Vampyres frequently attend Fetish Scene and Body Scene Clubs, which involve public sadomasochistic and violent sexual activities.
The Fetish Scene refers to clubs where fetish, sadomasochism and bondage & discipline are promoted and The Body Art Scene refers to body piercing, tattooing, modern primitives, and so on. Performance artists who use blood attend and perform at all of these venues.
The original Hellfire Club was founded by Francis Sashwood in 1751 when he converted an Abbey into a cult headquarters by decorating in Gothic style and pagan statuary. It was rumored that these clubs were linked to Satanism and Witchcraft. Keeping with tradition, the contemporary Australian Hell Fire Club provides its members with an assortment of specially designed rooms, furniture, and devices in which they can imaginatively experience pain/pleasure.
One of the most infamous clubs in London today is appropriately named Torture Garden.
Founded in 1990, it is currently Europe’s largest Fetish/Body Art club. Its average attendance is 600-800 people with special events attracting as many as 2000 and it claims to be a major pioneer in the fetish/body art phenomenon. It is a combination of a fetish, S/M, body art, Modern Primitives, straight, gay, performance art, body ritual, fashion, techno/industrial/atmospheric music, multimedia, and cyberspace club. The concept of Torture Garden may initially be difficult to accept, as it encompasses the most extreme manifestations of body piercing, mutilation, and ritual uses of blood in Western culture.
Besides dressing in the latest leather sadomasochism designs, original accessories include catheter bags filled with blood and urine, medical bags filled with blood, and air hoses when necessary. There is every imaginable form of mask, chain, whip, and sometimes even chainsaws and blowtorches are part of the festivities. The Torture Garden also contains a manifesto that clearly demonstrates the anomalous nature of fetish clubs. Their manifesto boasts:
Torture Garden remains the most radical and alternative club, always on the cutting edge of the latest underground subculture . . . Torture Garden is a world where the bizarre, strange and dreamlike become normal . . . Torture Garden is the apotheosis of all antinomies . . . The dissolution of all oppositions . . . As you mutate with Torture Garden, you reach new peaks of pleasure and eroticism and freed from the shackles of social convention . . . Torture Garden breaks taboos . . . Torture Garden has established an international reputation for encouraging artistic experimentation and transgression . . .
