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HORROR REWRITTEN: RETELLINGS, PARODY AND REINVENTION

Recognition can be comforting. Which, for horror, is extremely useful.

BEHIND THE SCREAMS

How do you scare an audience with one performer?

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE FEAR

Three horror makers on how fear actually works

4. Audience Awards cast your votes!

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3. BEHIND THE SCENES

HORROR REWRITTEN: RETELLINGS, PARODY AND REINVENTION

Horror loves a familiar shape. A story we already know, a form whose rhythm we recognise, a cliché we can see coming. But familiarity also gives theatre-makers something to betray. Recognition can be comforting. Which, for horror, is extremely useful.

Give an audience something they know and they arrive with expectations already in place. Change one detail, break one rule, shift the perspective, and suddenly the familiar starts to feel wrong.

For FATHOM writer Imogen Usherwood, that starting point was Shakespeare’s The Tempest. THE DUSK REALM reworks the familiar language of anthology horror, while PLOTBUSTERS plays with the collective vocabulary of horror movies themselves: summer camps, basements, cheerleaders, masked killers and the solemn promise that somebody will “be right back”.

THE STORY WE THINK WE KNOW

Imogen had been thinking about The Tempest for some time. She had written Shakespeare retellings before, but Ferdinand and Miranda particularly interested her. In Shakespeare’s play, they fall in love at first sight and are swiftly heading towards marriage. Strip away the romance, however, and Ferdinand’s circumstances look considerably less reassuring.He has survived an inexplicable disaster, believes his father and everyone he knows may be dead, and finds himself in a strange place populated by a mysterious man, his daughter and a magical creature, while events around him are manipulated by forces he doesn’t understand. Looked at from that angle, horror is already sitting inside the story.

“It’s a disorienting, uncanny situation,” Imogen says. “It felt like an interesting point of departure for a new play.”

FATHOM takes that point of departure and moves somewhere else entirely, relocating the story to the Fens and drawing on folk horror. The island in The Tempest becomes land repeatedly drained and reshaped by human intervention, making it an irresistible folk-horror metaphor for a landscape brought to heel which might decide to bite back.

REWRITING THE RULES

Rather than retelling a specific story, THE DUSK REALM borrows the structure and language of anthology horror: the ominous host, the introduction to a tale of terror, the portentous quotation, the reassuring rhythm of one strange story following another.

Its writer-performer, Jonathan Laury, is particularly interested in repetition because repetition creates rules. Set up a pattern clearly enough and an audience begins to anticipate what comes next. Horror and comedy can then have considerable fun refusing to give it to them. THE DUSK REALM presents a succession of macabre tales, each with its own introduction and conclusion and each using a different storytelling technique. That familiarity becomes a wonderfully efficient creative shortcut.

“We’re used to story structure, and traditional narratives,” Laury says. “So sometimes we as an audience think we want the same thing again. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, happy ever after.”

Or, alternatively:

“Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again and is eaten alive.”

PLOTBUSTERS uses the same shortcut, only faster. Its improvised horror movies are created from scratch, but well-worn tropes allow performers and audience to establish a shared language almost instantly. A cheerleader becomes separated from the group on Friday the Thirteenth and we have a reasonable idea where this is heading. But what if The Exorcist took place in a swimming pool? Halloween in an old people’s home? Dracula running an amusement park? These are, PLOTBUSTERS assures us, “all important questions”.

Image:  Jonathan Laury in THE DUSK REALM (photo credit: Karla Gowlett)



THE FORM FIGHTS BACK

Moving anthology horror from television to fringe theatre creates another opportunity for reinvention. Television keeps its audience safely outside the frame. THE DUSK REALM does not. The audience becomes increasingly involved in the performance, introducing an element of chaos into a structure that begins under the control of an authoritative host. The composed figure gradually becomes more fragmented as the audience interferes in increasingly strange ways. What begins as homage to an established horror form can therefore become something about anxiety, social pressure and the instability of trying to remain in command. Then the form itself starts to unravel.

