THE PRIZE OF FEAR

This Halloween, The Business of Pleasure traces the historic roots, and enduring appeal, of Horror Movies, from their origins stories in London’s West End to the survival stuff of evolutionary adaptation.

Youthful Follies

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 the 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 of course, I didn’t take him up on it. And a possible life-changing ‘Sliding Doors’ meeting was condemned to the personal ‘Hellraiser’ of regret.**

Hellraiser II

That evening, as every evening, I changed into my white tie and tails to greet the theatre-going public.  The suit’s previous occupant had been the infamous Hell Raiser, Peter O’Toole, who had appeared at the Shaftesbury in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and I had inherited (collared) the great star’s stylish Henry Higgins tails and ankle-length overcoat in return for shifting some costume rails for theatre’s Wardrobe Mistress.***

O’Toole famously massacred one of the most celebrated Horror Stories of all time, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (the show that dare not speak its name) which premiered 381 years BH (Before Hellraiser). The Old Vic production, which had reportedly grossed a whopping £250,000 in advance bookings, closed after just two weeks …and so entered into showbiz legend:

“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 some of them greeted one new interpretation at the Lyceum, with others calling it: “A melancholy travesty of Shakespeare’s prince.’’

But this was one Thesp 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, the overly-precise hand gestures and the ivory face paint (with blood-red lippy) Irving is widely believed to be the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Stoker worked for Irving 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 something more than a little suspicious (IMO) in someone casting their boss as a blood-sucking vampire.

The other giant overshadowing the Pantheon of Horror, Frankenstein, could also be said to have his roots in London's West End. The eighteen-year old Mary Shelley may have famously formulated the idea for the book in 1816 at the Villa Diodati outside Geneva, but the seeds of the story had almost certainly been sown (or at least well-watered) while she was sitting in the stalls watching the Gothic melodramas of her youth (or, more likely, in Byron’s Box at Drury Lane) as the spectacular stagecraft that drew the crowds to these productions regularly featured storms and lightning, resurrections and reanimations. (Sound familiar?)

It was also the London Stage which took Shelley’s ‘pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together’ and transformed him/them into the towering transplant recipient 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 as ‘Igor,’ Rocky Horror’s ‘Riff Raff’ and Young Frankenstein’s “Eye-Gore” played by bulging-eyed comic genius Marty Feldman.  

You say Igor, I say Eye-Gore

Whatever their origins, back-stories and subsequent iterations (and alliterations) the appeal of the horror genre (and its progenitor and co-producer, tragedy) has raised quizzical eyebrows 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 put 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.”

In an echo of last week’s read ‘free energy’ explanation of creativity***** this paper attributes the driving force, or evolutionary imperative, behind the appeal of Horror Movies to our adaptive ambivalence towards predictability and prediction error:

“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 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 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.”

DT 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' 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

*****Deliver Me From Somewhere, The Business of Pleasure, 23 Oct, 2025