Highlights from a Day at the 2025 Twin Cities Horror Festival

Twin Cities Horror Festival

The Twin Cities Horror Festival (TCHF) is on now through October 30, 2025, at the Crane Theater in Minneapolis. I wasn’t able to see all of this year’s shows, unfortunately, but I was able to fit in a five-show run on Saturday, October 18. I do think the ideal way to take in festivals like TCHF or Minnesota Fringe—if you can’t see everything but can afford the tickets—is to choose a chunk of shows and make at least some of them ones you know nothing about. You’ll probably see some brilliant things and some things that don’t quite work.

Cosmic Horror Meets Old-Hollywood Humor

The highlights were tremendous, if a little expected. Four Humors blew the doors off the Crane Theater main stage (once almost literally) with their 1920s supernatural insurance salesman comedy, Terms. Four Humors have been doing this kind of show for a long time; I first became a fan during their 2012 Fringe production of Candide. Nobody is better at packing immensely entertaining and—this might be more important—complete plays within the hourlong festival format. Terms is not only set in the ’20s but feels in many ways like a show from, if not that era, then the eras of theater and film that immediately followed. If you’ve seen His Girl Friday or any Preston Sturges comedies from the early ’40s, the dialogue here zips at a similar joke-a-second pace. There’s a little Glengarry Glen Ross in there, too. The production finds physical gags all over the sparse set, in tiny costume choices, and even in offstage lighting cues. Part Howard Hawks, part cosmic horror, Terms plays the audience like a fiddle, always one step ahead in a way you only get from experienced artists at the height of their craft. I cannot recommend it enough.

Courtesy of the Twin Cities Horror Festival

Thrilling Human Drama

Likewise, Strike Theater and the Improv Movement Project delivered a fantastic hour with The Walls. Strike and improv are generally associated with comedy, and that’s the context in which I’ve seen many of this show’s actors onstage. It was great to see them flex their dramatic chops in a crime thriller that eventually strays down more horror-centric avenues. The plot—your dad’s been kidnapped, they want $5,000—could feel predictable and contrived in less experienced hands, but Mike Fotis’s script knows exactly how much space to carve out for small human moments that make these familiar beats resonant and thrilling. Ultimately, horror depends on how much you care about the people under threat. Everyone in this cast shines, but Rita Boersma is particularly lights-out great as an elderly bank teller.

Courtesy of the Twin Cities Horror Festival

Stories in Small Doses

I enjoyed Love Drunk Life’s crow-centric anthology play Murder Murder Murder Murder with immense reservations. The Brandon Monokian–directed comedy is split into four mini plays, separated by interludes of static and radio broadcasts from the fictional station K-LEZ. I wasn’t sold on most of the efforts at drama, which is admittedly very hard to pull off in 10-minute chunks, but the production had a lot of energy and heart, and the very game cast found space within all the plays to shine. My favorite was the third, I Have Been So Affrighted, a Hamlet-inspired riff about a crow named Crowfelia (Hannah J. Rolfes) and a couple falling out of love with each other (Ashley Rose Wellman and Julia Weiss). The fourth play, Midnight Radio: The Rise and Bloody Fall of Local Legend Candy Lane, was a lot of fun too, allowing Julia Weiss the opportunity to chew scenery in the best way as narcissistic radio broadcaster Candy Lane.

Courtesy of the Twin Cities Horror Festival

Exploring Madness

Scrimshaw from Rogues Gallery Arts has an intriguing premise with tons of compelling craft choices, but this play also struggled within its limitations. It begins with a whaler, Lemrich (Duck Washington), imprisoned by missionaries after having seemingly gone mad. As the audience enters, Lemrich is dipping his fingers in a bowl of blood, which he uses to draw on the walls. You also cannot help but notice those walls are covered in chalk drawings that include hieroglyphics and a ton of whales. Once the play begins, Lemrich is joined by his captors (Philip D. Henry, Tyler Stamm, Becky Hauser, and Maureen L. Bourgeois), who apply various methods to convince him to reveal the source of his madness. The atmosphere here is phenomenal, as is the production’s use of the Crane’s smaller studio space—it feels like the audience is trapped in the cell with these characters. However, nearly all the drama consists of characters talking about more interesting things that happened elsewhere, offstage. The long expositional speeches rarely vary in tone or intensity, which is appropriate for the subject matter but likewise hampers dramatic development.

Courtesy of the Twin Cities Horror Festival

The Horror in Children’s Religious TV

Hot Chocolate Media’s Gospel Gus’s Godly Good Time Get-Together (with Phantom Chorus Theatre) is a slasher comedy about the former cast of a 1990s evangelical kids TV show. The premise here was intriguing. I especially like the way the play explores the idea that the people who make these shows don’t necessarily have the same beliefs or attitudes as the media they create—it’s just another job for them. That’s a fascinating idea to build a show around! The best moments focus on that conflict, where the characters’ own lives, behaviors, and beliefs clash with the content and purpose of the show they make together. They consider themselves open-minded or welcoming Christians, or just nonbelievers hanging out with friends and collecting a paycheck. Either way, there’s a cost to be paid. I wish the show zeroed in more on the characters’ experience and navigation of this conflict, rather than doubling down so hard on the costumes, effects, and slasher tropes. This had by far the most extravagant sets and effects of everything I saw, but even the Cronenbergian gross-out finale struggled to retrieve that momentum.

Courtesy of the Twin Cities Horror Festival

There are a lot of really good companies whose shows I just wasn’t able to fit in, but maybe you can.

The Twin Cities Horror Festival runs October 16–30, 2025. Visit TCHorrorFestival.com for show information and tickets, which are available individually or as a five-ticket pass (the full festival pass is sold out).