FATHOM changes the light on its source in a different way. Imogen describes retelling through a wonderfully simple image.

“It’s like holding a sheet of coloured plastic over a page of text - certain parts become easier to read, while others disappear completely.”

WHEN DOES A RETELLING BECOME SOMETHING NEW?

FATHOM is recognisably connected to The Tempest, but Imogen is clear that it is also a play in its own right. Its setting, time and thematic interests are different, making the border between adaptation and original work surprisingly slippery.

THE DUSK REALM has no single original to measure itself against. Laury trusts that filtering anthology horror through his own interests and lived experience prevents homage from becoming imitation.

PLOTBUSTERS goes further still - there is no original story because there is no story until the performance begins. What survives is the machinery of horror: stock characters, ominous locations, familiar warnings and bad decisions. The details change. The grammar remains.

DIGGING UP THE PAST

Horror has always been unusually fond of old material. Myths, folklore, classic texts, gothic stories and familiar cultural forms are repeatedly drawn upon. For Imogen, their longevity is part of their power. “If a story is old, that means it’s persisted,” she says.

Something in it mattered enough for people to continue telling it until it reached us. That gives an old story a strange kind of weight. Not necessarily truth, but cultural potency. Folklore gains an additional foothold because it is so often connected to landscape. Stories invented to explain places or natural phenomena remain attached to things we can still see.

The world changes around them. The landscape remains. Laury sees a similar tension between what changes and what does not. Social values shift, allowing familiar horrors to be recontextualised for a different moment. Something frightening in one period may look ridiculous in another, while something previously mundane can acquire new menace. But some fears barely need updating. Laury points to the ocean: technology changes, but put one exhausted person alone in deep water with nothing on the horizon and the fear becomes recognisable across centuries. Particularly, he adds, “when something large brushes past your leg.”

MAKING THE FAMILIAR STRANGE

Perhaps horror returns to familiar material because recognition gives it somewhere secure to begin. An old play. A television format. A masked killer. A summer camp beside a suspiciously picturesque lake. An audience settles in because it thinks it understands the shape of the thing. Then the shape changes. Imogen hopes that recognising The Tempest encourages an audience to believe it knows where FATHOM is heading, “until suddenly they don’t.”

PLOTBUSTERS might give its audience the cliché they were expecting, only to drop it somewhere nobody involved had imagined five minutes earlier.

And THE DUSK REALM’s ambitions for the moment when recognition gives way to surprise are marginally less restrained:

“Uproarious laughter. Standing ovation. Flowers. Let’s dream big.”

Either way, the pleasure is the same.

Horror doesn’t always need to invent a new monster. Sometimes it only needs to take something we thought we knew and bend it slightly out of shape.

END

BEHIND THE SCREAMS: How do you scare an audience with one performer

When there is nobody else on stage, where does the threat come from? We talk to solo horror-makers about invisible antagonists, unpredictable audiences, contorted bodies and why one performer is more than enough.

A performer walks onstage alone. There are no other actors to react, interrupt or take over while a behind-the-scenes trick is prepared. For horror, that presents an obvious problem. Fear thrives on anticipation. On the suspicion that somebody - or something - might be just out of sight. So what happens when the audience knows there’s only one person up there?

For writer-performer Polis Loizou, whose solo work includes YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES and I WAS A TEENAGE BISEXUAL, it undoubtedly makes the job tougher.

In YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES, Polis turns to 1940s Hollywood, playing a notorious film director auditioning a young actor for a horror film whose previous lead mysteriously died, gradually drawing him into a world of exploitation.

“It’s just harder to build and sustain that necessary tension,” he says. “You don’t have anyone to bounce off, and threat doesn’t feel as immediate.”

Harder, though, does not mean less effective. In I WAS A TEENAGE BISEXUAL, Polis plays roughly twenty characters and, at one point, has to fight himself.

