The Origin of Gaping Head Wound Playhouse

     What is "Gaping Head Wound Playhouse?" The brainchild (heh-heh) of @QuandaryMan on Twitter, Gaping Head Wound Playhouse or #GHWP came about one night when I stumbled upon a longstanding community of movie riffers after a several-year absence from Twitter. I had a few life upheavals in the past couple of years, and the same goes for a few of the people with whom I typically associated through chat rooms (for the young people, chat rooms were a Twitter prototype where people went to have online conversations, but they were limited to separate domains rather than the huge party line atmosphere Twitter provides). Shortly before I discovered the #TCMParty and #LiveTweetAlert groups such as #TrashTue, #DriveInMob, and #BMovieManiacs, I tried to exercise my muscles simply live tweeting random material all by myself. I didn't really expect to get anything off the ground. I just needed an outlet that wasn't being provided anywhere else. I didn't care if nothing I tweeted made sense outside the context of whatever movie I was watching alone, but therein lies the rub: it's nowhere near as much fun watching movies and television alone when there are others out there to share the enjoyment. For nearly 15 years, in an old MST3K fan chat room, I have been part of a small but dedicated fan riffing group that began as a Saturday night get-together to watch MST3K episodes. That Saturday night get-together shifted into riffing other movies and television and even to the formation of a meager commercial fan riff group called Cinemasochism (coined by me). I discovered that Saturday movie nights were a form of training. It exercised my wit and personality to a point where it became difficult to watch a movie alone and in silence. There were too many observations to be made and too many opportunities to make the experience even more fun than the filmmakers intended. It became almost impossible for me to watch anything without performing a good-natured roasting of the production just like the MST3K and RiffTrax crew do. I have no ego here. I'm told I'm funny, so I just take others' word for it and keep doing it. I'm just an amateur observational film riffer, and I'm no stand-up comedian. I haven't been on a stage since I played a snowman in my 2nd grade choir Christmas pageant.

     All of those life upheavals and the fact that an online community of 30+ people had dwindled to maybe 10 with only 3 or 4 ever getting in on movie nights led to the chat room being largely quiet most of the time. I'll never leave the chat room, but it's too quiet for me. We still get together to riff maybe a movie a week, but, and I'm being honest here, chatting online is pretty much the only social life I have had for almost 20 years. I only go out to movies and to eat on rare occasions, and I don't date (not for lack of wanting). It's not that I like to hear myself talk; it's that I need to be able to talk somewhere. If I don't, then I start to sink into a hole out of which it can be difficult to climb. Being alone inside my own head is not a lot of fun, and it has become significantly less fun since the death of my mother and confidant a little over a year ago. In fact, this blog used to be a personal one, and I used to share some intimate details of my past and my many attempts to process where my life was going before deciding to overhaul the blog into something a little more practical.

     On May 7, 2015, I participated in my first group movie live tweet of the Tennessee Williams-adapted film "BOOM!" It felt good if a little exhausting due to the difference between keeping up with a much larger group of people's comments (and photo uploads) on a movie instead of a small handful of people in a chat room only doing running commentary with no fancy apps involved. Multi-tab movie viewing was a sharp learning curve, but I felt destined to get with the times considering how much I love watching and riffing movies with others. It's the only real extroverted activity in which this potentially-terminal introvert engages. The following night, I went back off Twitter to have a movie night in my chat room, but I was left wanting more when it was over and went right back to Twitter to begin what would end up a one-sided conversation doomed to amount to nothing good. I ended up tweeting about my new cricket farm, the uncut Russian version of Humanoid Woman and other assorted nonsense, all the while stating over and over again a self-fulfilling prophecy that nothing good happens after 2AM. I was sleepy and punchy, but I needed to get the last of it out of my system. After a few @midnight hashtag war tweets, I got up to go to my kitchen and stopped briefly to play hide and seek with my dog behind a table. At one point, I bent over and WHAM! I hit my head on the sharp metal corner of a breaker box hard enough to make my face feel crooked for an hour. I soaked up an entire paper towel before the bleeding finally stopped, and I looked at the clock on my wall and laughed. It was 2:02AM. Nothing good happens after 2AM. Nailed it. Shortly before ending my tweets for the night, I tweeted, "Always be aware of your surroundings, a public service announcement from Gaping Head Wound Playhouse." It was a little on-the-spot tweet of silly humor and never intended to go anywhere as images of Saturday morning cartoon PSAs floated through my concussed mind, but it stuck with me as I had to go through Mother's Day and beyond with a noticeable lump and cut on my forehead that looked like I was about to turn into a lopsided unicorn.

