News A Midsummer Night’s Dream Comedian Alice Lowe is Writing a Horror Version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream It’s all fun and games until you have a frickin’ donkey head. By Molly Templeton | Published on October 23, 2025 Screenshot: HanWay Film Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: HanWay Film Getting lost in a forest with a bunch of magical creatures who transform you, cast spells on you, and make you do unlikely things sounds moderately terrifying. Shakespeare just made it funny. Now, British comedian, writer, and actor Alice Lowe (Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace) is set to put her own scary spin on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, turning the classic comedy of fairy meddling, weddings, transformations, and mistaken identities into something else entirely. Lowe told Deadline, “I wanted to make a classic and it struck me that A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I know so well, is always made in the same way over and over. It’s so genuinely funny. But also fey and fairies and blah blah blah. But I don’t see why it couldn’t be revisited with how terrifying and odd everything happens in it, and how the undercurrents are actually so dark and strange.” She’s not wrong. And to be fair, she’s not the first person to tweak Shakespeare in this way: Lowe follows in the footsteps of 2017’s A Midsummer’s Nightmare, a film I must admit I had never heard of before, despite the fact that it stars Paul Walter Hauser (Fantastic Four: First Steps) and Dominic Monaghan (The Lord of the Rings). It was apparently intended to be the pilot for a Lifetime series. There is also an early 2000s film called A Midsummer Night’s Rave, which I think is self-explanatory. I am somewhat more excited about Lowe’s project. Lowe is also writing and directing a film called Sprites, a horror comedy about which she said: It’s set in the early ’80s, which is a period that fascinates me. It’s a time when things were rapidly changing and I think the onset of the individualism that is today the mainstay of our psyches and society at large. . . . More so than today our parents would be saying one thing, but doing another. And it seems to me this was a kind of betrayal of contracts in families. So there was still a rigidity of behaving and conforming. A trust in institutions. Yet, society was starting to abandon those rules. Institutional abuse and misuse of those rules. And so, as a kid, you could slip through those cracks. So at its core it’s about being afraid of adults! Lowe’s last film was Timestalker (pictured above), the trailer for which was absolutely delightful. She co-wrote and starred in 2012’s Sightseers, which was directed by Ben Wheatley (Kill List). She was also in Hot Fuzz, Black Mirror, and The Mighty Boosh, but for many people the most important thing about her is that she starred in the beloved cult favorite Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. The series was created by Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness, who starred as a horror author (Holness) and his publisher (Ayoade). It is one of those series I have been told to watch for more years than I can count. Probably I should watch it. Probably you should too, in preparation for Lowe’s upcoming films. One does wish to be thorough.[end-mark] The post Comedian Alice Lowe is Writing a Horror Version of <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i> appeared first on Reactor.