‘Cool Is Dead’: I Went to the Viral Shrek Rave

Have you ever seen Humpty Dumpty coming up on a pill? I have. That’s because I spent my weekend at the UK’s first ever Shrek Rave. You heard me: an all-day event inspired by the 2001 DreamWorks animated movie and its associated sequels and spin-offs.

By now, the meme-ification of Shrek is a well-documented phenomenon. And this is its logical endpoint: Shrek Rave is what happens when internet culture spills out into the real world. Personally, I don’t find jokes about Shrek particularly fresh. And does a ten-year-old bit really warrant the takeover of Fire & Lightbox, a massive three-room club underneath the Vauxhall arches?

I want to understand what this is all about and whether the future of UK nightlife is destined to be this weird and cringe – so I put on some green facepaint and headed to the UK’s first-ever Shrek Rave.

It’s 4PM on a Saturday and I’m linking up with VICE photographer Yushy Pachnanda outside Vauxhall station. This is a weird time for an event to start. The Friday night heads are tucked up in bed, and the Saturday night crew won’t pick up a can for another couple of hours, at least.

This hasn’t deterred Shrek ravers from arriving bang on time. The doors have only just opened and there’s already a queue of brogres going back a mile. The Shrek fandom is like an onion – it has layers. A good chunk of the people here are what I’ll call casual fans. Yeah, they remember the first two films and they’ve seen a couple of memes online. In other words, they’re here for a laugh – Shrek Rave – it’s a bit of harmless fun, right? That’s layer one.

The second layer of the fandom is the Shrek ultras. These lot sat through all four Shrek movies, both TV specials (Shrek the Halls and Scared Shrekless), and there’s a high chance that they caught one or more of the 441 Broadway performances of Shrek: The Musical. These lot aren’t wearing cheap plastic ogre ears – they’ve built animatronic donkey costumes or painted every inch of their body green.

Then there’s the internet Shrek heads: memelords, shitposters and the former admins of ShrekChan, the 4chan-inspired imageboard dedicated to the green ogre. Their ironic t-shirts (“Check Yourself Before You Shrek Yourself”) are an instant giveaway.

The fourth layer of the Shrek fandom – the layer I didn’t know existed until today – is the gays. Looking around, this line is radiating queer energy. There’s drag versions of even the most irrelevant characters from the Shrek universe (Merry Man #4 anyone?) and I can tell half this line knows all the words to Ricky Martin. Who knew Lord Farquaad was a queen?

“Shrek appeals to the queer community because he’s an outsider,” says Theo Collie, a partygoer dressed as sexy Puss in Boots. “Everyone looks at Shrek and thinks he’s this bogeyman, when he’s actually emotional and sweet. Queer people can relate to him because they’re used to being judged.”

Maybe there’s more to Shrek Rave than meets the eye? For the first time today, I’m genuinely excited to get inside. Lucky for us, we’re ushered through the media entrance and get to skip the line (guestlist at the Shrek Rave – suck it!!).

At first glance, the event doesn’t look all that different from your regional branch of Oceana on a Saturday night. There are sticky floors, fluorescent lights, and the DJ is mixing Calvin Harris with the Ice Spice and PinkPantheress tune that’s soundtracked every TikTok for the last month.

But then I notice the 10 foot inflatable ogres emerging from behind the DJ booth and the giant screens projecting psychedelic Shrek visuals in the style of that terrifying “Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life” copypasta video. Then there’s the cocktail menu: The star of the show is the ominously named ‘Swamp Juice’. It’s made of two parts vodka, one part pineapple and one part a mysterious alcopop called Blue Citrus, with a gummy worm dropped in for good measure. It tastes like a Wetherspoons pitcher of every off-brand liquor from Nisa Local. One glass contains the sugar intake of a small country. My teeth hurt.

Flying from the cocktails, we head into room two. Breaking down the event etymologically, if room one is the Shrek bit, room two is the rave bit. It’s dark and smoky from dry ice, and a bloke dressed as the Gingerbread Man is trying to buss gun fingers. It’s 5PM. The dance floor is packed. How did this become the hottest ticket in town!?

It all started in March 2022, when Ka5sh, an LA-based content creator, threw a Shrek-themed party to raise money for his sister, who was the victim of a robbery and shooting in North Carolina. It ended up raising $10,000 and, predictably, videos from the event went viral on TikTok. The result? A country-wide tour that brought the party to 33 cities across America. It was only a matter of time before it washed up on British shores.

Without wanting to get bogged down in the behind-the-scenes politics of a novelty rave, there are now at least two rival promoters throwing Shrek-themed parties. Ka5Sh’s party has a single UK date at the Clapham Grand on March 3rd, while the one we’re at now – the deceptively named “Shrek Rave Official” – is playing 30 dates across the UK, before heading to Europe in early May.

“Originally, we were going to do this as a brunch,” says Peter Preston, one of this event’s promoters, “but Shrek has such a good soundtrack. So we posted about the idea of a party here and got two million views within a couple of weeks. We had to do it.”

Of course, neither this party or its original American incarnate own the trademark to the billion dollar franchise. But until someone takes a dodgy pill at one of these events, it’s the best free publicity that DreamWorks could ever ask for – they’d be mugs to shut it down.

Speaking of pills, more people are pinging in the rave room than I’d first expected. I’m getting tired of hearing jungle remixes of Eminem’s “My Name Is”, so I head back into the main room just in time for live performances from the West End cast of Shrek: The Musical. And you know what? The promoter is right: Shrek does have a banging soundtrack.

@vice

except for this @Shrek Rave UK #shrekrave #shrekraveuk #nightlife #clubbing

♬ original sound – VICE

The performers whip through the best loved tracks  – “Livin’ La Vida Loca”, “Holding Out For a Hero”, and that criminally underplayed ditty “All Star” by Smash Mouth. It’s silly, infectious fun. And to reiterate my previous point: camp as hell. As confetti falls from the sky and two of the three Little Pigs make out, I feel weirdly euphoric. Who knew that the enjoyment of Shrek – ironic or otherwise – could produce such sincere feelings of joy, nostalgia and belonging?

I really wanted to hate Shrek rave. I thought this was going to be the last breath of a lame internet joke. Instead, the film’s fandom of nerds, normies and gays have breathed strange new life into this 20 year old franchise. Maybe the Instagram bio for the original Shrek Rave puts it better than I ever could: “COOL IS DEAD WHO CARES COME HAVE FUN”. And you know what? I did.

Head to @ukshrekrave or their website for tickets to the next event.