HILL House flexed its supernatural muscles on the Liverpool Playhouse stage last night - and the effect was chilling.

The theatre promised its audience an alternative dramatic experience for the season of goodwill...and boy, did it deliver in spades.

There's no Ebenezer Scrooge-like redemption here. The Haunting of Hill House tells a story that is relentlessly bleak, not to say harrowing.

The play is an adaptation of the novel by author Shirley Jackson, who died in 1965, and was widely acclaimed for her hair-raising stories and tales of the supernatural.

In the seminal 1963 screen version The Haunting by Robert Wise the narrator quoting from the opening page of the book sets the scene thus: "Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within."

A riff to remember as the drama unfolds.

It is 1959 America and the mysterious Dr Montague decides it's about time science proved the existence of the supernatural and that Hill House - an eighty year old creepy mansion with a haunted history, the source of much local fear and rumour - is the perfect place to do it.

He invites three carefully-chosen guests to join him in his quest to unlock the house's dark secrets - but are they really guests or human lab rats in a sinister experiment?

First to arrive is the fragile Eleanor Vance (Emily Bevan). She initially regrets coming to a place of such doom and gloom but brightens up when she's joined by bohemian designer Theodora (Chipo Chung).

They meet up in the house's uncertain shape-shifting geometry - all virtually-projected rooms-within-rooms and endless circular passageways - with Luke (Joseph May), a cynical journalist with a history of exposing fraudulent paranormal activity, and the ringmaster Dr Montague (Martin Turner).

The four settle in over the next few days, but Eleanor seems particularly vulnerable to Hill House's ways.

Her bond with the house strengthens as the play develops. She begins to feel she and the house are one.

Eleanor's apparent psychological unravelling is brilliantly portrayed and one is never quite certain even at the shocking end whether the demons that torment her are a manifestation of the mansion or if they were there, in her own head, all along.

Have we just witnessed a haunted house or a haunted mind?

There are some full-throttle jump-shock moments and for the first act it felt a bit like riding a fairground ghost train with an over-the-top terror around every corner to jolt and startle.

But The Haunting of Hill House represents the perfect night out for those seeking an antidote to the anodyne excesses in this season of good cheer.

The house of horrors is stunningly realised by Miriam Buether's constantly shifting set, Jack Knowles' eerie lighting and the ominous atmospherics of composer and sound designer Nick Powell, working with company 59 Projections.

The play is produced in collaboration with Hammer and Sonia Friedman Productions.

This stage version is adapted by Anthony Neilson (The Wonderful World of Dissocia, National Theatre Scotland; Realism, Edinburgh International Festival) and directed by Olivier and Tony Award nominee Melly Still (Coram Boy, Nation; National Theatre).

Globe rating:  Four stars - weird, unsettling, the stuff of nightmares - loved it!

The show runs until January 16.

Tickets from the box office 0151 709 4776.