Horror is a genre of fiction whose purpose is to create feelings of fear, dread, repulsion, and terror in the audience—in other words, it develops an atmosphere of horror. A play like York Walker’s Covenant fits into this genre with its eerie atmosphere and active discussion of the Devil and the believed horrific consequences of sin. Let’s look at horror more deeply—how and when did it develop? Does it serve a purpose? What are the design tools used to successfully create horror in theater?

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THE SOCIAL PURPOSE OF HORROR

The horror genre forces the audience to maintain social norms by manipulating the human dread of violence and the unknown. Stories of dreadful consequence have existed for a long time—cautionary tales like The Boy Who Cried Wolf have simple, easy to absorb lessons. Boogeymen appear in fairy tales, fables, and parables to guide people toward behaviors which uphold cultural norms or encourage safety and survival. Ancient Greeks believed their gods controlled many aspects of their lives, and their need for social order pre-dated complex penal codes. Tragic stories like the Oresteia involved the Eumenides, also known as The Furies, avenging heinous societal crimes such as the murder of a parent and served a powerful warning against such crimes.

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HORROR AS SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Beyond encouraging social norms, horror can also function as social commentary. In the late 1700s and early 1800s Gothic Drama became very popular on English stages, with many shows based on the gothic novels of the day. These dramas incorporated many aspects of horror including revulsion and dread of horrific behaviors and their aftermaths. New and spectacular stage effects were used to present specters and other horrors. These dramas reflected and magnified social issues of their day, specifically anti-Catholic sentiment. Anti-Catholicism, sanctioned in England after Henry VIII’s dissolution of Catholic churches in 1540, grew again with the influx of French Catholic clergy fleeing the French Revolution in the late 1700s. Gothic dramas employed character types such as wicked or lascivious clergy, and settings like haunted abbeys and churchyards. These were plain manifestations of suspicion against Catholics in popular Gothic Dramas.

Religion continues to be a compelling element of horror for many modern writers. In York Walker’s Covenant, the avidly religious mother is a source of both her daughters’ pain. The paradox that religion and the Devil present in horror stories is that very religious characters are generally presented as unreliable—fanatics or small-minded people—but then the devil that they believe in actually shows up. The audience is left asking not if there is a Devil, because we have witnessed the telling of the tale, but rather if there is a God that can and will save us from that demon. In Covenant, Violet is certain there is no God watching over her: “And from that moment on the girl knew the truth. / That the heaven her Mama sang so fervently about / Was deaf to the sound of a Black girl’s voice.”

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WHY DO WE LOVE HORROR?

If the genre undermines human foundational beliefs and amplifies communal fear, why do we return to it? In his 1982 book Danse Macabre, Stephen King says:

If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unreal—to provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtexts are often culture-wide.

The solitary reader of a horror story feels relief that they have survived the tale by the end and may have learned something about themselves. The shared experience of an audience watching a horror story together provides similar relief and learning on a community-wide scale. Horror as a performance genre has the communal benefits of a shared experience and allows the community to approach a subject of great discomfort from a safe distance. The audience in a horror performance survives the tale together, which implies that they can survive their feared cultural ‘subtexts’ together as well. The implied hope explains the longevity of horror as entertainment.

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HORROR ON STAGE

Two modern examples of horror on stage are Sweeney Todd and Carrie the Musical, each using different approaches to create their dread-filled atmospheres to varying degrees of efficacy. Carrie the Musical, adapted from the 1974 novel for the stage in 1988, fumbled the gory details in its abstraction, missing the human story. Ken Mandelbaum’s look at the show describes unwieldy scenery and microphone issues caused by fake blood. These choices, coupled with strong performances, left audiences wildly divided in their reactions. David Richards wrote in his review of the 1988 Broadway production for The Washington Post:

The thinking seems to be that you can treat Carrie as a parable about good and evil, sin and expiation, love and hatred. Let the movie keep its real-life decors. The musical unfolds in a series of austere, abstract spaces, designed by Ralph Koltai and lighted, just as starkly, by [director Terry] Hands. ... By abstracting the tale, however, the creators have robbed Carrie of everything that is troubling, funny, scary.

The missteps in Carrie’s design don’t illustrate a larger issue for abstraction in design. It can be used to great effect, as it was in Hal Prince’s direction of Sweeney Todd. Stephen Sondheim said of Hal Prince’s approach to the direction of the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd:

Hal's metaphor is that the factory turns out Sweeney Todds. It turns out soulless, defeated, hopeless people. That's what the play's about to him; Sweeney Todd is a product of that age. Eugene Lee’s massive, Tony Award®-winning scenery was moved not by automation, but by stagehands in costume to reflect the human cost and horror of modern mechanism. The Devil, they say, is in the details.

When you enter the Black Box Theatre where Covenant is playing, ask yourself what creates the atmosphere you feel? Can you see everything? What stories are the specifics you can see telling? Are the sounds and light contributing to those stories, and how? Does what you see connect with a deep-rooted unease?

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Published on October 19, 2023.

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