Kurt Walsh tells Lucinda Herbert how he managed to fill his horror cafe full of gruesome and spooky props.
The former scare attraction owner and actor packed Scream And Shake Cafe with gory waxworks, film memorabilia, and has acquired some grizzly pieces of true-crime memorabilia which he also has on the walls.
Having just launched a brand new stall inside Abingdon Street Market, Kurt tells Unconventional Brits he's on a mission to 'keep Blackpool weird'.
Full episode coming soon to Shots! TV.
The former scare attraction owner and actor packed Scream And Shake Cafe with gory waxworks, film memorabilia, and has acquired some grizzly pieces of true-crime memorabilia which he also has on the walls.
Having just launched a brand new stall inside Abingdon Street Market, Kurt tells Unconventional Brits he's on a mission to 'keep Blackpool weird'.
Full episode coming soon to Shots! TV.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Scream and Shake is basically a cafe slash bar. We have a lot of kind of
00:05horror themed decor, we have props from movies, we have wax works of characters.
00:09So initially I was working as an actor at Passage del Terror, which was a dream
00:14job chasing people around with chainsaws and lots of good times. Then one day I
00:19noticed that the old little horror crypt attraction had closed down. We kind of
00:24did it up, refurbished it, put lots of wax works in that myself and my friends
00:29had built and that attraction did well for three years but people mostly used
00:33to come and travel to it and they would buy cups of tea and coffee from around
00:37the corner and come and stand and talk to me about horror movies for like three
00:41hours. So one day I had a bit of like the tiny bit of business part of my brain
00:45which is very tiny sparked off and was like if I was selling the cups of tea
00:48I'd be making more money than selling admission tickets. We took all the
00:53props, we took the kind of social element, the cafe. Yeah so we've got an
00:58allegedly a strand of Charles Manson's hair. We've got an actual life magazine
01:02that he's on the front cover of from 1969. We have a bit of Ed Gein's fence
01:07that was a birthday present one year from a friend. People know that I like weird
01:11stuff. People might say it's pretty morbid and it's pretty grim and like oh
01:15you should be ashamed of yourselves for making money off murder and stuff. Yeah
01:18but in general people do see that it's not they're glamorizing anything. These
01:22things are presented alongside like you know Frankenstein and Dracula so it's
01:26not like we're saying here's a bunch of great guys and fly from it you know
01:30he's a monsters you know he's a terrible people. We've got very irregular
01:35regulars. It's exactly what I wanted. I always wanted to be some like a safe
01:39haven for the weirdos. So at the same time we have regulars that are people in
01:42the 60s and 70s who just like to come down have a cup of tea and maybe they
01:47were fans of like old films back in the day and stuff or they just enjoy the
01:51atmosphere. So I think even though we look a bit scary we're all quite polite
01:54people I think. I've always been a big horror fan since as long as I can
01:59remember. Blackpool was somewhere that I came on holiday with to with my parents
02:04because I knew there was a lot of strange things here that would keep me
02:08entertained. The Two Sides exhibition used to be a Louis Two Sides and used to
02:13have the big chamber of horrors underneath kind of thing. So when years
02:17later I moved to Blackpool and like that place had gone I think like a lot of the
02:21ghost trains had closed down and stuff. I just wanted to kind of do something to
02:24kind of keep Blackpool weird.