Horror, as a genre, has firmly established its presence in literature and film, occasionally making appearances in theatre, as seen in the notable success of productions like The Woman in Black. But this begs the question: can dance truly be horrifying? Or, to put it another way, has a dance performance ever genuinely frightened you? While dance can certainly evoke unease, chills, and a sense of being haunted, true fear in dance seems to be a rarer phenomenon. However, one might argue that the realm of dance and horror are closer than we think, especially when we consider the impact of dance in film, and specifically, movies like The Movie The Forbidden Dance, which might explore these boundaries even further.
Dance, particularly ballet, often flirts with the edges of horror. Ballet’s origins are rooted in the same Romantic imagination that spawned Gothic literature. These early ballets are filled with narratives of tragic love, irrational forces, mysterious forests, imposing castles, shape-shifting characters, supernatural entities, and doppelgangers. Consider Giselle, where a deceased lover returns from beyond the grave. Malevolent witches populate La Sylphide and The Sleeping Beauty. Swan Lake presents the archetypal duality of good and evil through the twin figures of Odette and Odile. Notably, the very first Romantic ballet is believed to be a scene from Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable, where, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, “dead nuns give themselves over to unholy thrills”—a concept that would undoubtedly pique the interest of any horror aficionado.
These classical ballets are rich with the complex and often unsettling psychologies of desire, repression, transgression, and retribution—fertile ground for horror to take root. They subtly introduce a sense of the forbidden and exert a subterranean pull on our psyche. However, are they genuinely terrifying? Probably not. In fact, it sometimes appears that ballet deliberately avoids confronting the inherent horror within these themes. Think about how the dark and grotesque elements of ETA Hoffmann’s stories are transformed into the lighthearted balletic smiles of Coppélia and The Nutcracker. This sanitization raises questions about what darkness might be concealed beneath the surface.
Contemporary dance continues to engage with horror, albeit in different ways. Liam Scarlett’s Frankenstein for The Royal Ballet, while described by the choreographer as more of a love story than outright horror, still delves into dark themes. This wasn’t the first Frankenstein for the company; Wayne Eagling’s 1985 one-act version was reportedly unsuccessful. A more impactful exploration of dance horror at The Royal Ballet was Arthur Pita’s 2011 Metamorphosis. This piece effectively combined visceral disgust with psycho-existential dread and featured a truly disturbing scene: a suddenly tilting stage revealing figures in black crawling out like giant spiders. Matthew Bourne’s 2012 reimagining of The Sleeping Beauty as a “gothic romance,” replacing the traditional pinprick with a vampire bite, further illustrates dance’s ongoing flirtation with horror tropes. Mark Bruce’s atmospheric Dracula (2013) is another example in a long lineage of “Dracula ballets,” as noted in the Oxford Dictionary of Dance. Bruce himself is a master of the uncanny, unafraid to disturb audiences, evident in his unsettling Odyssey (2020) and the Lynchian surrealism of Made in Heaven (2013).
Hip hop dance theatre also demonstrates a surprising affinity for horror. Certain hip hop styles and techniques—broken-limbed flexes, gliding movements, robotic isolations, and cinematic spatial distortions—naturally lend themselves to portraying aliens, zombies, and other fantastical creatures. Breakin’ Convention, the annual hip hop festival, has featured numerous works with androids and space invaders. While often more sci-fi than pure horror, the 2005 festival notably featured three explicitly horror-themed acts: one inspired by the Japanese horror movie The Ring, another depicting a battle between vampires and werewolves, and a third exploring shamanic possession.
Hip hop’s strong connection to music video culture has gifted us perhaps the most iconic dance horror of all time: Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Directed by John Landis (An American Werewolf in London) and featuring a chilling voiceover by horror legend Vincent Price, Thriller’s grave-emerging zombies, moving in jerky, unsettling formations, both terrified and thrilled a generation. It inspired countless viewers to embrace dance themselves. This iconic video, much like a hypothetical movie called the movie the forbidden dance, demonstrates the potent combination of dance and horror on screen.
