HALLOWEESTEND!

This week thrust our moonlit gravedigger’s shovel into the beating heart of Horror, from its historic roots in West End Theatre to its unexpected psychological payoffs…

Back in 1987 a young theatre manager overheard a customer at the Shaftesbury Theatre box office window buying two tickets for Sondheim’s Follies “ as a wedding present.”  “Excuse me, Sir, the manager intervened, “I don’t know what you’ve read about Follies, but it really isn’t a great advertisement for marriage.” “Thanks for the letting me know,” the customer replied, “but that’s why I’m giving the tickets to them. So they know what they’re letting themselves in for. I’m a theatre critic for Time Magazine.”  Somewhat chastened, I took the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner up to my office and we chatted for an hour or so (it always pays to look after critics). When he learned that I was a recent film school graduate he very kindly offered to introduce me to his very good friend Clive Barker, the director of Hellraiser,* but foolishly I didn’t take him up on it. And a possibly life-changing moment was forever condemned to that other, far more excruciating Hell of regrets.**

That evening, as most evenings back then, I changed into my white tie, tails and smile to greet the theatre-going public. The suit’s previous occupant had been the infamous Hellraiser, Peter O’Toole, who had appeared at the Shaftesbury in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. I had acquired the great star’s stylish Henry Higgins tails in return for shifting furniture for the theatre’s Wardrobe Mistress, but sadly his rakish Lawrence of Arabia grin didn’t come with the costume.*** O’Toole famously massacred one of the most celebrated Horror Shows of all time, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which premiered 381 years BH (Before Hellraiser). The infamous Old Vic production, which had reportedly grossed a whopping £250,000 in advance bookings, closed after just two weeks and had theatre critics falling over each other in their attempts to deliver the coup de grâce:

“It is, quite simply, a disaster.” Irving Wardle, The Times

“The most calamitous production of Shakespeare I have ever seen.” Milton Shulman, Evening Standard

 “O’Toole declaims like a man possessed -but not by Shakespeare.” Michael Billington, The Guardian.

 “At times you fear for the safety of the scenery.” Daily Telegraph

Another of the Bard’s Biggies had vexed the ‘Gentlemen of the Press’ over a century earlier and a mile away across Waterloo Bridge. “The worst Hamlet ever,” was how one of them greeted the production at the Lyceum, while another dubbed it “A melancholy travesty of Shakespeare’s prince.’  But this was one actor the critics couldn’t kill off …Sir Henry Irving, the Lyceum’s icily cool, mesmerically hypnotic Actor Manager. With his high collars and swept back hair, his overly-precise hand gestures and ivory face paint (with blood-red lippy) Irving is widely believed to be the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Stoker worked as Irving’s Company Manager for 27 years, and Daniel Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew, is on record for asserting that Irving was “the model for Dracula.”  And while Stoker is generally thought to have idolised Irving, there’s got to be something a bit iffy about modelling a blood-sucking vampire on your employer.

The other giant bestriding the Pantheon of Horror, Frankenstein, could also be said to have his roots in London's West End. The eighteen-year old Mary Shelley famously formulated the idea for the book in 1816 at the Villa Diodati outside Geneva, but the seeds of the story may well have been sown in London while watching hugely popular Gothic melodramas such as Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre. The spectacular stagecraft that drew the crowds to these productions regularly featured storms and lightning, resurrections and reanimations (sound familiar?) The West End’s wily entrepreneurs were also responsible for taking Mary Shelley’s ‘pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together ‘ and transforming it into the towering transplant recipient/Box Office Banger we know today. ‘Presumption; or The Fate of Frankenstein (Richard Brinsley Peake, 1823) introduced the first on-stage monster-creation that would be recreated, bolt-by-bolt, for two hundred years and counting. Peake also introduced the comic servant ‘Fritz’ who would be reincarnated in 1930’s Hollywood as the hunched henchman ‘Igor,’ as Rocky Horror’s ‘Riff Raff,’ and as Young Frankenstein’s “Eye-Gore.”

The enduring appeal of the horror genre, and its great grandaddy Greek Tragedy, has been a source of bafflement for centuries:

‘It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy.’  David. Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, 1742 to 1752

Or as one 2023 research paper on Horror Movies puts it****:

“Despite tremendous efforts in psychology, neuroscience and media and cultural studies, it is still something of a mystery why humans are attracted to content that is horrifying, disgusting or otherwise.”

The paper then goes on to suggest that a hugely important adaptive (evolutionary) advantage might lie at the heart of the conundrum:

‘Recent evidence shows that humans are attracted to, and find pleasure in, relatively uncertain and volatile environments precisely because those environments afford excellent opportunities for error reduction at a better than expected rate -i.e. they offer optimal error dynamics that are essential for maximising learning. Learning is crucial to a system’s ability to minimise uncertainty over time; even successful action policies are very often time restricted. For example, foraging in certain highly predictable areas for food might bring short or medium-term reward, but at some point the supply will be exhausted and new ground will have to be explored. Under PP (Predictive Processing) these exploratory, or epistemic actions, are said to minimise expected prediction error on future outcomes. In other words, for the predictive agent both familiarity (predictability) and curiosity for novelty (unpredictability) drive adaptive behaviour. This is why we seem to be simultaneously attracted to both a comfort in familiarity and the surprising and unpredictable. Error minimising creatures can then be characterised as slope-chasers who are motivated to seek out optimal opportunities to reduce prediction error, or uncertainty, in new and interesting ways.’

Adding later:

 '…We think horror movies can operate in a similar way, offering moviegoers a rare chance to learn about how their own nervous systems react in the face of specific kinds of stimuli, over which they lack any immediate control. When I decide to turn off the lights, and watch a particularly terrifying film alone, I set the scene to learn something about myself. ’ 

Which, when you think about it, is hardly a blood-gorged bat-fang away from how one undisputed Grand Master of Horror, Stephen King, describes the undying appeal of the undead: “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

DT 30 October 2026

(Original draft posted 31 October 2025)

*Barker regarded the film and theatre critic, William A. “Bill” Henry as ‘one of my very dearest friends in all the world.’ “When I was penniless …he brought me over to America on his own dime.”

**Somewhat spookily, one of my Front of House team at the Shaftesbury at the time lived at 187 Dollis Hill Lane, Cricklewood, where Hellraiser was filmed, and was forever being pestered by fans of the film wanting to look around the place.

***Follies' book-writer, James Goldman, had actually penned one of O’Toole’s greatest screen roles, Henry II in The Lion In Winter, in which he played opposite Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine. Both Goldman and Hepburn won Oscars for the film, but, very controversially, O’Toole lost out to Cliff Robertson for Charly.

****Surfing uncertainty with screams: predictive processing, error dynamics and horror films Mark Miller, Ben White. Coltan Scrivner Philosophical Transactions B Royal Society, London, December 2023