Horror is a well-trodden path in cinema and literature, occasionally making appearances in theatre – the chilling success of productions like The Woman in Black attests to this. But can dance truly venture into the realm of horror? Is there such a thing as dance horror, or even more intriguingly, The Forbidden Dance – a performance so unsettling it evokes genuine fear? While dance can certainly be eerie, unsettling, and even deeply disturbing, the question remains: can it truly scare us? For many, the answer might be surprisingly complex.
Dance, in its history and evolution, frequently flirts with horror’s shadowy edges. Ballet, for instance, emerged from the same Romantic wellspring that birthed Gothic literature. Think of the shared fascination with tales of tragic love, irrational forces lurking in the shadows, deep forests concealing secrets, imposing castles, creatures that shift shapes in the moonlight, and the unsettling presence of doppelgangers. Giselle gives us a poignant vision of a lover returned from the spectral realm. Baleful witches cast their spells in La Sylphide and The Sleeping Beauty. Swan Lake presents the archetypal duality of Odette and Odile, the good and evil twins locked in an eternal struggle. Even the very genesis of Romantic ballet is often traced back to a scene from Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable, where, as Lincoln Kirstein vividly described, “dead nuns give themselves over to unholy thrills.” This prospect alone is enough to pique the interest of any horror aficionado.
These classic ballets are steeped in the murky depths of human psychology – the tangled web of desire, repression, transgression, and the inevitable specter of punishment. This is fertile ground where the seeds of horror can readily take root and bloom. They hint at the forbidden, at experiences beyond the pale, and exert a subtle, subterranean pull on our deepest fears. Yet, despite these thematic resonances, do they truly frighten? Probably not in the jump-scare, heart-stopping sense of horror cinema. In fact, ballet often seems to deliberately avert its gaze from the abyss it hints at. Consider how the darkly grotesque narratives of ETA Hoffmann’s stories are transformed into the sugarplum sweetness of Coppélia and The Nutcracker. It prompts one to wonder, what darkness is being deliberately masked by these bright, balletic smiles? What forbidden truths are being kept at bay?
Does contemporary dance delve deeper into genuine horror? Liam Scarlett’s Frankenstein, for example, while exploring dark themes, was described by its creator as more of a love story than a terror tale. Interestingly, it wasn’t the first Frankenstein ballet for The Royal Ballet; Wayne Eagling’s 1985 one-act version was apparently a critical disaster, more frightfully bad than frightening. However, The Royal Ballet achieved a far more unsettling effect with Arthur Pita’s 2011 Metamorphosis. This production masterfully blended visceral gross-out moments with a palpable sense of psycho-existential dread. It even delivered one of the few dance sequences genuinely capable of inducing fear: a stage that tilted without warning, unleashing figures shrouded entirely in black who crawled from beneath like monstrous, human-sized spiders. This was a moment that could genuinely unnerve an audience. In 2012, Matthew Bourne reimagined The Sleeping Beauty as a “gothic romance,” replacing the traditional fairy’s curse with a vampire’s bite, injecting a contemporary horror trope into a classic narrative. Mark Bruce, with his atmospherically charged Dracula (2013), contributed to the extensive lineage of “Dracula ballets” documented in the Oxford Dictionary of Dance. Bruce, indeed, has cultivated a reputation as a master of the unsettling and uncanny, unafraid to challenge audience expectations and delve into disturbing imagery. His Odyssey brought a gut-wrenching intensity to the classical myth, and his Made in Heaven (2013) fused Lynchian surrealism with a swampy, American gothic sensibility, creating a truly disorienting and forbidden landscape of the mind.
Surprisingly, hip hop dance theatre also demonstrates a marked inclination towards horror themes. Certain stylistic elements inherent to hip hop – broken-limbed flexes, gliding movements that defy natural physics, robotic isolations, and the manipulation of space-time reminiscent of cinematic effects – lend themselves remarkably well to depicting aliens, zombies, and other creatures of fantasy and fear. At the annual Breakin’ Convention festival, works featuring androids, space invaders, and similar sci-fi inspired themes are common. While often leaning more towards science fiction than outright horror, the 2005 festival notably opened on Friday the 13th and showcased three distinctly horror-themed acts: one drawing inspiration from the Japanese horror film The Ring, another depicting a clash between vampires and werewolves, and the last exploring the unsettling territory of shamanic possession – each venturing into realms typically considered forbidden or taboo in mainstream performance.
Hip hop’s close ties to music video culture have undeniably contributed to dance horror’s most iconic moment: Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Directed by John Landis, known for American Werewolf in London, and featuring a chilling voiceover by horror legend Vincent Price, Thriller unleashed grave-busting zombies who moved with a tense, frenetic energy. Their crazy-limbed formations both terrified and thrilled a generation of young viewers, inspiring countless to embrace dance themselves. Thriller demonstrated the potent combination of dance and horror, even if it existed firmly within the medium of film, not live theatre.
