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Killer On The Loose | Kyle Horton and Chris Fassbender are almost as sinister as the psycho they’re hunting in The Bone House.

THE BONE HOUSE
Directed by Courtenay Dobbie. Written by Marty Chan. Starring Chris Fassbender, Kyle Horton, Tracey Power. PCL Studio Theatre, TransAlta Arts Barns (10330-84 Ave). To Nov 7.
****1/2

Eugene Crowley, a self-proclaimed “mind hunter,” gives audiences three separate chances to leave the room during his lecture on the psychology of serial killers. Of course, nobody will actually get up and walk out, but now that I’ve sat through the whole hour, a big part of me wishes I’d have taken Crowley up on his offer. The Bone House is the scariest fucking thing I’ve seen all year. It is not for the faint of heart, stomach, or mind.

This fourth-wall-dismantling piece by Edmonton playwright Marty Chan, restaged here by Vancouver’s Village Theatre a decade after its premiere at the ’99 Fringe, sets itself up as pure nonfiction. There are no actors or crew listed on the playbill: instead, there’s only a cryptic list of names and numbers, as well as a terse paragraph written by Crowley, thanking the audience for letting him share this, his life’s work, with us. Crowley himself is armed with a grainy slideshow, an unreadable assistant named Jacob, and a singular accent and demeanour straight out of the American heartland.

He’s here to tell us about serial killers. Specifically, that they’re not so different than the rest of us so-called “normals.” They have steady jobs, and they’re well liked by neighbours — their childhoods are average and happy, full of fishing trips and ginger snaps. Then they start to murder people in cold blood. But to walk past them in the supermarket, you’d still never suspect a thing.

Then we come to the real subject of the lecture: Crowley has discovered a new serial killer, one who has never been caught or even formally identified because the police have never linked all of his crimes together. But Crowley has no trouble connecting the dots where others can’t or won’t. This killer’s pattern — they all have one — is that he takes his victims in pairs, making the first one watch as he slowly slits the second’s throat. In other words, he needs an audience. Crowley has dubbed him Midnight Cowboy, based on a song from that film, which recurs again and again in several of the cases.

Chan’s script is smart and full of creepy tension even on the surface, but the true scares in The Bone House come from where you least expect them, at least in a theatrical setting. After all, audiences can diffuse their initial fear by reminding themselves that they’re safe in their seats — so that’s the first thing to go. Crowley rearranges the audience throughout the show, putting strangers side by side. He makes them do arcane tasks involving divining rods, and studies their reactions for any traces of skepticism. Jacob quietly circles the room all the while, vulture-like. And when the lights go out? Well, you’ll have to see (or not see) that for yourself.

As Crowley and Jacob, Chris Fassbender and Kyle Horton, respectively, bring an eerie chemistry to their characters’ dynamic. From the beginning, their actions are a little off-putting — why do they both drink from their water bottles at the same time? — and Fassbender (who played Jacob in the original production) in particular does everything he can to make the audience suspect he’s the true killer. His Crowley then laughs off the implied accusation.

I’m docking a few minor points for the monologue that closes the show, which hits a few too many preachy notes. But this is an after-the-fact critique; in the moment, I was biting my knuckles in the pitch dark and praying for the house lights along with everyone else.