Week 13 - Immersive Vampire Dinner
This week I (co)created an immersive vampire dinner / farewell party.
Tools (we) used
Our house - which looks like vampires could live in it
Partiful - to create an event page, invite people, and track RSVPs
I made the ‘Find your blood type’ and ‘The Book of Blood’ - printed onto A4 paper and handed out to guests
Also ‘5 vampire commandments’, the ‘Vampire quiz’, the ‘Vampire singalong’, and ‘Vampire juice’
Name tags - to display new vampire names
Fake blood and white makeup and dark clothes - to get in character
An incredible feast of blood red and black food cooked by P - to feast upon
All the tables and chairs we could find - to feast from
All the cushions and fluff we could find - to watch movies from
What We Do In The Shadows - to watch after dinner on a projector
Context
Last December, my partner P requested we host a murder mystery dinner for her birthday. We invited 20 people and gave them characters a week in advance, and asked them to prepare a costume and learn their backstory. The event had 4 acts, each one was in a different room, and for each act, each character had a series of questions and answers for each of the other characters. One of our housemates cooked a 3 course meal for the event (Act 3), and then we finally took turns guessing the murderer before the big reveal (who turned out, by complete coincidence I swear(!), to be me). It was a huge success as gauged by my informal metric of ‘how long can you keep people engaged without looking at their phones’ —> 4 hours!
Process
We wanted to try something similar for our farewell party. We both love the movie What We Do In The Shadows - a silly movie about vampires in a sharehouse in Wellington - so we used this as inspiration for the evening.
The main elements we wanted to include were:
A delicious dinner
Connection games
Costumes, characters, and role play
A movie screening
Plenty of wiggle room to make things up as we went
P made a food mood board for the dinner:
This sent me down a rabbithole after I discovered the term ‘knolling’ works wonders on Midjourney prompts, so I made a few vampire ones for more inspiration:
Our concept was to set up an invitation that was sufficiently vague such that the guests didn’t know the theme was vampire. Once they arrived and we played up the fact that we wanted to eat them for a bit, we’d instead do a ‘conversion ceremony’ and they’d all get to be vampires too.
Before that part, I came up with a game that mashed up connection games, pseudo-horoscopes, and a puzzle. Rather than explain it, I’ll just post the instructions I handed out to everyone:
After 45 minutes, everyone had arrived (around 25-30 guests) and were busy talking to each other to find out their Blood Type and consult the Book of Blood. One book between 30 wasn’t enough, so I printed a second one, but it was still a bottleneck. I had to make the decision to move the party to the next scene - the ‘conversion’.
I announced that we had been planning on eating the guests, but had a last minute change of heart and would instead let them turn into vampires. This happened in 3 parts: finding out your vampire name, changing into black clothes, and white face and blood makeup. The naming part (ingeniously created on the fly by Michelle) took time and a person to explain how it worked and write a “Hi! My name is” tag…
…which created another bottleneck and people were backed up waiting to get their name. I printed out two more naming sheets, and designated two additional vampire namers, and we finally had everyone converted.
Next was a blood (hibiscus tea) ritual, taking a sip after reciting each of the 5 vampire commandments, and a ‘vampire quiz’ where we all shouted ‘yeahhh!’ or ‘booo!’ to a series of images I had printed.
The quiz had everyone fired up and for ready for dinner. Luckily, the group noticed (smelled) that one of the group had managed to avoid converting and remained a human. We seized Anne and took her away, and after a few minutes of stalling we had a grand reveal:
Dinner was incredible, P singlehandedly cooked up a 3 course feast: a black rice and red pepper cashew bake, a dino kale and grape salad, and a chocolate mud cake with raspberries. We all were hungry enough that we forgot to take photos, but trust me when I say it looked and tasted supernaturally good.
It sounds like a lot, but after a few small speeches and dessert, we still had two more activities planned! As it was a schoolnight, we offered people an out at this point, but most stayed on, as somehow the jokes still hadn’t gotten old. We gathered to the fluff where we’d prepared enough cushions for everyone to lounge, and Gavin premiered a ‘vampire singalong’:
At long last, and much later than we had planned on, we screened What We Do In The Shadows, and revealed that much of the inspiration had come from the movie. I hadn’t seen it in a while, and it was a perfect end to a thoroughly silly evening. A huge thank you to P, Gavin, Madissen, Michelle, and everyone who played along!
Learnings
Doing anything in large groups takes much longer than expected. Especially at a party, people want to chat, laugh, and hang out!
Having ‘something to do’ - like a ‘quest’, a game, a challenge, a theme - is a fun and engaging way to run an event
Requiring people to complete quests introduces bottlenecks to the flow of the event. If there’s a person, object, or space that can’t be used by everyone simultaneously, things will be slow and people will be waiting. Waiting is fine as long as there’s something else to keep people entertained
Along the same lines, many people thrive if they get to take on a clear role at the party, eg ‘vampire name giver’, ‘make-up artist’, ‘crowd controller’ and that frees up some time for me as a host. I can do better by asking for supporting roles early!
Being the host, particularly if I’m ‘in character’, is exhilarating. I feel in flow. Side effect: it’s hard to break character and connect with people
We forgot to take good photos of the event and the food - next time I’ll ask someone to do that
Next steps
Do it again with a different theme and a different location
Consider involving a larger team for decor, setup, cooking, lighting, music, and experiences