The Haunting Of Hoxton Hall
30 October 2024
Hoxton Hall
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
Continuing to pursue spooky experiences in the run-up to Halloween, The Haunting Of Hoxton Hall seemed like a great bit of evening entertainment suitable to the season. Hoxton Hall is suitably drenched in spooky lighting and eerie soundscape to welcome the audience and raise the tension.
The show follows three friends breaking into a derelict theatre, ten years after one of their friends died in this very spot. Back then, they were investigating rumours of a girl plummeting to her death from the gallery back in Victorian times, this time they want to stage a seance to speak to Lee, and to uncover why she had a fatal accident a decade ago. As they wait for midnight, they tell spooky ghost stories to entertain each other.
Each story is accompanied with aerial acrobatics, a nice atmospheric touch. However, the stories themselves don’t seem to build enough tension to be fully spine-tingling, feeling more lacklustre than scary. Visually, it’s a fun little show with great talent on display, the score by Tristan Jakob-Hoff is fantastic in building up a chilling soundscape, and the basic back-bone of the plot is interesting. Unfortunately the staging feels more Scooby-Do than horror. With bright torches being shone into the audience, blinding viewers to the action on stage, and stage lighting turned up too high, the spooky atmosphere just doesn’t quite build up fully, less is often more when it comes to lighting a scary show.
The scary stories fail to fully build up tension before revealing the twist, often lingering too much on details and foreshadowing the ending too heavily, reminding of campfire tales told to children. The overarching “haunting” of Hoxton Hall is definitely the most interesting part, but also told without fully building up the spook factor before revealing its twist, drenching the characters in too much light, and giving away its ending way too early.
The idea for this show is quite solid with an entertaining story, but the execution needs a good bit of work to be a horror or even spook show.
