Locking up a wedding venue, Sam Beech’s car sensor went off: there was something behind him. But every time I looked, there was nothing.” It kept going, snuffling around the car. Beech’s experience was eerily similar to a scene in Andy Nyman’s hit 2010 play Ghost Stories, which Beech had seen four times, so the gnarly end the character had met on stage filled his mind when the sensor went off in the dark.
Now, the uncanny experience has fed into his own new horror show Blackout (touring the UK to 27 February), which uses everything that made him so scared that night: the quiet, the absence, the idea of something lurking in the shadows. But it’s easy to go wrong with horror, Fisher says: “It often goes too far, too hammy. Too – and I say this affectionately – Blithe Spirit.” But when you get it right, he says, discounting Noël Coward’s farce about an eccentric clairvoyant, “people leave with a newfound understanding of what theatre can do”.
For years, 1987’s The Woman in Black was the reigning champion of achieving a proper nail-biting scare on stage. On a sparse set, the show invited the audience to imagine a pony and trap as the story set off, priming them, like Beech’s stalking shadow and Fisher’s Jaws theory, to fill in the gaps for themselves. It was unrivalled for years, but recently, perhaps kicked off by the success of Ghost Stories, there’s been an increasing flood of shows trying to eke out new ideas of horror plays.
The campily satisfying haunted house thriller 2:22: A Ghost Story is ever-touring and the hallucinatory Stranger Things: The First Shadow (which also features Fisher’s illusions) is going strong in London’s West End. Farther west in the city, at the Bush theatre, Mei Leng Yew’s recent debut The Hungry Ghost played with Chinese traditions and queer obsession to create a nightmarish story of possession. Going down the route of psychological horror, the immersive touring experience Sins uses audience participation to determine what happens on stage.
This Halloween season, the ghosts and ghouls have busy schedules. There’s so much awfulness in the world right now, people are turning more to the fantastic, and with horror, you’re not just following the story. You’re totally separated from reality.” Now, finding the scariest night out possible has become “almost a drug”, Fisher says, for audiences chasing the high of the collective fright.
The line between successful scare and unimpressed shrug is a fine one. It only takes a mistimed or misaligned moment, and your brain’s quick enough to go: ‘I didn’t believe that.’” The success of that minuscule moment relies on the atmosphere created by dozens of people backstage. Achieving the perfect jump scare requires the increase in tension, the wrongfooting, and the offbeat fright just as you’ve relaxed.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
