WhatsOnStage.com: To mark Halloween this year, we asked you to tell us when you've been most scared at the theatre. Below are the five shows with the most votes, but honourable mentions should go to the 1962 production of Lionel Bart's Blitz which still haunts one reader over half a century later, the climax of Ira Levin's Deathtrap, and... Edinburgh Festival, which received several miscellaneous votes – seeing 10 shows in a day can get quite scary.
3 comments:
I find it very interesting that Harry Potter: The Cursed Child made it onto this list. I have not seen it, but I have read it and did not get that feeling. That makes me want to see it. I have never really seen a truly scary piece of theatre, and I think that is a wonderful challenge for our art form to tackle. In film it seems almost easy with the special effects and in your face moments that are so readily available. Being able to scare someone with something that is happening onstage forty plus feet away must be a difficult thing to pull off. Another thing that must be difficult to pull off with this is staying away from something that is merely meant to scare someone, like a haunted house for instance.
While I haven’t necessarily seen that much horror in a stage production, I have certainly read scripts that invoked the feeling. One that many CMU students are familiar with is “The Pillowman”. While the play is not really bloody gore or jump scares, the play is unsettling and shocking. So, I do wonder from this list, which type of horror each play contains. “Carrie” strikes me as a show that would do the iconic bloody scenes, while “The Woman in Black” and “Ghost Stories” seem to go for horror of the mind. Horror on stage is very interesting and can be hard to be accomplish successfully. If done well though, it can be one of the best theatrical devices and make audiences remember the production. My guess is that productions with horror can become very expensive given the financial requirements of jump elements and the specificity of some of the tricks that would be used.
So, I have never heard of “Punchdrunk” or “Ghost Stories” and I haven’t seen any of the other three shows, and let me say, I’m not that upset by that. Well, I suppose I would love to see Harry Potter. The fact of the matter is I have no desire to be scared. I know some people love horror movies but that’s not me. I find no joy in someone scaring me, in fact, I hate it. However, these opinions are in the frame of reference of films. I suppose seeing something scary onstage could be less frightening because I would be more interested in the effect. Or, on the other hand, seeing something scary onstage could be far scarier than on a film because those are real people and they are probably within 200 feet of you. I suppose I should not judge before seeing a piece like this, but my gut is telling me, all things considered, in the moment I would be terrified, but after the fact I would be glad I saw a really cool thing onstage.
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