When people think of Broadway, they usually envision dazzling musicals, spectacular plays, and bubbly comedies. The words ‘dark’ and ‘spooky’ don’t immediately register in their theatrical lexicon, but times are changing. Over the past couple of years, shows with supernatural or dark twists have emerged more steadily on Broadway, and they hint at a growing acceptance for fear fare on those stages.
Currently, Death Becomes Her, inspired by the 1992 movie of the same name, is a massive hit. Yes, it’s a musical comedy with two curvaceous leads, but it still has neck twisting, a massive, smoking shotgun wound, and a bloodless decapitation which years ago would not have emerged on the Great White Way. The door for that may have been opened by the 2023 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s twisted musical, Sweeney Todd, about a barbarous butcher who turned people into meat pies, as well as the chilling, gasp-inducing play Grey House.
This past fall, the Americana musical Swept Away offered a tale of two brothers enlisted to join a whaling crew on the high seas (one unintentionally), but after their ship sank, the last third of the show featured only four men in a lifeboat with little food or water. It took a very grim turn. This is one show that did not last too long – musical theater and Avett Brothers disciples may not have appreciated the descent into cannibalism. Still, it was pretty gutsy to put that onstage.
The current year looks primed to bring more dark material to Broadway, including two new plays. Oscar Wilde’s gothic melodrama The Picture of Dorian Gray (with its ghoulish ending) officially opens on Broadway tomorrow for a near three-month run, while Stranger Things: The First Shadow, spun off from the creepy Netflix series, officially opens on April 22. Inspired by real-life events in the Old West, the new Dead Outlaw (while not horror) has been touted as “the darkly hilarious and wildly inventive musical about the bizarre true story of outlaw-turned-corpse-turned-celebrity Elmer McCurdy.” In fact, the lead actor plays dead during its second half.
Of those three productions, Stranger Things will offer some visceral frights as evidenced by UK reviews. The others at least lean towards greater acceptance of darker material. The genre has never been an easy sell on stage because it is hard to often pull off pieces that are either bloody or very spooky. The former can turn people off; the latter is hard to pull off. And yet mainstream appetites for the eerie, unsettling, and macabre have grown over the last 25 to 30 years.
Horror has undergone a renaissance in the 21st century that surpassed anything that came previously. Most prominently, horror movies have become big business with low budget films cranking out major profits way larger than what studios saw in the eighties through mid-nineties. Horror TV shows, both original and inspired by movies or classic literature, have become commonplace on streaming services – among the most notable: Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, and The Haunting of Hill House, adapted from works by Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James, and Shirley Jackson, respectively. Let’s not forget the grisly cop forensics shows, true crime recreations, and paranormal series that litter the small screen landscape.
Many music videos have recently embraced kooky spooky or scary scenarios, from the mirthfully gory mean girl battle between Jenna Ortega and Sabrina Carpenter in the latter’s “Taste” video to the fantastic jump scare in Childish Gambino’s short, but intense, “Lithonia” clip. The most famous music video of all time, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” set the stage for this four decades ago.
It’s not like Broadway hasn’t had its share of intense thrillers and dramas. Shakespeare certainly has dark psychological elements in Hamlet and Macbeth. One playwright who has always walked a line between thriller and horror is British playwright Martin McDonagh. His works, frequently dealing with characters from his parents’ home country of Ireland, are unique in that they are black comedies with freaky elements underneath. Shows like Hangmen, The Pillowman, and The Lieutenant of Inishmore have explored some very dark territory – squabbling British executioners seeing their trade become banned; a futuristic fascist Britain in which a murderer mimics gruesome children’s stories; and an Irish terrorist so extreme that the IRA disdains him. In fact, the second half of that latter show featured a stage covered in fake blood and body parts, while Hangmen delivered a brief live “hanging” on stage. During 2009’s A Behanding In Spokane – about a deranged man seeking the severed hand he lost in a train incident years earlier – a trunk popped open and severed hands flew across the stage.
There have been also horror-themed Broadway musicals like Dance Of The Vampires, The Woman In White, Jekyll & Hyde, and The Phantom of the Opera – the latter of which played for three decades on Broadway – but nothing likely to really creep out horror lovers. On the flip side, off-Broadway has seen its share of gory musical productions including musicals inspired by Re-Animator, The Evil Dead, and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The first two shows had “splatter rows” in the front where audience members had to wear a protective plastic sheet to avoid staining their clothes with gratuitous arterial spray. Now that’s horror, but those fall more into cheeky, kitschy territory.
The best off-Broadway horror piece of late was The Woman In Black, which ran for five months prior to and later in the pandemic at the McKittrick Hotel. Imported from England, where it played the West End for 33 years, this play was a visceral adaptation of the famed Susan Hill novel from 1983. There were only three people onstage – a middle aged solicitor telling a young man about a terrifying experience with the supernatural in his youth, with the silent, eerie woman in black stalking the stage at various times. It was brilliant. That’s the kind of creepshow that should hit Broadway.
When done right, a scary play can send shivers up your spine because it feels real. Sleep No More, a long-running immersive production based on Hamlet (also at the McKittrick), reportedly had unsettling elements as well, while The Weir, which has played numerous cities including NYC since 1997, offers an eerie atmosphere as pub goers swap spooky tales.
Hopefully we’re going to be seeing more attempts to bring dark stage dramas to a mass audience. Having Grey House do a three-month run on Broadway was a step in the right direction. That being said, 2026 will bring us the musical adaptation of the eighties-teen vampire hit The Lost Boys. Here’s the thing: Other than Frank Langella’s famed performance in the Dracula play in the late seventies, every other vampire show on Broadway has been a musical – Dance Of The Vampires (2002), Dracula (2004), and Lestat (2006). Those shows had great production values, but were not really deeply scary – although Dracula had some impressive flying effects to enhance the atmosphere.
What we really need to see is something more palatable and visceral. It’s great that an eighties classic is making its way onto the stage, but by the same token it would be great to not have the score to go with it. That’s the hope for the future, because when The Lost Boys finally does emerge, this writer fears he’ll be misquoting Grandpa from that movie: “One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach: all the damn singing vampires.”
