Monsters, murders, and terrifying moments in theater history
Executive Editor Interviews Amnon Kabatchnik, Author of Horror on the Stage: Monsters, Murders, and Terrifying Moments in Theater
Fearphilia—it’s not a word but it’s obviously a thing judging by all the people who line up at theaters to get the wits scared out of them. And since the days of the ancient Greeks, playwrights have taken advantage by creating all manner of diabolical characters and plotlines to keep audiences on edge. The advent of cinema only made their job easier.
Today, we’re thrilled to hear from Amnon Kabatchnik, author of Horror on the Stage: Monsters, Murders, and Terrifying Moments. Foreword’s Executive Editor Matt Sutherland found the book to be a riveting compendium of fear-inducing writing and jumped at the opportunity to connect with Amnon for the following conversation.
Let’s start off with the most basic questions: What is horror, as it relates to the stage? Why do playwrights use it in their works?
Horror is an intense feeling of fear, shock. The first unnerving moment in theater history occurred when an ancient Greek audience entered the Athens arena for a production of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (c. 480 BC) and saw Prometheus, the Titan, chained to a cliff, an iron wedge through his breast and shackles on his feet. The cliff was of enormous height, and the figure of Prometheus dangling above the orchestra must have been a chilling sight, setting a dark mood for the ensuing action of the play. Future playwrights found their own devices to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
What compelled you to create this definitive history of “monsters, murders, and terrifying moments in theater,” to repurpose your subtitle?
Many years ago, I graduated from Boston University with a BS in journalism and theater. I continued my studies at the Yale School of Drama, majoring in directing. I soon found myself in New York, directing plays Off-Broadway. I began my professional career staging plays by Anton Chekhov and Maxwell Anderson, but soon picked plays of suspense when helming productions across the United States—on the road, summer stock, and various universities (where I also taught courses in acting and directing), as well as abroad (in Canada and Israel). More and more I was drawn to plays of detection and melodramas of anxiety.
During the last twelve years or so, I returned to my old love of writing and penned a dozen books, including a series of seven volumes titled Blood on the Stage, examining, chronologically, plays of crime-themed plays, drenched with treachery and bloodshed. It was a small step to shift my concentration to the horror genre.
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, and other ancient Greek writers didn’t shy away from ghastliness in their theater productions, as you document in the book. But at the time, most everyone believed that gods like Zeus, Athena, and Medea were actively involved in life on earth. How do you think this paganistic belief system influenced how Greek audiences took in a play? Did those ancient playwrights need to write differently—perhaps, more outrageously—than the writers who came later and wrote to a Jewish or Christian audience?
As evident in early plays written and produced in ancient Greece, the courts of justice have already utilized the system of the jury. Yet, the belief in the Olympus gods was so prevalent, that the final decision of the fate of the accused was left to the gods. It was Zeus who sent Prometheus to Hades. It was Athena who made the decision to forgive Orestes, the killer of his mother. It was Hermes who sent the woman of Trachis to tear their king from limb to limb.
The death scenes were originally described vividly and colorfully by a messenger, but in Sophocles’s Aiax (444 BC), the title character ends up falling on his sword, and for the first time “dying” on stage in full view of the audience. Graphic descriptions of death and murder followed. Thyestes (60 A.D.) by Seneca climaxes in a gruesome banquet in which a father, unknowingly, partakes of his own children. The Killing of Abel (latter half of the fifteenth century), by The Wakefield Master, illustrates the murder of Abel by Cain, who, in a fit of jealousy, strikes his younger brother with a jawbone. In Herod the Great (1554 A.D.), by The Wakefield Master, the paranoid, cruel king is afraid that a future ruler will arise from Bethlehem, and dispatches his knights to slay boys who are two years old and younger. Quick vignettes ensue, with each knight snatching a child from his mother’s arms and spearing him to death.
How well do these twenty-six-hundred year old plays come across on the modern stage?
Through the passage of time, many of the old plays have been forgotten. A few have been revised by enterprising directors, mostly the ones by Shakespeare, notably Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Julius Caesar, and Volpone by Ben Jonson. In the 17th century, Tartuffe by Moliere. In the 18th century, The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. In the 19th century, Faust by Goethe, An Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol, An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by various adapters of the Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, and Sherlock Holmes by William Gillette.
Please talk about the importance of plays and the stage to a culture in the time before motion pictures? Were audiences more innocent, more susceptible to abject fear, than audiences now?
Since the arrival of the cinema and the television mediums, audiences have regularly adjusted to more audacious and graphic moments on stage. In Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1956), the kiss on the lips by two men shocked the audience, as did the end of act 1 in the musical Hair (1968), wherein the entire cast appeared totally nude before the curtain descended. Today such moments will have a less jarring effect.
What took place in the Swiss Alps on the night of June 19th, 1816, and why it was so important in the history of horror?
