How scary can theatre really be? My horror marathon in search of stage frights

The Guardian

15 hours ago

I am a wimp. When my friends used to gather to screech over horror movies after school, I would sit watching Countdown with one of their mums until it was over. I had to watch The Blair Witch Project with all the lights on and I never got through the opening scene of The Ring. But when it comes to horror on stage, I've rarely been fazed. Bar the odd jump scare, how scary can theatre really be? I set out to find out by watching a full day of horror shows at the Edinburgh fringe.
I start off gently with Elysium, a winding eat-the-rich tale told through lilting song. The gated community of Elysium Court is designed to keep the riff-raff out, but the inhabitants should be more worried about what they're locking in. With the air of two friends casually making music in their garage, Milly Blue and Jessie Maryon Davies of Ghouls Aloud unpack the concept that exclusivity equals safety, watching from a distance as the containment crushes everyone in Elysium Court into the same make and model – or destroys them if they attempt to stand out.
Blue's storytelling is sweet and unsettling, though occasionally veers off into tangents that don't serve the story. Davies laces tension through with moody piano, with Blue looping her voice in climbing harmonies above, as strange events begin to haunt Elysium's newest resident. Digging into the soil beneath the standard-issue astroturf that clamps down every garden in the Court, old monsters start to emerge. The darkness creeps in slowly and the script wants tightening, with some songs pausing the action rather than driving it on, but I decide I like my horror being sung to me. Maybe this was the problem all along.
From the candy-pink satire of Elysium, the pitch-black Scatter: A Horror Play couldn't be a sharper shift. The room is so dark it's a struggle to even find your seat. This low lighting continues as Patrick McPherson's jaw-clenching show of hereditary haunting reserves any bright light for blinding flashes. Liberally smattered with jump scares, the show sometimes leans so heavily on Will Hayman's intense shadows and sharp, saturated filters that the design comes to feel like the main event rather than an anchor to sink us deeper into the story.
McPherson plays Tom, a young man reluctantly recounting the trip he and his brother took to scatter their father's ashes in rural Wales. In the predictably traumatising process, they discover that their dad's end-of-life aggression, previously brushed off as delirium, was something far more sinister, his acts of violence actually a deeply troubled form of protection. Jonny Harvey's direction makes repeated use of the classic torch sweeping around a blackened room and heavy, breathless silences followed by piercing, sinew-shaking screams. These old tricks are effective. I sink into my seat every time the torch winds up.
A traditional folk horror, Scatter takes itself seriously. You can't help wondering if the balance of tension would intensify if some lightness was buried anywhere in the text; McPherson's performance, though convincing, starts off dour and stays similarly severe throughout. The ending is rushed, but Scatter sets out to scare, and it succeeds. As we pick our way out of the theatre, my heart takes a moment to return to its regular pace.
Later that afternoon, in another about-turn, Jed Mathre does a stellar job of making a whole room want to punch him in the face. Melanie Godsey's existential comedy, Sponsored By the Void, offers a queer awakening through the form of a supernatural visitor. Mathre plays the emotionally illiterate boyfriend to Leah (Kelly Karcher) who is so overburdened by his uselessness that she's close to bursting. When The Void (Jennifer Ewing) waltzes in, Leah is immediately felled by her hot dom energy and her demand that Leah does exactly what she wants. 'Do you eat?' Leah asks her, quivering. 'I devour,' The Void replies.
Created by Seattle-based company The Co-Conspirators, this goofy, sultry sci-fi horror revels in Leah's uncompromising newfound confidence, with Kennedy looking on in horror and Leah's friend Val (Be Russell, funny to her bones) watching with delight as she rejects everything she has previously accepted without resistance. Subservience to men is the real horror here. Eschewing subtleness, the play asks direct questions of how a woman can get trapped into a role she never asked for, and how she can – with support of a sexy, suited-up otherworldly entity – break her way out of it.
'I just want you to know what you're getting into,' David Alnwick says as he pops his head around the door, checking we're not actually here for the musical cabaret going on upstairs, before leaping to the side of the stage to fiddle with the video setup. Where a handful of these horror shows use film to enhance the spookiness, Alnwick's The Dare Witch Project is the only one to rely on it. Soldiering through technical issues, our eager host talks us through the footage he supposedly found in an old VHS he got off eBay. The man in the recordings looks surprisingly like him, with his clothes and his voice, and a determination to complete a challenge inspired by the infamous found-footage movie The Blair Witch Project.
While most of the tension from this Free Fringe show comes from the screen, as Alnwick presents these clips of the mysterious doppelganger recording himself in the woods, there is a singular, inspired physical magic trick used to beautifully creepy effect. The looping inevitability built into the show mounts tension as we wait, nervously, for what we know is coming, but it takes too long to get there to truly shake any nerves. I find myself wanting to be more scared than I am. Perhaps I'm becoming a horror convert after all.
The last show of the evening is the least terrifying. Maria Teresa Creasey's toothless attempt at a vampiric comedy-horror, Degenerate, begins ominously, as the writer-performer lies face-down, bound and gagged, waiting for one of us to untie her. But that's the end of the innovation. Pitched as experimental, Creasey's babbling speech acts like a fly being swatted, scattily returning to a smattering of ideas but never settling long enough to offer a performance worth our time.
Hazily buzzing around the notion of women being deemed irrelevant as they age, Creasey's character eventually flits towards the eternal youth of the vampire and lip-syncs to clips of scary movies. She wants to last for ever. I'm glad this performance does not.
Elysium is at Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower until 24 August; Scatter: A Horror Play is at Underbelly, Cowgate, until 24 August; Sponsored By the Void is at Greenside @ Riddles Court until 16 August; David Alnwick: The Dare Witch Project is at PBH's Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms until 24 August; Degenerate is at Pleasance Courtyard until 23 August