Brooklyn has never been short on inventive live performance, but comedian Lane Moore’s might be one of its most playfully chaotic yet. On April 10 at the Twisted Spine bookstore in Williamsburg, Moore will host the first in-person performance of “Heart-Throb Slasher: An Improvised 80s Horror Movie.”
The show’s premise is simple: using a vintage 1980s teen board game, Moore constructs a fully original horror movie in real time, guided by the audience. Each performance is a “choose-your-own-adventure” story where attendees help decide who survives and who meets a grisly (and comedic) end.
Moore, known for her long-running show “Tinder Live” and her work as an author, actor and musician, told Brooklyn Paper about her signature audience-involved work.
“I’ve been doing ‘Tinder Live’ in Brooklyn for over 10 years now, where we go through my dating apps and swiping live,” Moore said. “We’re only matching with like the craziest profiles, and just out-crazing the craziest profiles.”
That signature mix of improv and audience interaction carries directly into “Heart-Throb Slasher,” though this is the first time the show will be performed live.
“[The idea] came out of the pandemic,” Moore said. With a planned tour and album release suddenly halted, she pivoted to livestreaming. “I wanted to start doing a livestreaming show. Everybody’s depressed, everybody’s alone. I want to do something really cool to cheer people and myself up.”
Armed with a vintage dating board game called Heartthrob, Moore began experimenting with the idea that would eventually become “Heart-Throb Slasher.”
“It was one of the only things I had in my apartment to keep me sane during that time,” she said, adding that what started as a quirky livestream quickly evolved. “It turned into this improvised horror movie and people really, really loved it.”
At the center of the show are exaggerated, archetypal “teen boys” pulled from the board game, complete with absurd traits and increasingly unhinged revelations.
“It’s these cheesy, eighties boys with these cheesy, beautiful cliches,” Moore explained. As the audience learns new facts about each character, some bizarre and some outright disturbing, they help shape the narrative.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what the facts are gonna be,” Moore said. “I’ll never improvise the same movie twice.”
As her tour dates were rescheduled, she said that audiences always brought up “Heart-Throb Slasher.”
“ Everybody mentioned it when I would go to tour cities, they would say ‘I love it so much, do it more.’ I realized that this has become a really big cult hit and means so much to people.”
The game’s unpredictability is Moore’s favorite part. She added that “every single show is like its own contained thing — nobody else will ever see this horror movie again.”
The secondary sense of shared experience is a large part of why Brooklyn feels like the perfect home for the “Heart-Throb Slasher’s” live debut.
“What I love about Brooklyn is that we have always been the birthplace of weird, camp-y and super interesting art,” Moore said. “I think so many of us are really craving experiences that can’t be replicated.”
For audiences, the appeal is multifaceted. There’s the nostalgia of ‘80s aesthetics, the release of poking fun at terrible dating archetypes and simply watching a story unfold in real time.
“It is so cathartic to be able to rip on these guys, even if they’re fictional. Because they’re emblematic of these dating struggles that we all face. And then to be able to be like, ‘oh my God, every fact about this man is the worst.’ We get to kill him off in a crazy, really funny way,” Moore said.
“It’s also so deeply thrilling and nourishing to get to be around a bunch of people who love weird, interesting art at a time where it’s extremely necessary,” she added. “You get to be around your people and laugh more than you’ve laughed probably in months.”
Lane Moore’s “Heart-Throb Slasher” will open on April 10 at 8 p.m. at the Twisted Spine, 306 Grand St. in Williamsburg. Tickets cost $20 and are available here.
