Horror-themed cafe The Brewed serves scary good coffee and Halloween hi-jinx in Avondale

Lodged just above Logan Square, Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood offers itself as the hipster mecca’s quirky cousin, with a “Keep Avondale Weird” Portlandian ethos that yields urban legends of rogue pet chickens and “Simpsons” tribute bars.

For caffeinated fans of horror movies, too, Avondale has become an enticing destination, thanks to The Brewed, a coffee shop and de facto scary movie memorabilia museum that looks like it’s run by a ghoulish Pee-wee Herman.

The Brewed is attached to Bric-a-Brac Records near the corner of North Milwaukee and Kimball avenues, and both shops are owned and operated by married couple Jen Lemasters and Nick Mayor, along with friend and business partner Jason Deuchler.

While Bric-a-Brac recently celebrated its ninth anniversary, The Brewed opened in March. In a few short months, it established itself as a unique concept for a neighborhood coffee shop that transcends gimmick and embraces unfiltered kitschy nostalgia for all things spooky.

“A lot of the same spirit carries over into The Brewed, because we didn’t really know anything about running a record store when we opened and, likewise, didn’t really know anything about running coffee shops,” Mayor said. “We just had an idea of a kind of space that we wanted to create for people and sought out to do that and, luckily, there was a community of people that responded and supported the space.”

Even before walking inside the conjoined shops, visitors are immersed in the aesthetic charm achieved by the owners, who did all the design work. Michael Keaton’s Batman and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman loom from the windows, while cartoonish eyeballs leer back inside the lettering of The Brewed’s logo atop its door.

Both The Brewed and Bric-a-Brac have busy decor — the record store more so, since its walls are jam-packed with (aha!) bric-a-brac of all pop-culture sorts, not limited to the horror movie novelties that adorn the cafe side. Other than thematically, restraint was abandoned entirely when it came to furnishing The Brewed; you essentially can’t look anywhere without seeing something related to cinema’s dark side while you sip your coffee.

The Brewed serves Chicago-based Halfwit Coffee Roasters beans and, even if you hate horror movies, it’s worth a visit, if only for the drinks. Expect the usual range of beverages you’d find at a coffee shop, including pastries from pandemic-born bakery Hardbitten — helmed by the Chicago Reader’s best up-and-coming chef of 2021, Halee Raff — plus seltzers, sandwiches, salads and wraps from Ørkenoy’s kitchen. This fall’s seasonal drink is a Wassail Cider made with cloves, ginger root and cinnamon infused in apple cider.

Along with what’s on the menu, The Brewed also sells hard-to-find horror Blu-rays, including the film from which the shop’s name is derived: David Cronenberg’s “The Brood.”

The 1979 thriller isn’t a prerequisite to visiting the shop, but Shocktober devotees might enjoy screening what Roger Ebert described as an “el sleazo exploitation film.” The plot focuses on a woman entrenched in a dubious psychiatric institution exhibiting cultish tendencies, whose leader seems to be linked in a rash of murders involving strange, humanoid killers. Critical reception is divided, but Cronenberg fans applaud its atmospheric menace and clever script.

For all its fascination with creepy imagery and macabre memorabilia, the cafe evokes a sense of inclusion and welcome. Just because somebody’s wearing an Evil Dead T-shirt doesn’t mean they’re going to drench you in fake blood — at The Brewed, they’re likely going to hand you a really good cappuccino.

“I think the horror scene in general, and especially in Chicago, everyone’s very friendly and very open to meeting new people, sharing titles you may or may not have seen, or reminiscing about a classic,” Deuchler said. “Horror is one of those genres where you can take something that terrifies you from the real world and make that into a creature, monster, or whatever your movie’s about, addressing a topic that people are too scared to address in everyday life.”

And while ghouls and fictitious serial killers are the stars of the show here, they’re backdropped by friendly pastel and neon colors, a dichotomy of morbidity and bubbly optimism.

There’s a poster of Freddy Krueger brandishing his bladed glove in a promotional image for “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.” Right below is a mini poster for a mock-’80s horror film called “Death by Coffee,” featuring a severed hand emerging from a coffee mug. An antique wood-paneled television plays a loop of a primitively computer-animated jack-o’-lantern, taken from 1982′s “Halloween III: Season of the Witch.”

Eat. Watch. Do.

Weekly

What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life … now.

With such an impressive array of posters and novelties on display, it’s natural to ask where it came from.

“It’s just all our personal stuff that we’ve accumulated over decades of fandom,” Deuchler says. “There’s definitely stuff that Nick and Jen and I have come across at Bric-a-Brac, but Bric-a-Brac also came out of our own collecting to begin with. The poster collection is my main addiction recently, so (The Brewed) was a pretty massive enabler for that.”

Where can you find the kinds of posters on display at The Brewed? The internet is a pretty hard market to avoid, especially for rarer pieces, but if you want to shop local, Deuchler and his partners recommend Reel Art Collectibles in Berwyn — not just for horror movie posters, it’s a great spot to browse through movie memorabilia of all sorts.

To round out their haunted-themed events for the rest of October, The Brewed will host a spooky film fest through Thursday, a Halloween market Saturday and Sunday, and a ticketed viewing of the seasonal classic “Halloween” on the Oct. 31 holiday.

2843 N. Milwaukee Ave., thebrewedcoffee.com

Sean Peters is a freelance writer.

Big screen or home stream, takeout or dine-in, Tribune writers are here to steer you toward your next great experience. Sign up for your free weekly Eat. Watch. Do. newsletter here.