From Hair-Raisers to Hot 'N' Throbbing

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel reclaimed a part of herself when she wrote Hot 'N' Throbbing, which is getting a new production by the Signature Theatre Company's off-Broadway. Vogel showed an early interest and talent for horror films and stories. Although they were terrifying, she looked at her obsession as an escape from the real-life horrors of family problems. After penning critically acclaimed plays such as the Obie Award-winning, The Baltimore Waltz and How I Learned to Drive along with other numerous works, it is Hot 'N' Throbbing that Vogel holds close to her heart. Here, Vogel revisits her childhood to unearth the day when she showed interest in the horror genre, as well as the moment she lost interest in it.

When I was five years old, there came a Saturday when my parents announced that I would be staying home with my mother while my two older brothers got to go and see a matinee at the Viers Mill Movie Theater in suburban Maryland. And I threw, of course, a temper tantrum. Whatever my brothers got to see, I should get to see! So I somehow convinced my poor mother to allow me to go and see this matinee.

It was a horror movie. And of course I was too young to see it, and of course I was terrified. It was awful and cheesy and I don't even remember the title, but afterward I remember thinking, "When I get home, my brothers are going to start hiding behind the doors and jumping out and scaring me." So I quickly switched into a defensive mode, talking in great and vivid detail about the movie, and "wasn't it cool when the vampire came in, and wasn't it great when the head got chopped off…" And for the next week I started hiding behind the doors and scaring my brothers! Unfortunately, the act convinced my parents that I really enjoyed horror movies, and so they said "Well, we'll let you go and see the next Saturday matinee."

Thereafter, each Saturday I went and saw horror movies. I stopped sleeping at night, but I couldn't tell anyone--I had to keep up the ploy. Then, alas, The Twilight Zone started, and every night my parents let me watch. This went on and on, and by the fourth grade I had read the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe. As I grew up, I realized that horror movies had an incredible function. The traumas of childhood, the overheard marital fights that felt like Armageddon, the strained silence at the dinner table, the things we're really scared of, were diverted by the fear that Godzilla would break through the window. For years as a young child I wrote ghost stories, horror stories, until a fateful slumber party in junior high. Late in the night, I was making up some horror narrative when one of the girls went into hysterics. I immediately stopped the story and realized, "this isn't funny--this isn't fun." And I tucked away that part of myself; the budding Anne Rice in me got suppressed at that age.

Writing Hot 'N' Throbbing has forced me to revisit that part of my brain, the Twilight Zone era that I may have abandoned a bit too early. This play marks the only time that I've consciously used the horror movie techniques, which I chose to ease the play's harrowing journey into the fearful and violent territory of dysfunctional families and domestic abuse. How do I get us in one room, enjoy the watching at times? Make it funny? I wanted to use that childhood fascination with the things that frighten us, combined with the irrational comedy I remember from my favorite films. I am also a fan of Roman Polanski and Alfred Hitchcock movies and their techniques of colliding fear and comedy, especially Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers--it's a terrifying movie, and it's one of the funniest films that I've ever seen. A great joke in the movie: the villagers are being picked off by vampires while a poor Jewish innkeeper lusts after a young Christian village girl. He's kept under lock and key by a watchful wife, until he himself is drained by a vampire. As he descends through a skylight to carry off the gorgeous Christian girl, she reaches for the crucifix to ward him off...the line "Oy, have you got the wrong vampire!"--was one of the great moments in that collision of horror and comedy.

Though Hot 'N' Throbbing has allowed me in some ways to revisit that "horror movie world" of my youth, I don't think I could write this kind of play more than this once. Now that I'm an adult, I find it less and less of a relief or a release to think about Alien, or The Exorcist or Godzilla. It becomes far more difficult to divert my fears from what really scares me in the world today, from the terrors happening every day in our neighborhoods and in our living rooms. That is a large part of why Hot 'N' Throbbing exists, to show us these things that we too easily ignore. I must admit I don't see many horror films nowadays. I don't need Godzilla anymore--I'm perfectly able to keep myself up at night by reading the newspaper.