Horror on stage

It's not horror but Deathtrap has a few jumpy moments.

Let The Right One In had an overall creepiness that was unsettling, to say the least, and a big scare moment near the end. It's the darkest and most successful horror genre piece I can think of.

Woman in Black : Totally lame. Not a jump or a scare in it. Likewise with the film.

Horror is an extremely difficult genre to pull off on stage because it's extremely subjective. What scares one person might not do it for someone else - for instance, someone who's always been worried about the possibility of ghosts in their house wouldn't be able to handle a film like The Others, or someone with a deeply religious background would find The Exorcist most terrifying, or someone who knows that the real monster is man would be most freaked out by Hallowe'en, or someone who's very down-to-earth and eschews all things fantastical may nonetheless be extremely unsettled by Black Mirror - and in the same way that we judge comedy on whether it makes us laugh or not, we tend to judge horror on whether it makes us frightened or not. Which I always found unfair, precisely because of just how subjective horror is. If you're not scared of ghosts in creepy houses, then you might think The Woman in Black is entirely rubbish (there's even an example in this very thread!), even though it's also a very good example of how theatre works, how you can start with an empty stage and a couple of actors and - in spite of the lack of complete realism - expand it out into a fully fledged story in a way that can *only* be achieved in theatre.

Anyway, I've given it a lot of consideration over the years, and there's basically two different sorts of scare, which I like to call the Jump and the Creep. The Jump is what it sounds like, the theatrical (or cinematic or whatever) equivalent of someone jumping out and shouting "boo!". It's quick, it's startling, it gets the heart-rate up, and it's over very quickly. The Creep is less about the single moment than the Jump is, and is more about the dreadful anticipation during the moments where nothing quite so obvious is happening. I think the most successful horror pieces manage to strike a good balance between the Jump and the Creep. The Woman in Black, for instance, is largely about the Creep (personally I find the Creep much scarier, because those are the moments that come back to haunt me when I'm alone on a dark night) but it also has its Jump moments, which in addition to increasing the heart-rate also helps shatter the safety of the fourth wall as the more excitable audience members around you start screaming. It's difficult to be entirely blasé when everyone else around you is terrified, and The Woman in Black plays into that. Ghost Stories too (which I always found played better with my horror-movie-loving friends than with my theatre-loving friends) has plenty of moments of quiet dread punctuated with startling moments.

The only other horror plays I've seen that really worked for me were The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida, which wasn't great as a play but REALLY played on some fears that are extremely personal to me, and a short play by Lucy Kirkwood called Psychogeography, that was largely Creep but with a couple of very satisfying Jumps. I know a lot of people found Deathtrap unbearable, but as it was a thriller that was largely based on Jumps, it didn't really do a great deal for me. And I'm never entirely sure that horror and thriller should be as conflated as they often are anyway.

See, I'm the other way round, I personally thought Stephen Mallatratt took a fairly standard ghost story and elevated it into something special. But then I did read most (if not all) of Susan Hill's horror novellas in fairly quick succession, and they got very samey very quickly, which was a shame for me because I do generally like her style so really should have spaced them out more.

The Woman in Black gets far too much hype. Don`t believe the hype.
There is still a gap in the market for a horror play that approaches what is possible these days with technology.

Funny enough a colleague of mine saw Woman in Black this weekend and has described it as the only time screaming aloud in the theatre.

I do think venue makes a difference, it's wonderfully atmospheric at the older (admittedly bit run down) New Theatre in Cardiff. I imagine at a newer venue it loses some of that atmosphere.

Older readers will remember the childrens TV show Jackanory. Were a cleb read out a story for 15 minutes. The show ended 10 years ago, and for good reason. People are much more sophisocated today and are generally not thrilled be being told a long story, even by two people.

I agree wholly with the idea that the simpler and less explicit things are scarier because of the way our brains work, and I absolutely disagree that we can therefore should be doing more technically impressive stuff. Compare the practical effects of Jurassic Park with the CGI of Jurassic World - the more hands-on work still looks miles better to this day, and indeed it forced the makers to make a better film in the first place rather than ploughing on knowing they could plaster over the gaps later.

"The Woman in Black" is in my opinion the only one of her stories worth reading. There is really nothing to any of her other ghost stories.

Sorry guys I disagree. Previous posters mentioned Jurassic World. The movie was not some guy telling you a story about how he went to an island where there are dinosaurs. They actually showed you the dinosaurs. Jurasic World- $1.6 billion at box office. The Weir- most people have never heard of it.

Box Office gains don't necessarily mean anything other than that they had a lot of money to spend on promotion in the first place. To be fair, I did hear good things about Jurassic World, I just never got around to seeing it.

Back to horror. I would love to see more on stage. I always seem to miss it.