Blog Karber

Today, Amin and I launched the website for Killer Party.

What is Killer Party?

Killer Party is a horror-comedy musical for the Internet in 13 pieces. Amin and I have been working on it for two years now, and it’s finally at the point where we feel like we can share it with others and not be embarrassed.

It is about a group of college undergrads on the cusp of graduation, about to go out and face the world for the first time. But before they leave school forever, they want to do one last thing: throw a killer party.

But when the metaphorical killer party turns literally deadly, they are forced to confront the threat and fight against it. Or die trying.

But what is it really?

Killer Party combines several things that Amin and I really like:

– Horror-comedies
– Musicals
– Webserieses
– Whodunnits
– The college experience
– Parties

For now, I’d like to focus on Whodunnits, and why I love them.

I love Whodunnits because they are games. Because they challenge the mind. Because they require you to puzzle something out in your head. Because — to function — they require an audience response, and a particular kind of response: an analytic one.

A Whodunnit can be more interactive than a game. It can challenge your mind in ways that a game never can. It allows the audience to become a participant in the media. It makes them perform a kind of textual analysis, attempting to derive the meaning from a work.

But there’s a consequence of this:

Whodunnits, like puzzles, lose appeal when they are solved.

How do you make a Whodunnit with replay value?

Part of this is making it function on other levels: rather than just being about a mystery, rather than have the emotional core of the story be a question that the climax answers, the emotion of the film has to come from other concerns.

In Killer Party, it comes from the variety of interpersonal conflicts between and amongst the characters. Because, while the Killer can be revealed, there’s no real answer we can provide to the question of “What to do after you graduate?”

And the question of whether life is all just one big party — whether it is and whether it should be — is not something that can be solved by a resolution.

You can’t debate the reveal of a Whodunnit. Once the killer is revealed, you can’t say, “Oh, but I still think it’s so-and-so.” It’s no So-and-so.

But the answers to more important thematic questions can be endlessly debated, endlessly argued, endlessly puzzled over.

So it’s important — when you’re creating a Whodunnit — to remember that the real mysteries are more fundamental: What does it all mean? What should we do about it? How?

These are questions you can’t answer by pulling off a mask, and they’re the real replay value.

If you would like to request an invitation to our Killer Party (and therefore subscribe to our newsletter), please visit KillerPartyMusical.com. Anyone who subscribes before Halloween will get four demo songs in their email inbox. You’ll like them. I promise. And if you don’t, you can kill me.