I’ve felt anxious, sweaty, uncomfortable and desperate to get out of a theatre several times in my life. Sometimes because I was scared, sometimes because I was hungry, and sometimes because the play was worse than a shoe full of shit.

But rarely have I woken in the night, trembling and terrified by a play. At university, I spent a whole week sleeping on my friend’s floor after watching The Shining, just so when I did wake up in a holy terror, at least I could hear her breathing and laugh at her hideous pajamas. Which led me to believe that film will always be scarier than theatre. 

There are several reasons for this: firstly, when watching a film I can much more easily suspend my disbelief. I forget I am watching actors play out a construction; I think I am just watching a story. Secondly, creating tension, suggestion and fear is much easier when you can control of where the audience looks. Close ups, framing and focus mean that 90% of your viewers are watching what you want them to watch. In the theatre, there’s nothing to stop me spending a whole scene looking at a chair, lower stage right. And even the most hysterical cathedraphobe (that's made up Latin for fear of chairs) can probably manage twenty minutes of staring at a seat without jumping out of theirs. Finally, there is something about on-stage horror that all-to-easily tips into farce. A stage death, parading ghosts, ear-ripping screams and crashing crimson tides of blood can, and often do, give me the giggles.

So, imagine my surprise to discover quite how many of you had filled your breeches over just this kind of onstage antics. As well as the 4,856 of you who suggested that The Woman in Black haunted, terrified, and dampened you for weeks and years after, there were lots of suggestions of less well-known plays that had scared the living bejaysus out of you.

Promenade performances give quite a few of you the willies. As Felix Mortimer of RETZ so graphically put it, “I’ve never been chased around a cinema by a man with a chainsaw or locked in a basement with a creepy voice in my ear.” Obviously not been to my local Odeon, then. Or how about It Felt Like a Kiss by Punchdrunk, Adam Curtis and Damon Albarn, which told the ghost story of the American Dream in an apparently disused building. Or Slung Low’s They Only Come at Night: Visions, which scared film and theatre student Emmeline Wells so much she “had to keep reminding myself they were actors, not murderers.” 

Then there are the psychologically disturbing, rather than outright scream-a-long-a-shocka chills of, say, Jeremy ‘League of Gentlemen’ Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories. The writer Tom Green on Twitter called Relocated by Anthony Neilson “unnerving and then genuinely frightening,” while the inevitable slipping into madness of, say, Gaslight will always terrify me.

Or how about good old-fashioned supernatural terror? Queen Bee at Northern Stage shows a huge rambling family home haunted not by ghosts, but by a swarm of ghostlike bees. Or the unsettling butterflies of Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, which rendered poor old actor Fiona Porritt “rigid with fear”.

There are also the plays that tap into our childhood fears. Shockheaded Peter at the Albany Theatre creeped out Ella Bowman, while The Pitchfork Disney (another Philip Ridley play) made writer Miriam Zendle “shake violently for 10 minutes afterward”. Or, in the words of the my friend Ellie Mann, “I'm still haunted by the sight of Phil Schofield's shaved chest in Joseph and the Technicolour thingy.”

Happy Halloween!

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Illustration by Narcsville.

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