You join me as Manchester enters tier 3 lockdown measures, which means you can only get Covid in a pub if you’re not eating, but I’m still ploughing on through my favourite moments in scary and horror fiction all throughout October.
Today’s topic is a bit out there and focuses on a group role-playing drama created by my own mum! You might remember me talking about my mum’s experience with the East Anglian legend of the Lantern Men.
My mum has been working as a pioneering teacher of drama for more years than she’d thank me for saying, using these role-playing drama sessions as a means of getting children to be able to grow in confidence and express themselves through acting out a fictional scenario with each other, instead of simply performing to an audience.
Most of my mum’s extended dramas would comprise of a (usually scary) bizarre situation that the kids all found themselves in, with my mum and some volunteers narrating and acting specific roles within the story to move the plot along, then retiring and allowing the children to discuss what they’d seen, what it meant and what they should do next.
In a sense, the stories were largely written by the kids in the class with my mum intervening to keep the story within the bounds of acceptability. To give an analogy, the kids were deciding where to go and which route to take, but my mum would be behind the steering wheel, making sure the car stayed on the road.
There were many chilling settings for these extended role plays; once we were being given a tour in a cave, but an earthquake ended up sealing us in, once we were passengers aboard a spaceship, but something had gone wrong, and once we were walking home during a blizzard, but none of the houses looked right, and we realised we were lost.
The most infamous of all of these scenarios, however, was the Cleaner. This was one which my mum used a few times, as it seemed particularly effective in getting the kids to band together.
My mum would start the drama off by making us all lie down in this hall and would narrate that we had just woken up inside a cell. We couldn’t communicate with each other at first, we were simply just stuck there, while we could hear weird noises outside, which my mum would play from a tape cassette of strange electrical, robotic and just downright esoteric noises.
Eventually, the doors to our cells opened and we would be presented with a labyrinth (in reality a combination of chairs and tables placed to create some passageways) from which we couldn’t escape, but we met each other.
At this point in the story, one of my mum’s volunteers would enter the drama, claiming to have been outside of their cell for a while already, and give some exposition of what the noises were.
They would refer to this phenomenon as the Cleaner; a metal box with a light in the front of it. If its light touched you, you’d die and you’d be swept up, or cleaned, by this robot. While this story was being told my mum would quietly go to the tape player and start the strange noises again.
The volunteer would then be overcome by fear, and my mum would move around silently with a torch (this was back in the nineties when we could have all the lights off and the words health and safety were in nobody’s minds, so the torch light would have the effect of obscuring my mum from view, and just appear as this bobbing orb).
The volunteer would become too afraid and bolt, running into the torchlight, which would ‘kill’ them, and they would have no further part in the drama.
The story from there, was basically down to the kids and how they thought they could escape the labyrinth or defeat the Cleaner. My mum would periodically then go around with the torch and the noises to alarm everyone and get everyone to think creatively about having the opportunity to move.
Each group came up with different solutions as to why they were there and how they could escape. The group I was in when I was a child decided there was a main gate with a keypad on it.
My mum then made up a riddle, which we had to solve. Inputting the correct answer would open the gate and lead to freedom. The wrong answer would summon the Cleaner who would not leave until we all perished.
I remember at that time, such was the power of the drama, that we were unsure about the riddle and couldn’t bring ourselves to risk putting in the wrong code. We weren’t actually imprisoned, and my mum wasn’t actually wielding a death ray, but we’d got so into the scenario that we were unable to face the consequences of getting the answer wrong.
Which is why I almost didn’t write this piece, as my description of it doesn’t really do the drama justice. My mum was, and still is, a genius who was able to create essentially an interactive horror story for kids, long before video games were anything more than pixels bouncing around.
As I’ve stated many times during these posts, the most effective terror is often minimalistic; if you hint at something terrible, but don’t describe it in detail, your audience will imagine something far more personally scary than you could have described.
For me, that fear was the separation from the group. When with the others, I felt more confident of survival, more willing to be brave. The Cleaner killing me didn’t scare me because of my ‘death’ in the story, it scared me as it would erect a veil between me and the others.
I vaguely remember coming back as a young adult to help my mum out with a new iteration for a different group, and I was the unfortunate soul who ended up meeting their demise at the Cleaner’s beam.
But, by then, it was easier to just see the chairs, tables, torch and hokey sound effects. I’ll never forget the sheer unnerving terror my child’s mind concocted at the Cleaner’s sound, where it made my mind go and how it made me act. It was a positive experience, and one that definitely shaped me as an adult, as it has many others who went through her classes.
I’ve not named my mum (and she doesn’t share my surname) just in case some conservative pearl-clutcher reads this and decides my mum is a monster who shouldn’t be teaching kids anything remotely edgy like this. Just believe me when I say fear and collective resistance to are great catalysts in getting children to come out of their shells and, as an educator, when you do that, you can learn how they learn and how to help them.
I’ll end on confirming my mum always stopped the dramas if they were causing too much distress to the class and would pause the drama several times a lesson to get the kids to discuss the story outside of the story, turning the lights on and taking a lighter tone. It’s probably why I’ve grown to have a healthy love of horror and scary fiction!
Matt Hartless Blog 