Beware the Ghostlight: 3 Horror Plays You Should Know
The first professional theatre production I saw was a performance of Dracula put on by Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2012 or 2013. My high school drama club took a little field trip. We sat in the arena theatre and watched as vampires stalked the aisles. Blood sprayed from the victims onto those who sat in the first rows. Actors appeared and disappeared through lifts and smog. A child exited a coffin.
I wouldn’t call it scary. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t call most pieces of horror scary, no matter the genre. Well, except for horror video games. Interactivity heightens the fear for me in a way filmed jump cuts and artfully written dread simply can’t manage. But it was thrilling.
I love horror. Many of my favorite pieces of art are at least horror-adjacent. The darkness is enchanting. The tropes and monsters, the gore and sex, the character studies of high duress and mental breakage… I love it all so very much.
I’ve written plenty of my own.
There are short plays where:
And full-length plays where:
Heck, the very first play I wrote was a YA horror inspired by Christie’s And Then There Were None.
This is all to say, I deeply, deeply love this genre. And I love to see it on stage. So I’m going to introduce you to three horror scripts I love. I hope you’ll take the time to read them, produce them, and maybe write your own.
Our first play brings you existential dread Talk to Me by way of the found-footage horror flick Malevolent.
A skeptic and a group of paranormal investigators are hired to investigate a supposedly haunted mansion. The skeptic is there to prove it isn’t haunted, as hauntings, she notes, aren’t real. There are no ghosts or demons. The paranormal investigators are there to prove the exact opposite. Immediately, we run into some delicious tension between these characters and their competing beliefs about the world and each other’s potentially charlatan nature.
Without spoiling the show, I’ll say this much: Certain scenes relish in the magic of the stage to terrify an audience. They would delight designers, directors, actors, and viewers alike. You read it and imagine looking up and…!
Kendall knows how to bathe a theatre in darkness. And who knows what creeps behind your seat? You can laugh at the jokes. They’re funny. But part of you will laugh because you’re uneasy. You know the humor is there to make the dread strike with deeper precision. The ending edges closer and closer, and you’re not prepping for a jumpscare; you’re prepping to hold yourself tight on your way home.
Here’s my New Play Exchange recommendation for this wonderful, horrifying piece:
Some things you read, and they just excite you about theatre all over again, as if you're closing your first show again, living on the high, grinning and swimming in devious imagination. THIS is how you do horror. This is the sort of script that makes me want to kick my ass into gear and get a theatre company started so I can direct it, so I can throw it in front of an audience, and so we can all sit in such delicious terror. Read this. Perform it. And relish in the nightmare.
What happens if you’re told you’re not who you thought you were? If the world were nothing like the happy, stressful, knowable place you thought you resided in? Think of the robots in Westworld or the horror film Companion discovering their nature. It’s difficult to accept. It’s nonsense. If someone woke you up in a strange place tomorrow and said your entire life was a false concoction, you wouldn’t believe them.
But what if they’re right?
Laura Beth Gardner, a pregnant woman quite content with her love life and career, must read through the slush pile. This is generally an uneventful task. You discover people who can’t be bothered to read submission guidelines, people with atrocious prose, and some genuine gems. But this time… there’s a manuscript… that claims her life is a lie. Laura Beth’s. This is meant for her.
Her husband isn’t who she thinks he is.
Her baby isn’t, either.
To quote my New Play Exchange recommendation:
Funny. Terrifying and madness driving. Oh, how I loved this. Bravissimo, Daniel Prillaman. I can't wait to watch.
Sometimes the truest horror lives not in the moment of bloody depravity, but in the utterly sincere, banal, happy lives of those who enact the worst cruelties upon others. This is a time honored trope. In the manga Bleach, Unohana is a kind, gentle woman in charge of healing the soldiers. And yet everyone is terrified of her (with good reason, it’s revealed). In the horror masterpiece Get Out, the girlfriend is the most terrifying of the antagonists because she so easily embodies a loving persona.
We like monster movies, because monsters are different.
We like rogue AI movies, because AI is different.
We want to claim that characters who murder with a smile on their face are uncanny. That label pushes them away from us. We don’t have to ask as many difficult questions. We don’t have to look at our neighbor and truly wonder what they’re capable of. What we are.
In Better, we follow workers at a meat-packing plant. They seem quite normal. And, without spoiling too much, that’s where the true terror lies in this piece.
As I said on New Play Exchange:
One day I will direct a production of this - I'm speaking that into existence. Long live horror in theatre. Read this. Produce it. Damn.
One thing you might note across my NPX recommendations is a deep desire to produce these plays. I adore genre fiction, and I think theatre audiences deserve more of it. I will one day direct productions of all three of these pieces. I hope to see them as well. To that end, I encourage you to read them. And please, for the love of all that’s unholy, scare the shit out of some people by putting them on.
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