Camden Fringe Review: This App Is a Haunted House ★★½

Swipe right for scares, BUT LEFT for structure: This App Is a Haunted House at Camden Fringe

Arriving at the Hen & Chickens for This App Is a Haunted House, you are asked to choose: trick or treat. Choose treat and you are handed a marshmallow to hold. Choose trick, as I did, and you become a victim, script in hand, ready to be called upon during the show. It is a playful bit of scene-setting, and it tells you straight away what kind of evening this means to be: silly, a little chaotic, and keen to have you in on the joke.

Written by Scout Black and directed by MaggieMarie Casto, the premise, on paper, is a good one. A “final girl” (the survivor left standing at the end of every slasher film) recounts her own horror story, except the killer here is not a masked man with a knife but the modern dating app. Along the way we get a summer camp framing device, complete with amusing camp-counsellor voiceovers, and a series of vignettes about dating disasters and choices that had a pleasing, slightly rueful Bridget Jones air to them.

I should say upfront that I am too old to have ever used a dating app myself, and I do not watch many slasher films either. That did not stop me finding plenty to laugh at. There is enough shared cultural knowledge of both genres, the tropes of the doomed camp, the general indignities of swiping left, that anyone can find their way in, in the way that a good sketch about dating culture (News Revue at the Canal Café, say, or a strong improv set) works on an audience regardless of their own experience.

Black and Casto themselves are a large part of what does work. They are both appealing performers, and their handling of the audience throughout felt confident and comfortable rather than nervy, which is no small thing on a Fringe stage. Their comic timing is genuinely good, and some of the scripted scenes, the early “what happens on the first few dates” sequence in particular, were delivered with a knowing, self-deprecating touch that landed well. Their own speech was always easy to hear, which was not always the case for the pre-recorded material; the camp staff voiceovers raised a laugh but were not always easy to make out, though a separate telephone-man recording was while a separate male voice on the phone was clear and genuinely chilling.

Where the show struggled was in holding all of this together. Individual scenes were often very funny in isolation, but I came away without a confident sense of the overall plot, and there were moments (why, exactly, did the ghost need an emergency blanket?) that seemed to assume a shared understanding the audience simply did not have. Any show, but especially one built from sketches and vignettes like this, needs to set out its premise clearly at the start and then stick to it, so that even someone with no prior exposure to the material can follow along. Here, that did not quite happen, and I do wonder whether the fix is less about writing new material than going back over what already exists and checking, scene by scene, that each idea reads clearly to someone seeing it for the first time.

It is worth saying that testing new material in front of a live audience is exactly what the Fringe is for, and there is a lot to like in what Black and Casto have built here: strong ideas, real chemistry, and a cast willing to be a bit silly with their audience. A tighter, more clearly signposted version of this show could be a genuinely spooky, spectacular piece about the perils of apps, dating and slasher stereotypes. I hope they take it there.

The details: This App Is a Haunted House runs at the Hen & Chickens Theatre Bar, 109 St Paul’s Road, N1 2NA, until 6 August as part of Camden Fringe. Tickets are £13 with no concessions listed, so it is worth budgeting for at full price rather than expecting a discount.

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