The Theatre of Horror: The Haunting of Hill House
The ghost story is a Christmas tradition – but how about a Hammer horror-influenced stage show? As The Haunting of Hill House opens at Liverpool Playhouse just in time for the festive season, director Melly Still makes the case for an alternative to panto
In the world of theatre, Christmas can only mean one thing: panto. There’s no escaping it. As advent arrives, theatre snobs grimace as curtains rise for another year of festive frivolities, and the hangover of ‘he’s behind you’ lingers until the New Year. But if a pantomime dame in a frilly frock isn’t your idea of quality yuletide entertainment, fear not – an alternative theatrical experience awaits you.
The Haunting of Hill House is a psychological thriller that plays on our deepest and darkest human fears. An early critique of the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness, the play – based on the 1959 novel by Shirley Jackson – tells the story of a woman who feels completely excluded from a world in which finding the right husband and having 2.4 children is absolutely everything to live for. A social misfit who is desperate to fit the mould of 1950s America, the more she tries, the less she succeeds.
“On the surface, it’s about four people living in a house together. There’s the old horror trope of cosy fires and ghost stories,” explains Olivier and Tony award nominee, director Melly Still – who brings this new adaptation by Anthony Neilson to the stage. “But central to it, and underlying it, is the story of one person’s breakdown and how she becomes increasingly fractured. It’s a horror story, but it is also a tragedy.”
‘A human commonality is a fear of being unloved and that’s central to the story; it’s about the desperate fear of being alone’ – Melly Still
With scare attractions popping up across the Northwest, it seems our fascination with horror is more potent than ever before – the genre’s apparent genius lying in its ability to provoke terror while still attracting an enormous following. Indeed, its popularity grows year on year, and not just for Halloween. From horror films to immersive experiences, the macabre has a deeply profound impact on us: we are either obsessed with it or avoid it completely.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that horror is slowly making its way to the stage, branching out from its cinematic roots to occupy a new, live space. But what does it take to bring a genre that’s so closely associated with the big screen alive on stage? How does a director go about recreating the effect of multiple camera angles within a single theatre space? Can a cinematic score be transferred to an auditorium with the same level of intimacy?
“With theatre, the advantage is that it’s live; you’re all in the same room feeling the same tension and the same fear that is being manifested in the shared space,” Still says. “Certainly in film you always have the point of view of the cameraman, which can really freak you out. Psychologically you can do almost anything with that because the viewer can be made to feel like they are being watched. In the theatre, it’s harder to control because there’s only a certain amount you can focus on for an audience. If we’re comparing it to film, it’s like having one camera.”
The Haunting of Hill House is Still’s first venture into horror – her background is in directing folk tales – and although she looks to the techniques used in horror films for inspiration, she does not explicitly borrow them for the theatre. Rather, she is driven by one recurring question: What is it about horror films that keeps people watching them?
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“It’s the fear of the unknown that really spooks us out,” she decides. “We’re hard-wired to be afraid of the dark because if we’ve got no light, we don’t know what’s around the corner. With this in mind, we’ve adopted the conceit of darkness as a friend for this particular production.”
Though darkness is intrinsic to the desired effect, Still is quick to point out that the play does not use a multitude of scares merely for the sake of it. More important to her is that the play retains the elements of delicacy and intricacy located in Shirley Jackson’s original novel. “While there are some jump scares it’s not written to do that. It couldn’t be compared to [Susan Hill's] The Woman in Black in that sense because that was intentionally formulaic in order to scare audiences. The Haunting of Hill House is a psychological thriller and the menace within it is lingering; it’s more likely to leave you with an aftertaste. Ultimately, the horror element is not gratuitous – it’s there because it’s led by the narrative.”
All human beings share the emotion and experience of fear and very often it’s the things we most fear in ourselves that come to light in horror movies, which is why they’re so effective. Pointing to the ways in which The Haunting of Hill House taps into our primal fears rather than drawing upon the supernatural, Still remarks that “a human commonality is a fear of being unloved and that’s central to the story; it’s about the desperate fear of being alone.”
So in a play concerned with human fear, what’s the relevance of the haunted house? “In the end, the house serves as a manifestation of all that the central character fears and dreads,” Still says, going on to explain how the house itself becomes one of the characters. Although we never see it, it becomes an extremely vivid element of the play; its creaks and groans create a voice that is present throughout, which comes to life within a complex and detailed sound score.
And it’s not just the play’s content that creates an eerie atmosphere, but the theatre itself. Built in 1866, the Playhouse is the perfect setting for a production of this kind, which simply wouldn’t work in its modern counterpart, the Everyman. “It feels like there are a lot of dead people there somehow, a lot of lives,” Still says. “So many people have sat in the theatre over the decades, and there’s something about the fact it’s got this history. History still has a presence, and people who have lived before still have a presence. You can feel it, but it’s not really a tangible, explicable thing. It’s the uncanny.”
The Haunting of Hill House opens at Liverpool Playhouse on 7 Dec and runs until 16 Jan