A real Horror show! 'Winched from the Crypt' - reviewed by Charlotte Eccles
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Q. How does an audience leave a theatre horrified by what they've just seen, but feeling very satisfied?
A. They've just seen 'Winched from the Crypt' at Winchester Theatre Royal
On February 13th 2019, Creative Writing at Winchester staged the show ‘Winched from the Crypt’, showcasing some of the best submissions from last two years of the ‘Horror Fiction’ module. This module, taught by Matt Elphick and Glenn Fosbraey, teaches students about the inner workings of their minds, analyses what makes them cower behind the sofa, and then looks at how they can translate that fear to the page.
Thanks to the Theatre Royal and Faculty of Arts, third year students were able to see their horror stories brought to the stage in front of a paying audience. “I know one of the writers, and they were so proud to be chosen for the show. It was brilliant,” says student Tasha Cobbald.
The Theatre Royal is a small, local theatre, which formed the perfect setting for creating intimacy and an atmosphere of unease for this show. I went to see ‘Winched from the Crypt’ with my friends, knowing very little about it beforehand, and I was apprehensive to see how this would be transformed into a stage play. When I saw the show, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had managed to create something that toted the line between scary and funny.
The challenge that ‘Winched from the Crypt’ faced was collating all five stories into one smooth-running performance. They achieved this through their interesting plot, which put a new spin on the old horror trope of students around a campfire. Each actor played a student and climbed Winchester’s own St Catherine’s Hill to record themselves telling horror stories as part of a fictitious assignment. Little did they know that they would become part of the stories themselves, falling victim one after another, as the plot continued.
Horror stories were told through the medium of monologue, and a ‘student’ would stand to read their story, while undergoing a kind of possession before they fell victim to ‘The Lecturer’ (played by real-life Performing Arts Lecturer Phil Stanier), a ghoulish apparition dressed in a drab suit, with ghoulish make-up, whose job it was to scare the audience as well as the actors. No, I’m not kidding. While each of the stories were being told, Stanier would take a seat between a group of people, making them uncomfortable, and then would climb over to the seats in front of him, scaring whomever he moved to. “He kept making eye contact with me,” says Jade Waygood, a third-year student at Winchester. “It sort of added to the scariness, because you never knew whether you would turn around and he’d be next to you, staring right at you. No one was safe.”
‘The Lecturer’ would sometimes disappear during the performance and reappear on the upper level, torch under his chin, highlighting his white face in the darkness to anyone who happened to be looking up. This was a brilliant way to break up the monologues – which continued separate to him – and to keep audiences engaged. A common problem for monologues, after all, is that they can lack excitement and lose the interest of their audiences, but Stanier created a much-needed element of humour that made the horror even more effective by comparison.
Throughout the show, the horror stories became more intense over time, with the added mystique of each student being removed from the stage by their ‘Lecturer’, only to be seen again at during a gruesome final death scene. Each story was different from the last, adopting a different tone and often switching between gory or suspenseful styles. Some were set in fictional worlds where society relies on human sacrifice to keep the demons away – a marvellous idea, unless it’s your turn to go up on the crucifix! – others were set in the real world, with just one thing set off balance. The story that really got me was the penultimate one (‘Incisions’) which included a strange, almost alien infestation of one of the characters. The graphic description of the way these ‘bugs’ crawled out of their body during the night had my skin crawling and rubbed up right against my own fears, and the soulless way it was told led you to believe that there was no hope for this character’s survival.
By the time the show had finished, the audience was an anxious mix of amused and afraid, and everyone was talking about the quality of the stories they had heard. During the performance, however, not everyone was on board with this contemporary style. In particular, one older couple didn’t at first realise that the ‘Lecturer’ was a part of the show, and one of the people I was attending with pointed them out to me. They sat with their arms crossed, huffing and puffing at the back of the theatre. They had seen Stanier causing a commotion on the first two rows of seats, as he lay on the ground in front of people, trying to distract them from the show, and the couple assumed that it was the students in the audience creating the disturbance. It’s amusing to think that they didn’t realise what was going on until well into the second half of the performance, but at least they clocked on in the end.
‘Winched from the Crypt’ was created to give the writing students a way to put their words out there and give them something tangible and real that they could be proud of. It’s exciting to me that – if this event carries forward to next year – I could also be able to say that my own work had been used in a play. With your support this will become an annual showcase, so if you missed it this time, fingers crossed you will get another chance next February. If you think you can handle it, that is.
Watch clips from the show here (WARNING: Contains strong language and images some may find disturbing)