(Image: Freelance)
For generations, Yorkshire has proved that you do not need Transylvania, a haunted American hotel or a remote cabin in the woods to scare an audience.
Sometimes Sheffield will do perfectly well.
Perhaps the most terrifying production associated with the county is Threads, the BBC drama depicting a nuclear attack on Sheffield and its horrifying aftermath. The film mixed the conventions of nuclear horror with the everyday realism of ordinary British life, turning familiar streets and domestic routines into something nightmarish.
First shown in 1984, Threads was written by Barry Hines, the Yorkshire writer best known for A Kestrel for a Knave, which became Kes. What makes Threads so disturbing is its refusal to behave like a conventional disaster movie.
There are no heroic survivors rebuilding civilisation by the closing credits. Instead, it follows ordinary people as society collapses following nuclear war.
Sheffield was an inspired choice. The industrial city, with its factories, terraced streets and shopping centres, provided an instantly recognisable British setting. The horror comes from imagining the unimaginable happening not somewhere distant, but at home.
Four decades later, Threads remains the Yorkshire production capable of making viewers want to hide behind the sofa for entirely different reasons from Doctor Who.
For more traditional scares, Yorkshire has plenty to offer.
A particularly strong example is Ghost Stories, the 2017 film written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman. It was filmed extensively across Yorkshire, including Leeds City Varieties, Harehills Labour Club, Chapel Allerton, Holbeck, Saltaire, Harewood Estate, Harrogate and Hornsea.
Nyman plays Professor Phillip Goodman, a sceptic who investigates three supposedly supernatural cases and discovers that rational explanations become increasingly difficult to find. Paul Whitehouse, Alex Lawther and Martin Freeman also star.
Bradford district viewers have an especially good reason to recognise it: Salts Mill at Saltaire was among the locations used during production.
One of Yorkshire’s most atmospheric towns has inevitably attracted horror filmmakers as well. Saint Maud was filmed in Whitby and told the disturbing story of Maud, a newly devout nurse whose religious obsession develops increasingly frightening consequences.
Whitby hardly needs help in the gothic department. Bram Stoker’s association of the town with Dracula, its abbey ruins towering over the coast and its steep old streets have ensured generations of visitors arrive already expecting something sinister.
Then there is one of horror cinema’s most celebrated warnings to tourists: don’t wander about on the moors.
An American Werewolf in London begins with two young American backpackers encountering a very unfriendly welcome in rural Yorkshire. The Yorkshire section is comparatively brief, but its lonely roads, hostile pub and bleak countryside establish the atmosphere for John Landis’s mixture of horror and black comedy.
Sadly, John Landis didn’t venture north to film American Werewolf’s scenes in Yorkshire.
Instead, he used Powys, Wales, as a stand-in.
Long before that, filmmakers were already exploiting the menace of the Yorkshire landscape. Benighted, JB Priestley’s tale of madness, was adapted by Universal as a vehicle for Boris Karloff. Directed by James Whale, The Old Dark House is recognised as a golden age classic of horror.
The 1942 mystery-horror The Night Has Eyes sends two women to the Yorkshire moors while investigating the disappearance of a friend, only for bad weather and suspicions about what happened to her to close in around them.
At the considerably gorier end of the Yorkshire spectrum is Inbred, a 2011 horror-comedy about a group of young offenders whose excursion into rural Yorkshire goes spectacularly and gruesomely wrong after they encounter the locals.
And the scary bits of The Limehouse Golem, a curious mix of police detective story and Gothic horror, were filmed at Dalton Mills, in Keighley.
More recently, Emmerdale star - and horror lover - Dominic Blunt directed his own take on the werewolf legend, Wolf Manor, in Yorkshire.
As the werewolf, actor Morgan Rees-Davies wore a full Latex body suit, with hidden stilts inside making him over 7ft tall. “It took four to six hours to get it on and in place, and we filmed overnight so he was freezing,” says Dominic. “It was worth it though. We couldn’t wait to see him flying out of the stable the first time - we all ran round taking selfies.”
Set in Shropshire, Wolf Manor was filmed in Ludlow and a Leeds studio. The impressive cast includes James Fleet and John Henshaw.
Television has also discovered Yorkshire’s capacity for the macabre.
One particularly intriguing Yorkshire connection is Psychoville, the dark BBC comedy-thriller from Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton.
Part of the programme was filmed around Ilkley, something you spotted yourself when an Ilkley Gazette story appeared as part of the plot. Its mixture of comedy, grotesque characters, murder and horror made it a natural precursor to the pair’s later Inside No. 9.
What connects the best of these Yorkshire productions is place.
The county can provide Gothic Whitby and lonely moorland, but it can also provide something arguably more frightening: normality.
Threads did not depend on an ancient curse or supernatural monster. Its power came from showing ordinary Yorkshire people going to work, shopping and worrying about everyday problems before their world was destroyed.
That may be why, among all Yorkshire’s ghosts, werewolves and assorted psychopaths, Threads still takes some beating. Nothing is quite as frightening as seeing the end of the world happening just down the M1.