and stuff.

01:28Yeah, but in general, people do see that it's not, they're glamorizing anything.

01:32These things are presented alongside like, you know, Frankenstein and Dracula.

01:36So it's not like we're saying, here's a bunch of great guys and far from it, you know, he's

01:40a monsters, you know, he's a terrible people.

01:43We've got very irregular regulars.

01:46It's exactly why I wanted, I always wanted to be some like a safe haven for the weirdos.

01:50So at the same time, we have regulars that are people in the sixties and seventies who

01:53just like to come down, have a cup of tea.

01:55And maybe they were fans of like old films back in the day and stuff, or they just enjoy

02:00the atmosphere.

02:01So I think even though we look a bit scary, we're all quite polite people.

02:05I think I've always been a big horror fan since as long as I can remember, Blackpool

02:10was somewhere that I came on holiday to with my parents because they knew there was a lot

02:16of strange things here that would keep me entertained.

02:20The Two Swords exhibition used to be at Louis Two Swords and they used to have the big chamber

02:24of horrors underneath kind of thing.

02:26So when years later I moved to Blackpool and like that place had gone, I think like a lot

02:31of the ghost trains had closed down and stuff, I just wanted to kind of do something to kind

02:35of keep Blackpool weird kind of thing.

02:39It's such a vast genre and encompasses like obviously literature, film, artwork, stuff

02:47like that.

02:48But for me there's always just been more and more to find out and that's always been the

02:52attraction for me I think is kind of like digging deep.

02:56And a lot of times like the people involved in the creation of these things are just as

03:00interesting as the creations themselves.

03:02Like you've got Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein when she was 19.

03:06Like when we had the attraction we used to get some dads, certain kind of dads, going

03:12oh don't be a girl, get in there, and I'm like oh it was a 19 year old girl who created

03:18one of the most iconic horror monsters ever.

03:20I think the fascination has never stopped because the more you kind of get into it the

03:24more you find out.

03:26Then later in life I ended up getting into acting myself and stuff like that.

03:31I've done composing for films, done bits of special effects and stuff.

03:37I just generally love like the process of making films really.

Category

Transcript

Recommended