This brings us to a critical distinction: the screen seems a more natural habitat for horror, especially dance horror, than the stage. Why? Partly, it’s a matter of artistic taste and cultural expectations. Horror, by its very nature, often revels in schlocky tricks and manipulative effects, unapologetically disregarding conventional notions of “good taste.” Ballet, even in its darkest iterations, often operates within the boundaries of refined aesthetics. The inherent pursuit of beauty in ballet technique can run counter to the deliberate ugliness and shock tactics that horror often employs. Ballet audiences typically seek emotional resonance and transcendence, not necessarily blatant shocks. While other dance forms may be less beholden to traditional beauty standards, the aura of “art” still clings to the theatrical space. Film, on the other hand, can absorb anything – from high art to trashy exploitation – without its inherent nature being questioned. It can embrace the forbidden without fear of artistic compromise.
Technology also plays a crucial role in horror’s migration from stage to screen. In the 19th century, theatrical phantasmagoria captivated audiences with stage illusions of ghosts and skeletons, delivering spine-tingling moments. In the early 20th century, the Grand Guignol theatre shocked with luridly realistic depictions of madness and murder, pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable on stage. However, cinema rapidly surpassed live performance in its capacity for both fantastical special effects and unflinching realism, becoming the dominant medium for horror to flourish. Film could depict the forbidden with a visceral impact that live theatre struggled to match.
Cinema’s embrace of both the fantastical and the hyper-realistic is symptomatic of horror’s essence, and illuminates dance’s complex relationship with the genre. If dance struggles to effectively “do” horror on stage, why does it thrive in myths and fairytales, which often share similar thematic terrain? According to philosopher Noël Carroll, the crucial distinction lies not in the content – monstrous creatures and magical forces populate both – but in their underlying attitude. In fairytales, these fantastical elements are integrated into the natural order of the story’s world; swan maidens and sorcerers are accepted as readily as princes and peasants. In horror, however, these elements are presented as fundamentally alien, a violation of the natural order, something forbidden and unnatural intruding upon the everyday. Fairytales normalize the fantastic, even when it evokes fear; horror, conversely, emphasizes the abnormal, presenting the fantastic as an abomination.
Compared to cinema or even theatre, dance inherently struggles to portray “normality,” or its close cousin, “reality.” While dancers can be costumed as peasants against a realistically painted forest backdrop, the moment they begin to move in musical time and structured space – the very essence of dance – they transcend the realm of the ordinary. And without a grounding in normality, what can horror effectively threaten, undermine, or ultimately horrify? What boundaries can the forbidden dance truly transgress if there is no established normal to violate?
Dance’s inherent departure from realism – its inclination towards abstraction and stylization, its embrace of the “abnormal” – naturally steers its narratives towards myth and fairytale rather than stark horror. Yet, paradoxically, this very quality makes dance potent material for horror films. Numerous movies utilize dance to create particularly spooky or terrifying scenes. Consider the waltzing zombies in Carnival of Souls (1962), or the unsettling corpse-ballerina in Evil Dead 2 (1987), her body pirouetting while her head remains eerily still. In countless other films, dance and dancers become narratively linked to the unhinged, the psychotic, and the perverse, amplifying tales of obsession and possession. Think of the schlock-horror of Black Swan (2010), the nightmarish cinematography of The Red Shoes (1948), the ultra-stylized paranoia of Suspiria (1977), the melodramas of insane artists in The Mad Genius (1931) and The Specter of the Rose (1946), the musical slasher Stage Fright (2014), and the blood-soaked body horror of Livide (2011), featuring vampire ballerinas led by Paris Opéra étoile Marie-Claude Pietragalla. The cinematic landscape is rich with such examples, proving that dance finds a powerful, albeit often disturbing, voice within the forbidden realms of horror film.
Dance may not readily translate to stage horror, yet it thrives as a horror element on film. Perhaps this is why the only stage dance performance (more mime than pure dance, in truth) that truly made me recoil, shrink in my seat, and instinctively cover my eyes was Jakop Ahlbom’s Horror (2014), a work saturated with cinematic references. A brilliantly constructed montage of moments borrowed and reimagined from The Shining, The Exorcist, The Beast with Five Fingers, The Omen, and countless other horror classics, it genuinely scared me. It was a performance that blurred the lines between stage and screen, tapping into the visceral language of film horror and translating it into a live experience. Ahlbom’s Horror might just be the closest we’ve come to witnessing a truly forbidden dance on stage, a performance that dares to fully embrace the unsettling power of fear in movement.