Alice Mayer, writer-performer of HOURGLASS, takes a different approach. Rather than playing the other characters herself, she performs opposite a cast of disembodied voices.

HOURGLASS follows Charlie, a young woman whose exes keep dying and who begins to find power in a curse that may make her considerably more dangerous than she first appears.

“The only thing you get to rely on is the strength of your own storytelling,” Alice says.

Perhaps the first rule of solo horror, then, is not to apologise for there being only one person on stage. It’s to make that person feel like an entire cast.

THE UNSEEN MONSTER

Horror doesn’t need to put the monster in front of us.

Polis prefers to let the audience complete the picture themselves. Subtle changes in physicality or vocal inflection can suggest an unseen presence. In YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES, the idea is complicated further: his protagonist is the threat to somebody the audience cannot see.

In HOURGLASS, the uncertainty lies partly in Charlie herself. She may be an unreliable narrator.

“Your audience’s mind is your greatest tool, especially in solo theatre,” Alice says. “Is she this sweet girl who has bad things happen to her, or is she a mass murderer? That decision is in the audience’s hands.”

For writer-performer Mimi Thompson and director Nathalee Avery, creators of THE HAUNTING, the threat comes from somewhere different. Thompson plays Mimi, who is being haunted by her period. Every month she receives instructions sealed in blood which she must obey in order to stop the bleeding; when the demands escalate to kissing her best friend’s boyfriend, the one-hour solo horror-comedy follows the repercussions of this decision.

Rather than drawing out the anticipation, they keep the show deliberately fast-paced. Mimi is constantly moving, with props and costumes appearing throughout.

“Since they can’t predict the next thing to happen to her, the possibility suddenly emerges that a threat might suddenly leap out from a curtain, from the audience, from behind Mimi,” they explain. “The possibility becomes the antagonist.”

That may be one of solo horror’s great advantages. Remove the visible threat and almost anything can occupy the empty space - a prop becomes suspicious, a dark corner becomes inhabited, silence becomes menacing.

Polis is emphatic about the value of withholding information: “Don’t show everything and never over-explain. Uncertainty is one of the key drivers of fear.”

THE HAUNTING similarly asks its audience to contribute imaginatively. Mimi narrates much of the story and frequently uses mime, turning the limitations of a small-scale fringe production into part of the theatrical language. Thompson and Avery describe it as a challenge to the audience: can a solo performer on a minimal set persuade you to enter this world and be frightened by it?

Horror has always understood this principle well. Show us the monster and we can assess it. Leave the door closed and we can invent something far worse.

HOW MUCH TECH DO YOU NEED?

There’s no single answer.

Polis has tried both extremes. I WAS A TEENAGE BISEXUAL uses video, sound and changing lighting states to create a cinematic world large enough to hold its many characters. YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES, on the other hand, strips almost everything away: Polis, a chair, a fake glass tumbler and one lighting state.

In that piece, it’s precisely the sparseness - and the acknowledgement of theatrical falseness - that makes the experience uncomfortable.

HOURGLASS is at the other end of the scale. Alice performs against a single 45-minute track, interacting with pre-recorded actors as though they are in the room with her. Different sound states, music and silence help create the world around Charlie, alongside puppetry, food and, naturally, severed body parts.

Timing is unforgiving.

“If I mess up, the whole show messes up,” Alice says.

Meanwhile, THE HAUNTING also takes a maximalist approach. Props were part of Mimi’s thinking from the start, while sound became another way of populating the space. Multiple voices are absorbed into a soundscape which, in a small theatre, can become almost oppressive.

The lesson seems less about whether solo horror should be technically elaborate or stripped bare than whether the theatrical language belongs to the story.

One performer can occupy a cinematic landscape; another can have little more than a chair.

Both can be frightening.

WHEN THE BODY BECOMES THE SPECIAL EFFECT

Without another actor to redirect our attention, the performer’s body becomes extraordinarily important.

