One day I decided it would be funny to write a play in the horror genre. What could possibly happen? I'm a fan of the genre, and I'd never heard of Israeli horror plays, so I jumped at the chance and began the journey to write an Israeli horror play. So far I've written two: "Blood Blood, Blood," a play about parents who kidnap a movie star to marry him off to their deformed daughter, and "Political" - a short play about zombies and politics. Along the way I learned all sorts of things:

1 Lack of awareness

If there is a strange noise in the basement, it makes perfect sense for the characters to go down and check where it is coming from. Why? Because the characters do not know that they are inside a horror film or play. From their point of view, there is no tense music playing in the background. I myself have often found myself wandering around in the middle of the night to find out where some disturbing noise was coming from. So let your characters go and check the noise.

2

Horror and comedy have always gone hand in hand. Classic grotesque horror (physical danger, blood, crazy characters) turns into a parody on stage. The audience laughs at the imitation of the cinematic genre, at the gesture that the creators make, and the audience seems to say to itself: "Look, they're making a movie in a fake way." Even though I wrote a play similar to a Greek tragedy, about a girl who murders her parents in order to prove her love for a movie star, the audience never stopped laughing at the main character's struggle. Comedy works on struggle, not suffering. One day I was sitting in a cafe writing, and an elderly man didn't notice where the entrance to the cafe was, crashed hard into one of the windows and slowly smeared himself on the sidewalk (struggle). I couldn't help but choke on laughter. Twenty seconds later, the elderly man bled from his nose, lost consciousness, and they called an ambulance for him (suffering), and I stopped laughing. Even though the characters in this genre suffer a lot, if on stage the suffering doesn't feel real to the audience, if it is mostly physical and not emotional, if the audience knows that a character won't die, and that no one will be hurt, they allow themselves to laugh at the struggle.

3

On stage, a pencil is more dangerous than a gun. A gun will never fire on stage, not in reality. A gun is only threatening in movies; on stage, it is a symbol of power. On stage, any sharp object is more dangerous than a gun: a knife, a fork, a drill, a sword. The audience is afraid when the actors might be physically harmed. Therefore, in my play "Blood Blood, Blood," we replaced one of the guns with a drill. When it worked and made noise and the drill came close to the head of the main actor, you could feel the silence in the hall.

4

If I shoot someone in the theater and they bleed, the audience won't think it's real, they'll say: "Wow, how did they do that?" In the theater, the audience won't believe that the physical horror is real, but they like to be surprised by the pyrotechnics, and by the imagination of the creator who found a sophisticated way to get closer to the truth. It's no different than a magician's magic. And blood is a dirty thing...

5

It is said that when Shakespeare was a member of the cast, one of his jobs was to wash the blood off clothes at the end of a production. Later, when he rose to the rank of playwright, he wrote "Titus Andronicus" (a horror play in every sense of the word), and during the performances he realized that the theater was spending a lot of money on laundry, and from then on he decided to have characters murdered offstage, because it was both cheaper and more effective. He discovered that the audience was more afraid when they heard how the murder was committed (anxiety and psychological horror) than when they saw the murder itself (Macbeth returning after Duncan's murder is a good example).

6

Have you noticed that when people see something disgusting, they cover their eyes with their hands, but leave a slight slit to see anyway? There is an element of small trauma in disgust that we are curious about. What is disgust? Anything that involves the exchange of fluids. Oil, blood, pus, saliva, anything greasy is disgusting. That's why monsters look sticky. Even a "wet" kiss is considered disgusting. In short, anything that involves the exchange of fluids. If you want to create grotesque horror on stage – use fluids. Just don't be surprised if the audience doesn't come back later.

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Playwrights like Harold Pinter, for example, manage to create discomfort through verbal terror, subtext, silences, and manipulation. Stage fright does not stem from physical pain, but from the fear of losing control. The audience knows that if the manipulation affects the character on stage, it may also affect them.

8

The fear of death is our greatest and most conscious fear, and horror as an exaggerated and extreme genre is sometimes a good way to deal with it. In a world where missiles fall, and there are wars and armies, we can perhaps let loose a little in the face of the angel of death, laugh with him and at him too.

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