SCREAMS FROM THE ATTIC: How Two Dead Cats Inspired Hastings’ New Horror Show

What writer hasn’t been asked: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’  It’s a cliché perhaps, and a notoriously difficult question to answer.  But for the writer of SCREAMS FROM THE ATTIC, a chilling new theatrical experience arriving this September at The Stables Theatre, the answer is easy – the idea began with two dead cats in a pub.

If you’ve visited The Stag Inn in Hastings Old Town, you may have noticed the blackened, mummified felines displayed in a glass case behind the bar.  Their twisted forms had been bricked up for centuries in a chimney before being discoveredduring renovation work in the 1940s.  Local folklore suggest they may have been put there for protection against plague by Hannah Clarke, said to be a seventeenth-century witch who once occupied the building.

It was there, over drinks, that the cast and creative team behind last year’s acclaimed new adaptation of Henry James’ classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw, began discussing what collaboration should come next.  And with inspiration from the witch’s cats, their imaginations turned towards horror.

The team began trading local legends and eerie tales: Molly Hawkins, the child ghost said to haunt Waterloo Passage, after drowning in the Bourne.  The lingering sightings of the Pevensey Werewolf – and the looming shadow cast by one of Hastings’ most infamous former residents, occultist AleisterCrowley, the self-proclaimed ‘wickedest man in the world’.  Crowley spent his final years in the town and supposedly cursed it before his death.  According to the curse, once Hastings gets hold of you, it never truly lets you leave.

But how could these disparate legends and ghost stories be combined into one theatrical experience?

Inspiration came from a tradition in horror cinema – the portmanteau anthology, films where a series of sinister stories unfold within one framing story.

Fans of British horror will immediately recognise the format.  It began in 1945 with the legendary Dead of Night, and thencontinued in the 1970s with cult Amicus productions like Tales from the Crypt, The House That Dripped Blood andAsylum.

Bringing the structure of the portmanteau anthology to the stage, offered exciting possibilities to local writer, TimothyBlackwell.  The form allows horror to shift unexpectedly in tone and texture, from supernatural dread to dark comedy, psychological unease to outright nightmare.  For audiences, it offers the almost forgotten pleasure of theatrical variety, a ‘variety bill of horror’ with the tantalising enjoyment of never quite knowing what awaits them in the next scene.

As the team found out when performing The Turn of the Screw, live theatre intensifies fear in ways that no screen can replicate.  A gasp spreads through the audience.  A scream ricochets between strangers sitting shoulder to shoulder.  The experience is communal, immediate, physical – and there’s no pause button.

Few venues are better suited to such an experience than The Stables Theatre, having a ghost of its own, if stories from the staff are to be believed.  Since opening its doors in 1959, the theatre quickly became central to the cultural life of Hastings.  Under the stewardship of Neil Sellman and the dedicated team of volunteers, the theatre continues to expand in artistic confidence and the scale of its productions.

With any new piece of writing, even if its primary intention is to entertain, there is still the question of zeitgeist – why this story and why now?  Horror on the stage has been enjoying a striking resurgence recently, with the popularity of The Woman in Black, 2:22 A Ghost Story, and Inside Number 9 Stage/Fright.

Why is it that in life, fear is something we instinctively avoid, but in fiction we actively seek it out?  Perhaps horror offers what fairy tales once did: a safe encounter with danger, darkness and mortality.  Children step into the dark wood with Red Riding Hood, confront a wolf disguised as grandma – but they survive the terror unharmed when the story ends and the book is closed.  With a world becoming ever more terrifying, perhaps, as adults, we still need to practice fear through the protection of fiction.

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’  Well, for SCREAMS FROM THE ATTIC, it began with two mummified cats – and from Hastings itself; the dark stories buried beneath its streets, whispered through its pubs and carried in the sea mist.

SCREAMS FROM THE ATTIC premieres at The Stables Theatre from the 23^rd to the 27^th of September.

Tickets are available from the theatre’s website:

stablestheatre.co.uk

Box office: 01424 423221