"Grey House" didn't scare me, and that's OK
But also no, it's not.
When I say that I contain multitudes, I mean that I’m a horror fan who gets scared very easily. And it’s more challenging than you know. I have to mentally prepare for any jump scare lest I react too strongly. I pull up Wikipedia plot summaries in case I get too stressed out watching something at home and want to spoil myself. I struggle to answer the people who say “but wait, I thought you loved horror” every time I confess that I’m spooked so consistently. No one understands my struggle.
Obviously I’m not going to stop consuming horror, which is objectively the best genre, but here we are. It wasn’t always this way! I grew up skittish and terrified of most scary movies, despite being horror-curious. I began experimenting in college (tale as old as time), and quickly became obsessed with the genre, spending the next 15 years of my life consuming as much horror as I could, and writing about it incessantly. And then 2020 happened, and the dread crept back in.
Maybe it was the very real threat of the pandemic, or spending a year inside, or the rebound anxiety from being perpetually medicated for those first few months, but the end result is that I no longer have the tolerance for suspense, unease, unpleasantness, and gore that I once did.
To be clear, I’ve never liked being startled, and there were always certain depictions of violence that I couldn’t stomach, but I can no longer deny that something shifted over the last few years, and I’m assuming at this point that it won’t shift back. It’s been genuinely hard to accept this, and honestly a little shameful to admit. I haven’t given up on horror—I’m still doing my best of list every December; see 2022’s here—but it takes a lot more energy than it used to.
This is all my very long preamble to saying that I approached Grey House with a fair amount of apprehension.
The play starts with a classic horror conceit: Max and Henry (played in this production by Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks, respectively) are driving in a blizzard when they crash their car. With Henry’s leg broken, they find their way to a nearby cabin, occupied by a matriarch named Raleigh (Broadway scream queen Laurie Metcalf) and teenage girls of various ages and improbable names. Along with Marlow, Bernie, A1656, and Squirrel, there is also a boy who mostly doesn’t speak and an Ancient One, who only appears after Henry has (maybe) started hallucinating. Yes, as Henry recovers from the accident with moonshine as his only medication, he starts seeing things, and you can—at least to some extent—guess where this is going.
Real horror on Broadway is exceedingly rare these days, and Grey House promised to be more than just spooky. As friends who had seen it let me know in advance (not necessarily a warning, though it functioned that way), Grey House also has jump scares and some shocking gore. I did what I could to prep (read reviews, including Jackson McHenry’s at Vulture, which has just the right amount of spoilers), and warned the friend I was going with that I would probably embarrass myself at some point over the course of the show’s 100 minutes.
Then came Grey House’s most shocking twist: It didn’t freak me out. I never jumped. I never considered casually fleeing the theater to avoid a panic attack. There is one effectively deployed jump scare that might have gotten me if I hadn’t seen it coming (thank you, Jackson), and the rest feel a little predictable. The gore is there, but nowhere near as alarming as I’d been led to believe. It’s a cool effect, just not an entirely effective one. I’ve seen far bloodier tableaus in Martin McDonagh shows.
After all the nervousness I’d let build up ahead of seeing Grey House slowly dissipated, and I realized the play wasn’t going to get under my skin (or get me out of my seat), I felt a familiar rush of relief. And then—a little disappointment!
I don’t want to be scared, but I also don’t want to be not scared. It’s the constant push-and-pull of being a person who loves horror and sometimes, for reasons of self-preservation, has to keep it at a distance. It’s sort of like knowing that I’m sensitive to very spicy food and still feeling let down when something with two chili peppers next to it on the menu turns out to be bizarrely mild. I was staving myself for unpleasantness! Instead, I was left unmoved.
And that’s the larger issue with Grey House. It doesn’t move you with scares or with anything else, for that matter. The themes and tropes it traffics in are nothing I haven’t seen over and over again—your mileage may vary, depending on how much horror you consume. But as someone who watches an awful lot of midrange overpraised indies (sorry!), I’ve seen plenty of explorations of trauma through the genre. That same conceit has crept into mainstream studio offerings, too. Without something new to say, all Grey House really has going for it is the way that it’s packaged, and despite some clever moments, the best comparison I can offer is “lesser Shudder Original” (if you know you know).
I do kind of hope it ushers in a new era of horror on Broadway—in part because I’m a masochist, and in part because I think the genre is uniquely suited to theater. The combination of the darkness, the way you can feel the reactions around you, and the lack of distance between the audience and the performers makes seeing a scary play that much more nerve-wracking than seeing a scary movie. I’m thinking not of Grey House, but of two Lucas Hnath plays that did fuck me up: The Thin Place and Dana H. Both made ample use of atmosphere and pushed me right up to the edge of panic. It’s less that I’m eager to get to that place again, and more that I’d like to see someone try.
And if you ever do see me making a beeline for the exit during a particularly terrifying theatrical experience, pretend you didn’t. Maybe that was just your eyes playing tricks on you.
Grey House runs through Sept. 3 at the Lyceum Theatre. Buy tickets here.