INSIDIOUS: THE FURTHER YOU FEAR

DIRECTORS’ NOTE

Well it’s about to head on tour! INSIDIOUS – THE FURTHER YOU FEAR has been such a great joy to work on, partly because it has set us an even greater challenge:

How to make the live Insidious event as terrifying, heart-pumping and generally as jump-scaringly thrilling as the original Insidious movies?

As many of you will know, Spymonkey’s origins are in comedy, in theatre that makes people laugh. But we’ve had some experience with scaring people too. In 2013 we created an immersive show in the Winter Gardens in Blackpool called Spookshow, which was our riff on the mid-century American tradition of coupling horror cinema with magic and spectacle to make a live fright-night package – bringing scary theatre to horror movie fans. We mashed up Rosemary’s Baby with Abigail’s Party and had a kitschy 1970s Ouidji board that went horribly haywire. We did a mentalism trick that went explosively wrong and ended with a member of the audience being exploded in a dressing room whilst being filmed. We dropped large stepladders behind a crowd and someone passed out. It was an education in the relationship of comedy and fear.

We like to think that making people laugh and making people scared are intricately related, part of one continuum. They are both based on the suspension and release of tension. Horror movies tend to get big laughs, especially when we see them, as they are best enjoyed, in movie theatres – laughs of relief, of recognition that we’ve all been made to jump at the same time, that we’ve been susceptible, suggestible, taken in by the movie makers; laughs of surprise, of recognition, as a response to the shock of gross-out disgust. But laughter is also a great tool for makers of horror. It opens people up to being surprised, caught off-guard. It lets people’s guards down. 

We’ve been so brilliantly aided in this mission by the great Carl Grose. We love working with Carl – in fact when we first started thinking about this show we were working on our third collaboration, The Frogs (an adaptation of the old Greek play rather than the schlock 70s eco-horror). When we mentioned in rehearsals that we had been approached by RoadCo to make a live experience based on the Insidious films, Carl rattled off every factoid you can imagine – stuff about James Wan and his creepy doll fixation, about the relative budgets of Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring, about Lyn Shaye’s career, about experimental composer Joseph Bishara playing the Lipstick Face Demon. So we were incredibly lucky that we happened to already be working with the world’s biggest horror nerd! And that he enthusiastically grasped the nettle of this great theatrical challenge. He has crafted the most brilliant script out of our ramblings, jottings, sketchy visualisations, special effects ideas and sticky-note dramaturgy.

We were also fortunate to be introduced to the great illusion designer Steve Cuiffo and video artist Josh Higgason early on in the life of the project, and spent a giddy couple of days holed up in a slightly dodgy rental right on the freeway in Union City NJ, talking about the craziest intersections of live theatre, magic and video. And how to make shit scary for you folks. We played cool bits of video that we’d seen or pieces of theatre we’d been involved in, and thought a lot about what the experience would be like for people who were coming to see Insidious. Then there was the earthquake!

Steve and Josh were both instrumental in building, pretty much from scratch for our UK-based company, a crack team of creatives here in the States. We thank all of them for their dedication and skill and patience in making this show, alongside the wider production and general management team.

As for our cast of wonderful performers, some of whom we met through Spymonkey’s training programme and others via castings but who each bring their unique, bold and distinctive qualities to our process and their roles. It’s been fun to play with them all in rehearsals and now we set them amongst you to do what they do best.

Thanks to Stephen Lindsay and everyone at RoadCo, and Floris and Julia at GEA, for trusting us with this brilliant opportunity.

Lastly thanks hugely to Emily Coleman, Spymonkey’s long-standing executive producer, who has been way busier on this project than we ever thought she’d be, keeping the train on the tracks across the time zones. Scarily brilliant.

Toby Park & Aitor Basauri, Spymonkey