Polis maintains that surprise doesn’t require a new physical element suddenly appearing. A sharp increase in volume, a jump, or even a creeping realisation passing across somebody’s face can be enough to catch an audience off guard.

His multiple characters in I WAS A TEENAGE BISEXUAL are built through specific movements, poses and voices. One town-hall sequence requires him to switch rapidly between ten characters, changes that have become instantaneous through repetition.

Even a small alteration in voice or posture, he argues, can become unsettling.

For THE HAUNTING, physicality is crucial. Towards the end of the show, Mimi’s body itself becomes part of the horror. Thompson took a contemporary dance course while developing the show, exploring the limits and possibilities of her movement.

One key moment has her fold herself into an uncomfortable, contorted position. At first, it looked faintly comic. So she and the director made it last longer. Then she began to move, slowly.

The longer they stretched the moment, the more disturbing it became. Audiences subsequently identified it as one of the show’s most frightening scenes.

Alice also begins HOURGLASS with physical transformation, using a short movement sequence in which Charlie grotesquely stretches into a spider.

She admits that, as an audience member, watching one performer dance can make her uncomfortable. So she uses that discomfort.

“I commit to it and then when the piece snaps to reality, it causes people to laugh and then they’re immediately on your side.”

Sometimes the difference between funny and terrifying is simply refusing to stop.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

Small fringe venues may seem difficult places to hide theatrical tricks, but they’re also particularly well placed to frighten people.

For Alice, that intimacy recalls something much more basic: hearing a frightening story at a sleepover and lying awake afterwards.

“You have to trust audiences to use their own imagination.”

Polis wrote YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES specifically for the Cinema Room at Edinburgh’s Banshee Labyrinth. The intimacy intensifies the claustrophobia and allows an audience to see tiny changes in his face that would disappear in a larger auditorium.

THE HAUNTING similarly uses proximity to its advantage. Its audience is involved throughout, with those closest to the action unable to retreat from what’s happening in front of them.

But proximity also alters the relationship between performer and audience.

A solo actor has no colleague on stage to absorb an unexpected laugh, cough or badly timed reaction.

Mimi draws energy from those responses and sometimes acknowledges an unexpected laugh before returning to the story. Thompson and Avery see that responsiveness as part of building a stronger connection with the room rather than pretending the audience isn’t there.

Alice is equally dependent on the people in front of her.

“My show lives and dies by audience reaction,” she says.

A particularly large laugh or gasp can alter her timing, forcing her to speed up or slow down while still keeping the show locked to its pre-recorded track.

Polis remains aware of the room too, subtly altering his performance around its energy.

The audience may not have lines, but they are the other people in the scene.

ONE PERFORMER, MANY HATS

There is also a less glamorous reality to solo performance - if something needs doing, there’s only one person available to do it.

The ending of THE HAUNTING asks Mimi simultaneously to move props, deliver dialogue, interact with the audience and change costume. Thompson and Avery knew from the beginning that the sequence would be difficult and rehearsed it repeatedly to prevent any practical activity from draining the scene of energy.

DOES IT ACTUALLY WORK?

And then there is the question every horror-maker eventually has to confront: is any of this actually scary?

Alice’s answer is admirably concise.

“You don’t. You hope.”

One encouraging indication so far? Her favourite reaction to one of the show’s scares: “An old woman clutching at her pearls.”

For Polis, development begins with the simplest test: “Do I find this creepy?”

Beyond that, fear is subjective. A moment that unnerves one audience member may leave another completely untouched. His default position, he jokes, is to assume he is boring everybody until they tell him otherwise.

Thompson and Avery brought in an audience early in the process, holding a feedback session after a dress rehearsal. Unexpectedly, most people wanted to participate more.

Rather than shrinking away from the threat, they wanted to move closer to it.

Which perhaps speaks to the strange appeal of horror theatre.

An audience buys a ticket knowing that somebody intends to make them uncomfortable.

