Tim Foley has lent his words to many of the greats – Sir Michael Palin strred in his Torchwood audio drama Tropical Beach Sounds, while Christopher Eccleston reprised his role as the Doctor in Doctor Who audioplay Auld Lang Syne in 2022. He’s written dialogue for Alex Kingston, Samuel West and Peter Davison.

Now he’s putting words in the mouth of actor George Naylor, the central character in horror play It Walks Around the House at Night. The play is showing at Southwark Playhouse Borough until March 28th, after a sell-out UK tour.

Right now it does feel like somewhat of a renaissance for horror theatre. We saw huge stars taking part in 2:22: A Ghost Story’s run, and Paranormal Activity the stage play is back on the West End. It Walks Around the House at Night might take place in a comparatively smaller venue, but it packs just as mighty a punch.

In its simplest form, the play tells the story of Joe, a bar manager and aspiring actor who’s hired by his older gentleman crush to do a ghost walk around his Tudor manor house, to scare two visiting nieces.

Things start to deteriorate, however, when Joe senses someone – or something – following him as he makes his way through the woods each night for a week.

The atmosphere is unsettling from the get-go. In the small theatre – ironically named The Large at Southwark – there is nowhere to hide. Audience members crunch through the gravel and undergrowth forming part of the set as they take their seats, and from then on you know the monster could quite literally come and grab you.

Naylor is fantastic as Joe. For what is essentially a one-man show, he delivers each line with perfect pitch and transitions between terror and flirtation like the flick of a switch.

And aside from its well deserved place in the horror genre, the play has heart, too. There are plenty of laughs, but also some poignant moments that had me tearing up. The monster is, quite genuinely, terrifying – and the first time I saw it on stage I wanted to instinctively duck behind the seat in front of me.

I do think the play would have been bolstered by having more actors, if only because Naylor is forced to spend so much time recounting what others are saying to him regardless. It would have been nice to see him play off other people, rather than just himself.

There is a section towards the end in which we meet the only other actor in the play, Oliver Baines, who plays the unnamed Dancer. True to his name, the pair perform an intricate interpretive dance number mid-show which, strangely, didn’t feel at all out of place. It was a little like a dream sequence – that part in a horror film where the protagonist is so beaten down by the metaphysical events going on around him that even the absurd seems to make sense.

The ending is what ultimately left me with chills. There’s a moment where Naylor breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly and I felt my stomach drop to my toes, as though the whole thing had been a giant ruse and there really was something lurking in the theatre with us, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.

I left the theatre double checking the shadows for any lurking presence.