Jump scares, leather gloves and squeaking moth noises: theatre horror masters on how they make their shows so scary
Whether it’s immersive chiller Blackout or the campily scary 2:22: A Ghost Story, ‘tis the season to be scared witless at the theatre. But what’s the secret to making an audience gasp in terror?It was 1am. Total darkness. Locking up a wedding venue, Sam Beech’s car sensor went off: there was something behind him. “It went on for half an hour,” the writer and director recalls, “on the front bumper, then round the back. But every time I looked, there was nothing.” It kept going, snuffling around the car. So he stopped looking. “I thought: ‘If I don’t look behind me, it won’t get me.’” Since then, Beech, the creator of one of a plethora of horror shows currently haunting the stage, admits, “I don’t like driving in the dark”.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. “It’s the Jaws effect,” says Chris Fisher, the illusions designer behind the stage show of Paranormal Activity (at London Ambassador’s theatre to 27 February, and touring the UK), which had me sheepishly checking under my bed for several nights and stopped just short of nightmares. “It’s scarier to see the fin and hear the music,” Fisher says, “than it is to see the mechanical head of the shark.” Continue reading…
To read the full story from the source: The Guardian – International
