Be afraid: Jakop Ahlbom's Horror brings the chills
A woman's body levitates; blood splatters from a severed limb; a hand crawls across the floor boards. Horror certainly doesn't fall short of its name.
"Oh good, you suffered!" jokes Jakop Ahlbom, the Swedish artist and trained magician behind the stage production that will terrify audiences when it tours Australia next month.
"Horror is a complex genre, it is a particular way of suffering. But on stage this is rather difficult, much more different to film," he says over Skype from Amsterdam.
"It is exciting to bring people into the tension, because it's a new layer of frightening. And because the people don't know how the magic illusions happen, it captures them a little bit more."
Horror is a subject Ahlbom has been fascinated with since he was a child, and the production sees magic, special effects, acrobatics and mime combine in a dramatic piece of physical theatre that pays tribute to the genre.
"What scares you is so particular to the person and I like to play with that, but I also like to build up suspense and tension in a physical space, that is what is thrilling about the horror genre for me," he says.
The production follows two eerie sisters – one is dead, one alive – who have been victims of brutal parenting. Returning to her childhood home, the living sister confronts her disturbing upbringing in a maniacal Puritan household, deep in a forest, in a bygone era.
"Childhood is a touch point for everybody and I play a lot with intuition," Ahlbom says. "And even though people want to intellectually analyse things, with this story you can only go down to your emotional experience."
Touching on the discomfort of a damaged family life is front of mind for audiences at present with Ari Aster's Hereditary – also centred on a fractured family and a dark, old house – dominating box offices globally.
"The horror genre is often a very powerful place to show mental illness and things like domestic abuse," says Ahlbom. "There is much tension in confinement and people have many experiences related to their families. I want to touch people through the heart to the head, not the head to the heart."
Good horror films, according to Ahlbom, manage to keep audiences guessing about whether something genuinely supernatural is happening or whether a plausible, rational explanation is just out of sight.
"There must be respect for the audience when it comes to this genre," he says.
I have always been drawn to the complicated way people acknowledge and feel their fear.
In the terror, mystery shock and gore of Horror, buffs will detect the tributes to a handful of famous films that have left their mark on the genre including The Blair Witch Project, Carrie, The Ring, The Exorcist and Poltergeist.
"People get pleasure in recognising the films in this play," says Ahlbom. "But I have not wanted to bang them on the head with them. This play is a celebration of technique, not a mirror."
Horror has almost no dialogue – it debuted at the London International Mime Festival in 2016 – and Ahlbom has used restricted dialogue in other works. Lebensraum – another critically acclaimed, almost silent play – debuted in 2012 and also traces the idiosyncrasies of family, although without the blood-soaked horror.
"I train all of the actors in the art of illusions, though I have the help of some professional magician friends," he says. "It is of the utmost importance we get these sequences right. One slip up and the tension breaks, that is unacceptable for this kind of work."
While Lebensraum also features visual trickery and a peculiar family, the unrelenting splatter of Horror is a new benchmark for Ahlbom's work.
"Visually, I push it very far in this one," he says. "I'm not a writer, my instinct and the tools I have let me visually express myself and because there is no talking, you have to follow your senses and I can play with that. Everyone interprets something differently so it broadens up the story."
The wizardry of the grim set is courtesy of Ahlbom's long-time collaborating technician Yuri Schreuders who manages to incorporate three, deep sets on one stage, as well as manage the mechanics of the perplexing magic.
"Horror is generally a film genre which relies often on cross cutting [between shots] to create the tension," Ahlbom says. "I cannot do this on stage, the eye is trained on live action. So I tried to build up the tension with music. Music and silence are the main builders of tension."
One grim living room, a sterile kitchen and a glade of looming dark trees form the stage set, though the furniture and household appliances play host to a series of remarkable occurrences.
In the past Ahlbom has described an unhappy childhood in his native Sweden as what fed his attracted to the dark tension of horror films.
"There is something scary about trying to be scary and I have always been drawn to the complicated way people acknowledge and feel their fear," he says. "There are some fascinating horror stories out of Australia that I'm looking forward to learning all about."
Horror will play in Sydney from August 29 to September 2; Wollongong from September 5-8; Canberra from September 11-15; Melbourne from September 18-22 and Brisbane from September 26-29.