On the night of June 19, 1816, four friends were trapped by a storm at a lodge in the Swiss Alps. Lord Byron hosted the impromptu party, and his guests included Byron’s physician, Dr. John Polidori, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft, daughter of author William Godwin. Trying to pass the time, they decided to concoct ghost stories. That night, two important works were born. Polidori would embellish his ghost story and come up with the novella The Vampyre, introducing the suave undead Lord Ruthven, and Mary would build on her tale and write the gothic novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Percy Shelley edited Mary’s manuscript and Frankenstein was first published, in three hardcover volumes, on January 1, 1818. Five years later, Richard Brinsley Peake adapted the novel to the stage under the title Presumption, or, The Fate of Frankenstein, the first of many theatrical versions to follow. Polidori’s novel was adapted to the Parisian stage in 1820, and later that year was produced in London, called The vampire, or, the bride of the isles. Both the vampire and Frankenstein’s monster remained to this very day key factors in the everlasting history of horror.
With Mary Wollstonecraft on our minds, can you add a word or two about other women writers of horror for the stage? Was their prejudice against them?
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the first English women to earn her living by writing, breaking a cultural barrier and serving as a literary role model for later generations of female authors. Between 1670 and 1687, Behn produced nineteen plays, more than any dramatist of her generation (except John Dryden), of which one was a bona fide tragedy, Abdelazer, or, The Moor’s Revenge, an adaptation of 1600’s Lust Dominion by Christopher Marlowe, wherein the action unfolds mostly at Spain’s royal palace. A series of betrayals and fatalities engulfs the kingdom.
The next female author who utilized criminous elements in her works was the American Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935). She is variously regarded as the “mother, grandmother, and godmother of the detective story,” because of her authorship of The Leavenworth Case (1878). Green adapted her novel to the stage in 1891. In a key moment, the secretary of a tycoon shoots him as he sits at his desk planning to change his will. The murder of a household maid follows. A reviewer of The New York Times (September 20, 1891) called it “a strong and thrilling story,” but complained that “the incidents too strongly border on the awful, and tend to harrow up the feelings of the audience.”
More female authors began to join the fray, mixing their ink with blood. The better known were Baroness Orczy (The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1904); Mary Roberts Rinehart (The Bat, 1920); Peggy Webling (Frankenstein: An Adventure of the Macabre, 1927); Mae West (Diamond Lil, 1928); Ayn Rand (Night of January 16th, 1935); Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes, 1939); Vera Caspary (Laura, 1945); Quida Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes, 1953); Helen MacInnes (Home Is the Hunter, 1964); Clara Stauch (Dracula, Baby, 1970); and Polly Teale (Jane Eyre, 1997). Agatha Christie, who wrote nineteen plays, concocted one that was peppered with horror touches—Ten Little Indians, 1943—which she based on her novel And Then There Were None, wherein ten men and women are cruelly murdered in a variety of means.
You open chapter 3, Harrowing Adaptations, with a quick story about Robert Louis Stevenson conceiving his 1886 book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a cocaine-induced nightmare, according to The Guardian. Since 1887, more than 120 J&H plays have been produced in the US and Europe. What is it about Stevenson’s story that resonates so well with audiences?
Readers responded vigorously to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the day it was published in 1886. The story had such great impact that the two names, Jekyll and Hyde, have become part of our common language as a metaphor for a person marked by dual personalities—one good, the other evil. I personally admire Robert Louis Stevenson’s bogey tale as number one in my reading of horror novels.
When Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was adapted to the stage in 1887, starring Richard Mansfield, the reviews were favorable, including the comment “The Climax is very striking and vivid.” The spectators were shocked when they realized in the last two scenes that the kind Dr. Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde represented the dual nature of the same person. Critics reported that “strong men shuddered and women fainted and were carried out of the theatre. People went away from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde afraid to enter their house alone. They feared to sleep in darkened rooms. They were awakened by nightmare. Yet it had fascination of crime and mystery, and they came again and again.”
That fascination of crime and mystery, coupled with directorial theatrical devices for suspense, was especially effective in moments conveying the suggestion that Hyde was approaching. “This was effected with an empty stage,” said scholars, “a gray-green gloom, and oppressive silence. Then with a wolfish howl, a panther’s leap, and the roar of a fiend. Hyde was miraculously in view.”
The effect of the show was proven during a run in London in 1888. The mutilated bodies of five prostitutes were found in Whitechapel, and the related series of murders were soon attributed to the elusive “Jack the Ripper.” Among the theories it was suggested that the dangerous murderer was a butcher, sailor, policeman, journalist, and a royal surgeon to Queen Victoria. Due to Richard Mansfield’s convincing portrayal of Dr. Jekyll’s transformation into Mr. Hyde, the actor was added to the list of suspects.
In view of the fact that people love to fear when there is company around, the success of Mansfield’s show in Manhattan spawned other versions all over the United States, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was adapted to the screen and to television numerous times in various countries. While such genres as the Western have declined, the horror milieu remained constantly strong. No doubt, a new adaptation of Stevenson’s novel is around the corner, proving again and again that people love to fear in a dark auditorium, when surrounded by a nearby crowd.
Sophocles, Seneca, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Henry James, Agatha Christie, Stephen King—such an illustrious list. So, who was the master of the horror-for-the-stage genre, in your mind?