Thriller is a film, not a stage performance, and it seems that cinema is a more natural habitat for horror, especially dance horror, than the stage. This may be partly due to differing aesthetic sensibilities. Horror often revels in overt, sometimes crude, shocks and manipulative effects, often disregarding “good taste.” Ballet, even in its darkest forms, tends to adhere to certain aesthetic boundaries. The inherent beauty within ballet technique can be at odds with the raw, often unpleasant nature of horror. Ballet audiences generally seek to be moved and elevated, not subjected to blatant scares. While other dance forms might be less constrained by notions of beauty, a certain artistic aura still surrounds live theatre. Film, however, can accommodate a vast spectrum of styles and content, from high art to exploitation, without compromising its medium.
Technology also plays a role in horror’s migration from stage to screen. In the 19th century, theatrical phantasmagoria did create spine-chilling stage illusions of ghosts and skeletons. The Grand Guignol theatre in the early 20th century presented gruesome tales of madness and murder with graphic realism. However, cinema amplified both fantastical effects and visceral realism to levels unattainable in live performance, allowing horror to truly flourish. Imagine how cinematic techniques could elevate the dance sequences in the movie the forbidden dance, creating a truly terrifying experience.
Cinema’s capacity to embrace both the fantastical and the realistic is crucial to horror and illuminates dance’s complex relationship with the genre. If dance isn’t inherently suited to horror on stage, why does it thrive in myths and fairytales? According to philosopher Noël Carroll, the distinction lies not in the subject matter—both genres feature monsters and magic—but in their attitude. In fairytales, supernatural elements are integrated into the story’s natural world. Swan maidens and sorcerers are as commonplace as princes. In horror, these elements are alien, violating the natural order. Fairytales present the fantastic as normal, even if frightening; horror presents it as abnormal, an abomination.
Compared to cinema or even theatre, dance struggles to portray “normality” or “reality.” While dancers can wear peasant costumes and perform against realistic backdrops, the moment they move in rhythmic time and structured space—that is, when they begin to dance—normality is left behind. And without a grounding in normality, what can horror threaten, undermine, or ultimately, horrify?
Dance’s inherent abstraction, its inclination towards the “abnormal,” aligns it more closely with myth and fairytale than stark horror on stage. However, this very quality makes dance potent material for horror films. Numerous movies utilize dance for particularly unsettling scenes, such as the waltzing zombies in Carnival of Souls (1962) or the horrifying corpse-ballerina in Evil Dead 2 (1987). In many films, dance and dancers become narratively linked to madness, psychosis, and perversion in heightened tales of obsession and possession. Consider the schlock-horror of Black Swan (2010), the nightmarish visuals of The Red Shoes (1948), the stylized paranoia of Suspiria (1977), the melodramatic portrayals of insane artists in The Mad Genius (1931) and The Specter of the Rose (1946), the musical slasher Stage Fright (2014), and the gruesome body horror of Livide (2011), featuring vampire ballerinas led by Paris Opéra étoile Marie-Claude Pietragalla. And this is just scratching the surface. Imagine a contemporary film like the movie the forbidden dance pushing these boundaries even further, exploring the terrifying potential of dance on screen.
Dance may not consistently deliver horror effectively on stage, but it excels as horror in film. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only stage dance performance that truly startled me was Jakop Ahlbom’s Horror (2014), more mime than pure dance, but deeply rooted in cinematic horror references. A masterfully constructed montage of moments inspired by The Shining, The Exorcist, The Beast with Five Fingers, The Omen, and countless other horror films, it was genuinely terrifying and left me wanting to experience it again. This example, alongside the cinematic potential hinted at by the idea of the movie the forbidden dance, suggests that while stage dance horror might be elusive, dance’s capacity to terrify on screen is undeniable.
