Redirected Rage

Amber Osburne didn’t go to the gathering for her fiancé after his funeral. Instead, she went to a rage room.

Osburne became a fan of rage rooms after her fiancé committed suicide. Her therapist endorsed the idea of her taking out all her anger on a dresser with a softball bat.

“I felt myself snap and just went to town,” says Osburne, 46, a DJ who goes by Amber the Pirate Princess on 93.5 Pirate Radio in Fort Collins. “It helped a lot.”

Rage rooms allow people to, well, rage by slinging paint, throwing things at a wall or smashing stuff. The idea is more popular than you might think; Limp Bizkit had a hit off the idea with “Break Stuff” way back in 1999. Sometimes rage rooms are fun, sometimes they’re crazy and sometimes they’re a way for people to let out some anger. A lot of the time, it’s about anger.

Since the rage room helped Osburne process her feelings, she thought her friends could benefit from it as well. A couple months ago, she went to Splatter Spot in Greeley with a bunch of girlfriends. The small room sounds like the title of a cheap slasher movie, but it encourages patrons to make a mess of the walls, each other or both with paint that looks fluorescent under the single black light. Osburne and her friends, all of them 35 or older, even wore white T-shirts so they could make art projects while flicking away their frustrations.

Her group had all kinds of motivations. She was there to have fun, but she could tell that her friends, some of whom were “going through a lot,” needed to let loose, she says.

“I just wanted them to have moments where they weren’t thinking about anything else,” she says.

Time to smash

Fort Collins’ Shatter Rage Room is contained in a small cinderblock shelter that could very well be a set piece for a post-apocalyptic show. The owner, Caitlin Nelson, greets you with a sincere apology, even if it seems counterintuitive to what she’s selling.

“Sorry about the mess,” she says.

It’s not nearly as messy as you might think, given that her business model is to let people break things with baseball bats, golf clubs and sledgehammers or sling paint around.

Nelson started the business near the end of 2020, which turned out to be a good time to give people a safe way to blow off steam.

“I have so many people after a session walk out and say, ‘Ah, that’s better,’” she says.

The pressure to keep her inventory fresh and full remains high, given that she hopes it’s always being depleted.

“We go through thousands of items a week,” she says.

It’s easy for Nelson to offer a variety of things her customers like to break, including dishes, wine glasses and coffee mugs, because most people have too many of those and gladly donate them. She also gets requests, like TVs, and can sometimes fulfill them, as long as they’re not hazardous to smash (only newer models of TVs are safe, for instance). Printers are also a popular item because of the scene in “Office Space” where the workers take a baseball bat to one. Nelson has a picture of actor Gary Cole as the annoying boss from the 1999 movie right above her desk.

She gets a lot of her merchandise, if you want to call it that, from liquidators and her partnership with Habitat for Humanity Restores that let her buy stuff that doesn’t sell.

“It gives them a little bit of money, and it keeps my business going,” she says.

Nelson sells packages based on how much stuff people want to break and how much time they want to spend doing it. There are waivers to sign and a few rules: Customers can’t wear Crocs, for instance, or flip flops, and they should wear eye protection, along with long-sleeve shirts and pants. She also sells a safety suit for $20. She doesn’t allow customers who are drunk or high, and she has cameras in the smash room in case customers get too rowdy (surprisingly, it’s rarely a problem).

Nelson has a Bluetooth speaker so people can either play their own rage mixes or listen to one she’s made on Spotify. There’s a sign that says Limp Bizkit isn’t allowed, but Nelson doesn’t follow it: A younger employee made the sign after hearing “Break Stuff” for the 100th time that day. She’s hosted first dates, work parties, divorce parties, bachelor parties and birthdays at the rage room. A band even filmed a music video there once.

Nelson also sells a Good Grief package to people who are grieving, which includes small items painted black that explode into color when you smash them—plus one item you can really destroy. She gives those customers more privacy.

“A surprising amount of people are going through stuff,” she says.

 

Sharpening your skills

Before we get to the ones who enjoy throwing axes at their exes, we should probably make something clear: Axe throwing is indeed a sport.

It’s not as athletic as, say, basketball, but it is a skill game, much like darts, pool or bowling. People take it seriously enough that there’s a governing body for it: the World Axe Throwing League. Austin Jenkins, who was inspired by his parents’ rage room and axe-throwing business in Amarillo, Texas, hosts a league at the Greeley Hatchet House on Monday and Tuesday nights. He offers gold-painted axes as trophies for the best throwers.

“They take it very seriously on Monday nights,” says Jenkins, who opened the business in downtown Greeley five years ago. “Tuesday is more of a beer league.”

Axe throwing isn’t just a sport; it’s also a way for people to work out some frustrations. That’s why Jenkins has ninja stars and saw blades in addition to axes.

“We’ve got plenty of pointy things to throw at the wall,” he says. “We’ve heard multiple times that it’s cheaper than therapy.”

The best example of that is the Axe Your Ex special he runs on Valentine’s Day, when customers can print out a picture of their ex and throw an axe at it. Jenkins got some pushback from a church about that once, saying that he was promoting violence, but that confused him.

“I just let people drink and throw things at a wall,” Jenkins says, “and this is the best place to do that.”

He pauses.

“I mean, they’re not throwing axes at the real person,” he says.

 

Making a mess

At Splatter Spot, the goal isn’t to smash or split things. You don’t even need to be angry. You can be artistic.

“You’re not destroying something,” says Kait Marshall, who runs the place. “You’re creating something.”

This is true, if you count a mess as a creation. Splatter Spot is as messy as its name, and the room where it happens is already covered in a thick layer of paint despite the fact that it just opened in June.

“We want to be messy,” Marshall says. “It’s a mess Mom and Dad have never cleaned up.”

Customers who see themselves as the next Jackson Pollock can buy canvases from the business. Marshall also sells the white T-shirts Osburne wore when she visited.

Her mother, Jessica, is a co-owner of Makers Mercantile & Studio in downtown Greeley, which houses Splatter Spot in its basement. She lets her daughter run it with Jade Ludwig, a fellow senior at Greeley West High School, and Taber Herbst, a Valley High School sophomore.

They expect some aggression. They even encourage customers to throw paint at each other, as long as they don’t aim for their faces. They hope to one day offer water guns or balloons full of paint.

“Some people just throw all the paint at once,” Marshall says.

Still, the place is less apocalyptic than a rage room. Makers Mercantile sells artwork from more than 100 local artisans and provides places for artists to gather and create, either by themselves or by instruction. The coffee mugs aren’t designed for smashing, at least not right away.

Customers are required to wear goggles and booties so they don’t track paint through the store. There are places to clean up afterward, but you can also put on a poncho provided by the store if you’d like.

The trio tries to keep things PG, so customers shouldn’t write anything on their wall that you would write on, say, a bathroom wall. They allow walk-ins on Friday nights but don’t want drunk people coming in. They’ve welcomed all kinds of customers.

“Our age demographic is literally anyone,” Ludwig says, “from 2 years old to a grandmother.”

Everyone, it seems, needs to rage occasionally.