It was one of the most spectacular flops in Broadway history. And yet, when a musical version - produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, no less - of Stephen King's debut horror novel Carrie hit New York's Virginia Theatre in 1988, hopes were high. After all, King's book was a bestseller and Brian De Palma's 1976 film, starring Sissy Spacek as the girl with telekinetic powers, was something of a cult teen hit.
But reviews were as blood-curdling as the havoc Carrie wreaks at her high-school prom. The New York Times called it a "wreck". And, just five performances later, Carrie: The Musical was over. Losing a record (for the time) US$8 million (Dh23.4m), its infamy was such that the American theatre columnist Ken Mandelbaum wrote a book titled Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Musical Flops.
So the news that New York's MCC Theater is to revive the show next January has sent ripples of amusement around the theatre world. The director Stafford Arima admitted in The New York Times that the show is to be revamped, updated and set in the 21st century. Most importantly, perhaps, at least half the songs will be different. As Mandelbaum noted in his book: "What makes Carrie unique is its combination of soaring, often breathtaking sequences and some of the most appalling and ridiculous scenes ever seen in a musical."
Of course, a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required for any musical - there aren't many among us who regularly break into song during periods of heightened emotion, after all. But in Carrie's case, it's arguable that it's impossible to be both tuneful and psychologically powerful.
Indeed, some would argue that horror is not well served by the stage, with fake blood that's obviously fake, and tension somewhat dampened by stage hands moving the sets between scenes. But there's actually a fine tradition of theatre that disturbs and disgusts, going right back to the plays of Shakespeare. The supernatural forces at play in Carrie have their genesis in Macbeth. When The Globe staged Titus Andronicus in 2006, it had to issue warnings about the "gruesome and bloody" content after one too many audience members fainted. Grand Guignol, meanwhile, isn't just a catch-all term for melodramatically gory film, art or theatre - it comes from Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, a venue in Paris that opened in 1897 and specialised in scaring audiences with psychological dramas.
And even though cinema has generally overtaken theatre as the medium of choice for a thrill or a chill, a well-judged play can still have immense power. The David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardasson version of Franz Kafka's haunting Metamorphosis, which has toured the world in recent years, may not have the jump-out-of-your-skin moment Carrie (the movie) boasts, but it does inflict a horrific torment as its protagonist is transformed into a beetle - and the Nick Cave/Warren Ellis score lends a distinctly uneasy edge.
More straightforward scares are found in The Woman in Black, billed as "the most horrifying live theatre experience in the world". The stage version of Susan Hill's acclaimed novel, it tells the story of a young solicitor who gets more than he bargained for when he travels to attend the funeral of a former client. the production has been going strong in London's West End for more than 20 years, and has also played in the US, Japan and Dubai. The secret of its spine-tingling nature, audiences say, is its simplicity - it relies on just two actors, and the most basic of special effects.
Essentially, for theatre to raise the heart rate, believability isn't as important as an immersive storyline. Those who queued up to see It Felt Like a Kiss - the collaboration between the theatre group Punchdrunk, the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis and the musician Damon Albarn at 2009's Manchester International Festival - knew that they weren't actually going to come to any harm during the performance. But if festivalgoers happened across slightly dazed and uneasy groups of people walking around town, chances were they'd just been chased down the dark corridors of the office building in which the play was set... by a man wielding a chainsaw.
And the most notable scary success on stage recently has been Ghost Stories, a collaboration between The League of Gentlemen's macabre genius Jeremy Dyson and the director of Derren Brown's shows, Andy Nyman. Making good on its advance warning that it contained "moments of extreme shock and tension", this brilliantly entertaining show came with a plea that people didn't give its entertaining secrets away, and ended up transferring to London's West End last year.
So, actually, the ground has been prepared for a Carrie revival. In fact, one of MCC Theater's artistic directors said at the launch that they've "been in love with this piece since we heard a reading two years ago. It's so moving." Hmmm. You'll excuse us if we reserve judgment until, well, at least five shows in.