Many years ago, when enrolled at Boston University, I was cast in the title role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The director, Michael Clark Lawrence, was a member of the Abbey Theatre and I was assigned by him to learn and practice sword dueling. The climax of the play, in which most of the leading characters are killed by stabs and poisoning, was naturally hooked in mind and I would nominate Shakespeare as an uncharacteristic master of the horror-for-the-stage genre. We should also remember the unsettling appearance of the three witches and the assassination of children in Macbeth, as well as the suffocating-by-a-pillow of the moor’s innocent wife in Othello.
But competing with Shakespeare for the “honor” of being the master of stage horror are ancient Rome’s Seneca, whose play Thyestes climaxes in a banquet scene wherein a father, unknowingly, munches on his sons’ remains and drinks their blood and Edgar Allan Poe, who has not written plays but his short stories were adapted to the stage, notably “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which a gigantic ape viciously slaughters two women and plants their bodies in a chimney. Bram Stoker’s unearthly Dracula drinks the blood of virginal women. The climax of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw depicts a losing battle between a governess attempting to protect a young boy and an evil ghost. The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells, introduces hybrids of animals in grisly experiments—an attempt to give them human qualities.
Frankenstein, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Jekyll and Hyde, Misery, Carrie, Sweeny Todd, Silence of the Lambs … do you have a favorite for the GHPOAT (greatest horror play of all time)?
The French author Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) created a hideously disfigured, masked musical genius, Erik, who is amorously obsessed with a young, beautiful opera singer, Christine Daae. Erik dwells in the subterranean passages of the Paris Opera, where much of the action takes place. Among the suspenseful moments is the tearing of the mask by a curious Christine, revealing Erik’s horribly distorted face, and Erik releasing the ceiling hook during a performance, sending the massive chandelier down and, with a blinding flash, it swings madly over the orchestra pit and crashes at Christine’s feet. With music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, and book by Richard Stilgoe, The Phantom of the Opera may well be the greatest horror play/musical of all time. It won the 1986 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best New Musical, the 1988 Tony Award for Best Musical, and the 1988 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Broadway Musical. It is the longest running show in Broadway history.
On to the appendix where you talk about the Birth of the Gothics. Please describe Gothic terror?
The exact description of Gothic terror varies by researchers and scholars. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the Gothic novel as “European Romantic pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. The Heyday was the 1780s but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries. Called Gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins, such novels commonly used such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trap doors … The classic horror stories Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker are in Gothic tradition … Gothic atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorn, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great Expectations.” This description seems to be definitive, though, as I have mentioned above, there are many other authors who dabbled in Gothic terror.
And then, Paris, France, 1897–1962: Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, about which historian Mel Gordon winningly writes, “Audiences came to the Theatre of the Grand Guignol to be frightened, to be shocked. … Here was a theatre genre that was predicated on the stimulation of the rawest and most adolescent of human interactions and desires: incest and patricide; blood lust; sexual anxiety and conflict; morbid fascination with bodily mutilation and death; loathing of authority; fear of insanity; an overall disgust for the human condition and its imperfect institutions.” Fascinating stuff. Please give readers a feel for the place?
Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol was established in 1887 in a decadent alley of Paris. This was not an ordinary playhouse. Each bill included one-act plays of the horrific and the erotic. “A prostitute is trapped in a bedroom with a psychopathic killer,” relate authors Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson in Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. “A doctor replaces medicine with poison and injects his unsuspecting patient … A man embraces his daughter before blowing out her brains … Another father strangles his son to death … A woman’s face smokes and melts as it is covered in vitriol … a man amputates his own hand with an axe … A woman is skinned alive while another watches in sexual ecstasy … Members of the audience begin to lose consciousness while a desperate house-house attempts to revive them.” Often, dramatic pieces interspersed with comedies. The repertoire of stage trickery and special effects, enhanced by the ingenious use of stage lighting and shadows, made the audience gasp.
After many years of success, the Grand Guignol became a victim of cinema. Movies could present gory images more realistically than the theater, as evident by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s les diaboliques (1954) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Movies also had the advantage of editing and location shooting. Finally, the Grand Guignol had to close doors, performing for the last time in November of 1962.
Have you personally seen many live performances of these plays you researched for the book?
I have had a personal connection with a number of suspenseful and horrific plays as a director. Among the plays that I staged (for Off-Broadway in New York, at summer stock, and university theatres) were The Cat and the Canary, Arsenic and Old Lace, Angel Street (Gaslight), The Mousetrap, Ten Little Indians, Dracula, Sleuth, Wait Until Dark, Dial M for Murder, A Shot in the Dark, Ladies In Retirement, and the playlet “Coals of Fire,” which initially opened at the Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol in Paris.
What’s next for you and your talented pen?
My next writing project is Murder in the West End: The Plays of Agatha Christie and Her Disciples, in two volumes. The first volume is due to come out any day, published by BearManor Media. I analyze plays of crime and punishment that have premiered in London during the twentieth century. The entries are presented chronologically. Each includes a plot synopsis, production data, opinions by scholars and critics, as well as biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors and directors.
Matt Sutherland
