Thirty years ago, Stephen Mallatrat's masterful adaptation of Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black changed the way that ghost stories were told on the stage. Anybody who has seen either the West End or the touring version of the play will know how bone-chillingly effective the production is even today, especially if you don't know what to expect. Mallatrat's The Woman in Black remains the standard by which all other theatrical ghost stories must be held, and Tim Luscombe's version of the Henry James 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw is no different - especially as it mentions it in publicity.
Different people find different things scary, and there are very different approaches to making things scary within the horror/ supernatural genre. There's out-and-out gorefests, and the productions that go for the visceral as well as the visual (Ghost Stories, The Soulless Ones), while there's also the spooky, eerie, atmospherically charged productions - such as The Woman in Black - which creep up on the senses and shout BOO!
