You’re sitting in the dark, watching a scary story unfold. Maybe the hairs on the back of your neck are standing on end. Maybe you’re on the edge of your seat — and maybe you’re sitting in a slightly tired, slightly cramped red velvet chair, next to a stranger sipping an expensive plastic glass of wine. Because these days, you’re as likely to encounter a ghost story in a theater as you are in a movie theater or on your couch. Fear is coming back to life on stage.
Paranormal Activity, an adaptation of the 2007 horror film, is due to open at Leeds Playhouse, while a version of the disturbing 2019 film Saint Maud opens at Newcastle’s Live Theatre in October. TV’s dark comedy series Inside No. 9 heads to the West End in January, while hit play Ghost Stories returns for its first UK tour.
Meanwhile, some theatregoers are turning to classical narratives: Punchdrunk’s latest play, Viola’s Room, is inspired by Barry Pain’s 1901 Gothic short story, while Room 13 at the Barn Theatre in Cirencester offers a modern version of MR James’ ghost stories, opening in September.
This sudden influx of shows is notable because the horror genre has often been strangely underrepresented on British stages – not least The Woman in Black, which ran for more than 30 years in the West End. Ghost Stories has haunted the stage on and off since 2010, and there was an adaptation of The Exorcist a few years ago. But for the most part the genre has remained in the shadows – certainly when compared to its ongoing dominance on screen.
So why the revival now? One answer—a cynical one—is that the trend is simply driven by the hope that such shows will reshuffle their tickets. And that confidence is undoubtedly due to the runaway success of one particular play: 2:22 — A Ghost Story.
Danny Robins’s story of a woman who becomes convinced her house is haunted opened in the West End in 2021, breaking box office records as the biggest-selling play ever at the Noel Coward theatre, then at the Gielgud and then on tour in the UK. Its now globally licensed and fast-turnover cast of stuntmen – Lily Allen, Cheryl, Stacey Dooley – has helped add to its appeal.
“It’s a beautiful example of taking a risk on something new and keeping up with the public’s taste,” says Tristan Baker, one half of Runaway Entertainment, which produces the show. It would be equally accurate to say that it aligns theater with broader pop-culture tastes — by recognizing the success of ghost stories in film, TV and podcasts and bringing that magic to the stage.
Baker thought audiences coming out of the pandemic might want to see a show like The Woman in Black. 2:22 was one of just eight shows to open in the West End in summer 2021, but Baker’s prediction that 2:22 would connect with younger audiences ready to return to theatres proved accurate. “We got a lot of first-time theatregoers who wanted to have a great night out, have a drink and chat about it,” he says.
It’s no wonder that producers from around the country are now trying to break into this market. But box office revenues may not be the only reason for the revival of stage horror: Richard Hand, a professor at the UEA who specialises in horror studies, believes the underlying cause is deeper – “we are in a new Gothic age” and we are all turning to horror films to process the horror of the world around us.
The pandemic itself was a horror movie-like experience: the terror of a mysterious disease, the confrontation with mortality, the quarantines that felt like being trapped in a nightmare. And since then, we’ve been bombarded with images of the most brutal conflicts imaginable.
“It’s a zeitgeist,” Hand says, noting that interest in the Gothic often flares up in times of social upheaval. “When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, there was this anxiety about the coming of the new century, this paranoia about immigration. Or Frankenstein and the industrial revolution. I can’t help but think there are parallels in the 2020s: it might reflect a kind of anxiety that we have.”
That theory rings true for Felix Barrett, founder of immersive theater pioneers Punchdrunk and now director of Paranormal Activity. “The world is a really rough place right now, there’s a lot of conflict and instability. I think we need those pieces to release the tension that we hold in our daily lives,” he says.
Of course, Paranormal Activity is also likely to sell tickets because of its brand recognition. Not because they’re doing a faithful remake — it’ll be “a new story in the same world,” Barrett promises, if it still features a couple plagued by demons, both figuratively and literally. But he says it’s important for the audience not to know what’s going to happen to really build the tense anticipation.
“I love the idea of making theatre dangerous,” says Barrett cheerfully. “That sustained tension is really exciting.” And he believes theatre is the perfect setting for nail-biting stuff: whether it’s in the gripping intimacy of Punchdrunk’s latest – Viola’s Room takes small groups inside a dark tale about an unwilling bride – or in a mainstage adaptation of a film, theatre has the ability to viscerally move audiences.
“The wonder of live theatre is that it has that electricity – of all the art forms, theatre is the one that gives you that crackle of tension, that makes you feel like it’s happening. Now,” says.
Fear can also feed on itself – and so the collective experience of watching a show surrounded by other drunk people helps to amplify it for everyone. Theatre is “the ultimate form of 3D,” Hand suggests: “you’re in that shared space, that shared moment… that’s what’s particularly exciting.”
So why did horror fall out of fashion on stage in the second half of the 20th century? Hand notes that the theatre has a rich history – from violent Greek dramas to bloody Elizabethan revenge tragedies, from the moralistic ghost stories of the Victorian stage to the hyper-violent melodramas of the 20th-century Grand Guignol.pearl-century Paris. The latter heavily influenced early silent films — and at that point, horror seemed to have migrated to the screen.
And there it largely remained. Hand suggests that theatrical snobbery in the face of the mass popularity of horror films may have something to do with this neglect of the stage. “I think there’s something shameful about horror,” he muses. “It’s not an intellectual form—it works with your lower body, it’s not ‘sophisticated.'”
It also produces very black-and-white bodily responses: viewers are either scared or they aren’t. And when it’s a scare fest not can be scary, creepy or unintentionally funny. Witness The Enfield Haunting, based on a true story and recently garnering a series of truly awful reviews for being unscary, boring and accidentally chuckle-inducing. When horror goes wrong, it seems to go very, very wrong.
Still, it’s a risk that many theater makers, and many audiences, are clearly increasingly willing to take. And when it works, stage fright has a unique ability to bring audiences together and provide a collective release valve: scary, but deliciously scary. As Baker says, “you can’t beat a thousand people jumping and screaming in the same room at the same time.”
2:22: A Ghost Story is at the Gielgud until August 4th (222aghoststory.com); Paranormal Activity is at Leeds Playhouse until August 3rd (leedsplayhouse.org.uk); Viola’s Room is at One Cartridge Place until August 18th (punchdrunk.com)