Then they walk into a dark room and help them do it.

ALONE, BUT NOT REALLY

A solo performer may not have another actor to bounce off, a visible antagonist or somebody else to help carry the scene, but they’re not really alone.

“I don’t feel alone,” Alice says. “I’m in a room full of people.”

Then there are the lighting and sound design, the set, props and costume. The character created through a change of posture or voice. The thing behind the curtain that never emerges.

And there is a willing audience filling every empty space with possibilities.

Asked what they would need to frighten a room if restricted to one performer, one prop and one lighting state, Thompson and Avery reply: Mimi, a torch and red light.

With the right show, that’s enough.

After all, as Polis puts it: “Feel the fear yourself, and they’ll feel it too.”

performance details and ticket links:

I WAS A TEENAGE BISEXUAL LowMAC, 134 Lower Marsh, SE1 7AE
14-19 October, 7pm Plus 2pm on 17 October
Tickets: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/vaultcreativearts/2176727

YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES at Old Red Lion Theatre
21-22 October, 7pm
Tickets: You Oughta Be In Pictures – Old Red Lion Pub & Playhouse

THE HAUNTING at The Libra Theatre Cafe
25 October, 7.30pm, 27 October, 8pm, 28 October, 7pm
Tickets: https://outsavvy.com/event/38731/the-haunting

HOURGLASS at The Bread & Roses Theatre
29-30 October, 7pm
Tickets: https://www.breadandrosestheatre.co.uk/whats-on.html

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE FEAR: Three horror makers on how fear actually works

What does it actually take to frighten an audience in a theatre? From a carefully placed silence to a 3,000-cue technical system, LPTM Horror Season meets some of the people building fear live. How do you make someone afraid when they’re sitting in a theatre surrounded by other people, perfectly aware that the person apparently having their teeth pulled out a few feet away is an actor?

Everything has to feel immediate - the performer has to sustain the fear, the sound cue has to be perfectly timed, the lighting change has to happen at precisely the right moment. Perhaps that precision is exactly what makes theatrical horror so interesting.

A successful scare belongs to a team: writers, performers, the director, sound, lighting and set designers, technicians - and, ultimately, the audience.

For Horror Season, we spoke to theatre-makers behind three very different fringe productions - THE MAN WHO THOUGHT HE WAS A BABOON (performing at Drayton Arms Theatre, Kensington), MARA (Hen & Chickens Theatre, Islington) and SURVIVE THE NIGHT (The UnDisposables at Old Red Lion Playhouse, Islington) - to find out how the machinery of fear actually works.

STARTING POINT

Somi De Souza, playwright, director and performer of THE MAN WHO THOUGHT HE WAS A BABOON, starts with character. “We have to see them in their normal state before anything has happened,” she explains. If an audience is going to fear for somebody, first they have to care what happens to them. In BABOON, Hugo is living a quiet life with his wife, Summer, when a substantial inheritance changes everything. Drawing on a secret shame from his childhood, Summer and the newly arrived village doctor begin carefully convincing him that he is a baboon.

De Souza describes the play as psychological terror: “a slow removal of boundaries, a dismantling of the character’s sense of reality”. There are no monsters waiting in the wings. The horror comes from watching something recognisable - apparently good intentions curdling into something darker. 

4. AUDIENCE AWARDS FOR HORROR SHOW, CAST YOUR VOTES HERE

We’re putting the decision in your hands. Throughout the festival season, audiences will be able to vote for their favourite productions and moments across all three festivals, including:

Best Death

Best Jump Scare

Best Twist

Most Inventive Use of a Prop

Keep an eye out for the voting link and have your say.

FOLLOW THE HORROR SEASON ON INSTAGRAM @pubtheatres1

New reviews and features will be added throughout October, so check back regularly for the latest coverage. LPTM’s Horror Season is an experimental editorial feature for October 2026, and we’ll see where it takes us … For now, dim the lights.