     Cut to May 12, 2015, and my first sit-in with #TrashTue and a showing of the movie Alien. As I mentioned, I sat alone watching a few random movies on Twitter but never really considered my own hashtag. At 10PM EST on May 12, 2015, the first Gaping Head Wound Playhouse feature went forward as a fill-in for the typical second feature of #TrashTue with Screamers, a Roger Corman treatment of Island of the Fishmen, and #GHWP took off as an easy hashtag to leave room for a joke within the 140-character limit. For me, it was just an attempt not to have to watch a movie alone, and I was glad I built up the nerve to live tweet it with those good and funny people instead of just watching it myself or waiting for a potential future movie night in my chat room that may never come. It wasn't planned in advance, but it was something I feel I should have been doing on Twitter years ago. There is, however, a large group of funny people on Twitter that have been doing this for a long time, and the last thing I wanted to do was to pull people away from their dedicated efforts, especially when I found some kindred spirits watching the types of movies I love most. I also had watched too many movies alone to keep them to myself and follow a schedule, so I just did the next best thing: I shoehorned myself into starting an after party to pick some movies I wanted to see or had seen and couldn't keep to myself. "Who is this nobody with no followers trying to start up his own lame movie watching hashtag right under our noses?" some of you may say. Well, that's me. I'm just one lonesome loser doing something I love: spreading some of my good childhood movie and TV memories while trying as hard as I can to avoid watching them alone.


     After Screamers, #GHWP kept going with Cruel Jaws, Black Moon Rising, and an old 1980s Commander USA's Groovie Movies broadcast of Mako: Jaws of Death. The 80s commercials in that last one were the real hit of the night, and they featured trailers for two movies I still plan to showcase on #GHWP in the near future. The road the Playhouse travels, however, took a sharp detour when #DriveInMob added episodes of Space Giants to their live tweet viewing on May 21, 2015. This put me in a rare mood. Tokusatsu was the primary force that pulled me into MST3K through Godzilla and Gamera movies, and it has been several years since I really sat down and watched any sort of tokusatsu material. My last tokusatu viewings were Ultraman Zero: The Revenge of Belial, the final episode of Daimajin Kanon and the finale movies of Kaizoku Sentai GoKaiger and Kamen Rider Fourze. Circumstances in my life left me feeling short of time and attention span for subtitled Japanese superheroes/monsters for the past few years, but one of my first childhood loves was an obscure Ultraman-style 1970s superhero, from the makers of Space Giants, known as Spectreman. I was delighted to see Spectreman episodes in abundant supply on YouTube, so I just had to go forward with a live tweet and revive it.  

     Spectreman began its run in the United States in 1978, a production whose English dub was written, directed, produced, and largely voiced by Roger Corman staple character actor Mel Welles (perhaps best known as Mushnik in the original Little Shop of Horrors as well as Digger Smolkin in The Undead). At the age of 4 in 1982, I'd had my first limited introduction to Roger Corman and giant monsters through the comedic clip showcase feature It Came from Hollywood, but aside from a couple of Godzilla movies I'd seen at that age, my first in-depth exposure to tokusatsu came from Spectreman, which, to my good fortune, was still on the air on a local network until 1983. I still remember the heartache of coming home from Kindergarten one day to find that Spectreman was off the air for good, and it would be many years before I ever saw it again through old VHS tapes and bootlegs I bought off eBay. Now I had the opportunity to feed my riffing habit and to soothe my 5-year-old inner child at the same time, and eventually #GHWP's The Midnight Spectreman live tweet was born, cheesy graphic logo and everything.

     So there you have it: the origin of Gaping Head Wound Playhouse. As of this writing, #GHWP is 10 episodes into this 63-episode series, and I intend to live tweet them all as well as showcasing some fun movies in the wee hours of the night, schedule permitting. I hope to be able to go back and make some blog chronicles of past shows, and we'll see how this little venture goes as time progresses.