Horror is one genre that doesn’t get much love in modern theater — unless you count the haunted house performances that pop up every October as a kind of interactive theater. Levi Holloway’s Grey House, a Chicago import with a starry cast and a lavish physical production, aims to change all that with its attention to detail and a first-rate cast that elevates the creepiness without ever asking us to look too deeply into the underlying logic of the story.

That’s a good thing, because the surface charms of Scott Pask’s rustic cabin-in-the-woods set, Natasha Katz’s creepy lighting and Tom Gibbons creaky sound design are plentiful. And director Joe Mantello directs the nine-person cast to tiptoe just to the edge of camp without ever quite falling over — and sets up enough old-fashioned jump scares to keep the audience firmly in his grasp even as the plausibility dims along with the lights.

Holloway has crafted a doozy of a story, about a mother figure (Laurie Metcalf, in a stringy gray wig and rural-ish voice) and the five creepy kids in her care — otherworldly figures who all seem to be trapped in the remote mountain house in the mid-’70s for reasons that are revealed only gradually, and never completely. We first see them watching Roadrunner cartoons on TV, performing eerie sing-a-longs and stringing together bloody animal entrails into a macrame-like tapestry that hints at some of the horrors to come.

This unsettling domestic scene is interrupted by the arrival of a couple (Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks) who have totaled their car on the road nearby in the middle of a blizzard and who settle into the house to wait out the storm and allow time for Sparks’s injured Henry to recuperate enough to make their escape. In a bit of foreshadowing, Henry even comments on the gloominess of the setting: “I’ve seen this movie.” We all have.

What follows, in fact, lives up to just about every horror trope that’s burst from behind the supposedly locked door of a movie from Hammer Films or New Line or Blumhouse over the last half-century. There’s the basement into which Squirrel (Colby Kipnes) disappears; the fridge sometimes laden with eggs and other staples and sometimes full of jars of “moonshine” labeled with the name of an unidentified man with a vintage-like date; the ragged carpets hiding a pentagram-like drawing scratched onto the wooden floorboards; the sudden blackouts and creaking from within the walls.

The cast is excellent. Maslany initially oozes discomfort but gets drawn into the uneasy rhythms of the house; Sophia Anne Caruso plays the alpha daughter, Marlow, with a mean-girl energy; bespectacled Alyssa Emily Marvin projects a kind of know-it-all wit as the ominously named A1656 (“It’s no A1655”); and Quiet Place star Millicent Simmonds, as the deaf daughter, hovers about the stage with eyes both watchful and knowing. While there are hints of larger themes at work — allusions to the Holocaust, as well as childhood sexual abuse and cycles of trauma — they never coalesce in way that packs an emotional wallop. Instead, Grey House is content to deliver a skillful bump in the night.