NEW YORK — A young married couple driving through a blizzard in the lonely Oregon mountains hits a deer and wrecks their car. In shock, the pair knocks on the door of a remote cabin. They’re read their Stephen King and are plenty discombobulated, for their arrival seems to have been expected by the strange, feral family they encounter there. “I’ve seen this movie,” the injured husband tells his stressed-out wife, even as he bleeds out on the floor. “We don’t make it.”

Fans of cinematic horror are, of course, well acquainted with the self-awareness that’s de rigueur in this genre, at least since the “Scream” franchise and Jordan Peele. But Broadway thrillers — a long-standing genre but hardly one in fashion — have tended to be more tied to thunder, gunshots and other monikers of traditionalism. That’s not the style of Levi Holloway, a rich, thick and very postmodern writer who uses the genre not just to creep out his audience but to weave a complicated morality tale that reaches back into history to punish the guilty.

Holloway created this fascinating, intermission-less play for the low-budget A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago with a different cast and director in late 2019. A Red Orchid is an artistic petri dish where the actors work just a few feet from your head. Back then, it both scared the bejesus out of me and compelled me with its emotional intensity and psychological sophistication. And I had no idea where it was going.

On Broadway, where the expectations are as different as the beefed-up budget, both fresh polish and a palpable tension has emerged between the oddball core of this play and the need to play up to the commercial expectations surrounding a marketable world like horror. The show, now directed with his typical craft and creativity by Joe Mantello, first titillates its audience with loud, scary music and a theater that immediately plunges into darkness and then, as the play takes a very different, avant-garde turn, hopes they will switch gears and come along for the ride.

I’m not sure those are the right initial expectations to raise, just as I am not convinced everyone around me at the matinee I saw understood what was going on, not least because Holloway wrote a much stranger play than anything typical of this genre and he refuses to pander. Good for him, and for Mantello for backing this young writer all the way, but I bet there will be plenty of question marks on the audience feedback surveys. “Grey House” is weird and complicated, more Sam Shepard and Tracy Letts than King, and very much of the Chicago storefront school.

Laurie Metcalf, a hugely gifted actress schooled in that very ethos, does uncompromising work as the matriarch of a brood of seemingly fatherless girls in the house, variously played by Sophia Anne Caruso, Millicent Simmonds, Colby Kipnes and Alyssa Emily Marvin, and one taciturn young boy, Eamon Patrick O’Connell. Who are these retro, ritual-loving girls in the long dresses who all know how to sing in harmony? Why is one of them called The Ancient (Cyndi Coyne)? Does the family really subsist on the moonshine that fills their refrigerator? And what are their intentions with their terrified visitors?

You’ll intuit that there likely is some sort of connection — but finding out exactly what takes up most of the play. I think it’s a worthwhile challenge and one I’m not going to spoil.

I didn’t see Tatiana Maslany, who plays the confused wive Max, alongside the overly retiring Paul Sparks as husband Henry; Maslany missed opening performances due to health reasons. The understudy, Claire Karpen, surely powered through, although the hiccup might explain why the connection between the outsiders and their hosts was not as emotionally intense as I remember in Chicago. The script is structured like a postmodern Sophoclean tragedy where all illusions, delusions and defenses are slowly stripped away as the rot below is revealed and finally understood by the perpetrator. In other words, “Grey House” requires a deep dive on the part of both the cast and the audience; ideally, this show is not just about haunted house-like scares but about confronting the animal within and the complicity that feeds it oxygen. As such the play is not unlike Letts’ “The Minutes,” on Broadway in 2020.

“Grey House” is trying to honor that unstinting parentage, despite the baked-in demands on a mostly young cast of kids, who give it all they’ve got. The show also has whip up interest on a hot summer night. That’s not an easy combo, and you can see the strains it puts on the second half of the show, but much of its worth gets unpacked there. Scarily so, to boot.

At the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St., New York; greyhousebroadway.com

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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