‘It’s not sophisticated. It appeals to your lower body’: How British theatre became obsessed with horror
You’re sitting in the dark, watching a scary story unfold. Maybe the hairs on your neck stand up. Maybe you’re on the edge of your seat – and maybe it’s a slightly tired, slightly cramped red velvet seat, next to a stranger nursing an overpriced plastic glass of wine… Because these days, you’re as likely to encounter a ghost story in a theatre as in the cinema or on your sofa. Horror is coming back to life on stage.
Paranormal Activity, an adaptation of the terrifying 2007 film, is about to open at Leeds Playhouse, while a version of the unsettling 2019 movie Saint Maud opens at Newcastle’s Live Theatre in October. TV’s blackly comic Inside No. 9 makes the leap to the West End from January, at the same time as the hit play Ghost Stories returns for its first UK-wide tour.
Meanwhile. some theatremakers are turning to classic narratives: Punchdrunk’s latest, Viola’s Room, is inspired by a 1901 Gothic short story by Barry Pain, while Room 13 at the Barn Theatre in Cirencester offers a modern-day riff on MR James’s ghost stories, opening in September.
This sudden rush of shows is notable because horror has often been peculiarly under-represented on British stages – certainly there was The Woman in Black, which ran for over 30 years in the West End. Ghost Stories has haunted stages, on and off, since 2010, and there was an adaptation of The Exorcist a few years ago. But mostly, the genre has remained in the shadows – certainly compared to its continued domination on screen.
So why the reanimation now? One answer – the cynical one – is that the trend is simply due to the hope that such shows shift tickets. And this confidence is no doubt driven by the runaway success of one particular play: 2:22 – A Ghost Story.
Danny Robins’s tale of a woman convinced her house is haunted opened in the West End in 2021, and smashed box office records as the highest-selling play ever at the Noel Coward theatre, then at the Gielgud, and then as a UK tour. It’s now licensed around the world, while rapid turnover stunt casting – Lily Allen, Cheryl, Stacey Dooley – has helped broaden its appeal.
“It’s a beautiful example of taking a risk on something new and the public being in step with your taste,” says Tristan Baker, one half of Runaway Entertainment, who produce the show. Although it’d be just as accurate to say he was getting theatre in step with wider pop-culture tastes – recognising the success of ghost stories across film, TV, and podcasts, and bringing that magic to the stage.
Baker thought that audiences coming out of the pandemic might want to see a show like The Woman in Black. 2.22 was one of only eight that opened in the West End in summer 2021, but Baker’s hunch that 2:22 would connect with the younger audiences comfortable with going back to theatres proved correct. “We found lots of first-time theatre goers, who wanted to have a great night out, have a drink, and chat about it,” he says.
No wonder producers around the country are now trying to tap into that market. But box office receipts may not be the only reason for the stage horror revival: Richard Hand, a Professor at UEA who specialises in horror studies, believes the underlying reason is more profound – we are in a “new Gothic age”, collectively turning to horror to process the awfulness of the world around us.
The pandemic was its own horror movie-like experience: the terror of a mysterious illness, a confrontation with mortality, lockdowns that were like being trapped in a nightmare. And since then, we’ve been bombarded by images of the most brutal conflicts imaginable.
“It is a zeitgeist thing,” Hand suggests, pointing out that interest in the Gothic often flares in times of societal upheaval. “When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, there was anxiety about approaching a new century, a paranoia about migration. Or Frankenstein and the industrial revolution. I can’t help thinking there’s parallels in the 2020s: it may reflect a kind of anxiety that we have.”
This theory chimes for Felix Barrett, too, the founder of immersive theatre pioneers Punchdrunk, who’s now directing Paranormal Activity. “The world is a really bumpy place at the moment, there’s so much conflict and instability. I think we need these pieces to be able to release the tension we’re holding in our day-to-day lives.”
Of course, Paranormal Activity is also likely to sell tickets because of brand recognition. Not that they’re doing faithful retread – it’ll be “a new story in the same world”, Barrett promises, if still featuring a couple haunted by demons, both metaphorical and literal. But it was important, he says, that the audience don’t know what’s about to happen, to really crank the nervous anticipation.
“I love the thought of making the theatre dangerous,” Barrett says, gleefully. “That durational suspense is really thrilling.” And he believes that theatre is a perfect medium for such nail-biting stuff: whether it’s in the immersive intimacy of Punchdrunk’s latest work – Viola’s Room takes small groups right inside a dark fable about a reluctant bride – or in a main stage adaptation of a film, theatre is capable of viscerally impacting audiences.
“The wonder of live theatre is it has that electricity – out of all the artforms, theatre is the one that gives you that crackle of tension, that it is happening now,” he says.
Fear can also feed off itself – and so the collective experience of watching a show surrounded by other whipped-up people helps amplify it for everyone. Theatre is the “ultimate 3D form” suggests Hand: “you’re in that shared space, that shared moment… that’s what’s particularly thrilling about it.”
So why, then, did horror fall out of fashion on the stage in the second half of the 20th century? Hand points out that the theatre does have a rich history of it – from violent Greek dramas to gory Elizabethan revenge tragedies, to moralising ghost stories on Victorian stages, to the ultra-violent melodramas of the Grand Guignol in 20th-century Paris. The latter hugely influenced early silent films – and at that point, horror seemed to migrate to the screen.
And that’s where it’s stayed, largely. Hand suggests that theatrical snobbery against the mass popularity of horror movies may have had something to do with this neglect on stage. “I do think there’s something embarrassing about horror,” he muses. “It’s not an intellectual form – it works with your lower body, it’s ‘unsophisticated’.”
It also produces pretty black-or-white bodily reactions: audiences are either scared, or they’re not. And when a fright-fest isn’t frightening, it can be cringe-inducing, or even unintentionally funny. Witness The Enfield Haunting, based on a true story, which received a truly terrifying slew of damning reviews recently for being unscary, boring, and accidentally snigger-inducing. When horror goes wrong, it seems it goes very, very wrong.
Still, it’s a risk many theatremakers – and many audiences – are clearly increasingly willing to take. And when it does work, stage horror has a unique ability to bring audiences together, and to provide a collective release valve: it’s scary, but deliciously so. As Baker puts it, “you just cannot beat a thousand people in the same room jumping and screaming at the same time.”
2:22: A Ghost Story is at the Gielgud until August 4 (222aghoststory.com); Paranormal Activity is at Leeds Playhouse until August 3 (leedsplayhouse.org.uk); Viola’s Room is at One Cartridge Place until September 15 (punchdrunk.com)