For anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, Hammer wasn’t just an outlet for horror films – it was horror itself. The company mastered branding before that word existed, and created its own interconnected universe back when the Marvel one was confined to the local newsagent. Hammer had all bases covered, with hit films that revolved around the horror supergroup of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy as well as detours into Satanism (The Devil Rides Out), science fiction (the Quatermass series) and literary classics (The Hound of the Baskervilles). This was horror with a twist of eccentricity and a splash of camp. Sure, you’d get Christopher Lee sinking his teeth into virgins’ necks but you might also see kung-fu warriors fighting the undead in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, or Dora Bryan pinned to a door with a poker in Hands of the Ripper.

The studio enjoyed a screen comeback in 2012 with The Woman in Black, riding the frock-coat tails of the popular stage version, but that slick ghost story had few of the tawdry thrills associated with Hammer in its prime. A 19th-century, Grade II-listed music hall, the venue for the company’s new immersive promenade theatre production The Soulless Ones, seems like a more fertile breeding ground for Hammer’s heritage-industry horror.

Choosing from cocktails that include AB Positive and Corpse Reviver, and dressed in regulation black capes that render us invisible to any ghouls or vampires, we make our way into the creaking, musty auditorium of Hoxton Hall, where Nathaniel Blythe (Stephen Fewell), an expert in the supernatural, promises an evening in which any doubts about the existence of the spirit world will be laid to rest. We are invited to explore every corner of the building and it takes at least 40 minutes for the audience, and the production, to find its feet. I stumble into a candlelit boudoir where the vampire Elodie (Charlotte Blackledge), whose red gown and high collar suggests she got first dibs on the dressing-up box, is being attended to by her servant Dimi (Robert Nairne), who is much feasted upon but longs to become a vampire himself – to graduate, in other words, from dinner to diner.

The locations are more immediately evocative than the drama. Downstairs lies a music room where eerie carnival puppets dangle from the walls. There is a crypt transformed into a misty graveyard with wood-chips underfoot and creepers on the walls, as well as some kind of dimly lit Moroccan tearoom. The bar itself becomes a setting for the musings of Billy the Keys (Trevor Michael Georges), a wandering balladeer. And what unspeakable wretchedness lies behind this curtain? Oh, it’s just the kitchen.

The way to navigate a path through the play’s vignettes, it transpires, is to pick a favourite character and follow her or him around until another takes your fancy. Wandering up and down the stairwells and communing with the spirits is Remy St Clair (Samuel Collings), a poet in breeches and billowing shirt, who captured perfectly the way I was feeling after an hour, when he turned yet another corner and sighed: “Christ. More stairs.”

Dimi’s tale is by far the most compelling, partly because of Nairne’s eye-catching performance but also due to its clear and poignant narrative. There is some intrigue involving Blythe and Elodie, but chancing upon that is a case, like much of the play, of being in the right place at the right time. It was just as likely that I would find myself in the company yet again of a pair of ghostly, giggling dandies with a fondness for bawdy limericks; I’m assuming they were part of the company, though they might easily have been my fellow critics.

The success of Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories, recently adapted for cinema, proves that theatre and horror are not mutually exclusive. (A stage version of The Exorcist also opens later this year.) To nail the Hammer mood authentically, though, there would need to have been at least a hint of the chilling about The Soulless Ones. It might also have been rewarding if there were some noticeable intersection with Hammer’s cinematic back catalogue.

But while the production is spiffy, it’s never spooky. The main problem is that any air of dread is dispersed and diluted by the scattershot structure. Though the show is topped and tailed by scenes on the main stage, it’s impossible for the rest of it to achieve the intensity of focus or the claustrophobic immersion that successful horror demands. Whichever room I found myself in, the screams and cries seemed always to be emanating from elsewhere in the building. It was an evening that dealt not in fear but in the fear of missing out.

• Hammer House of Horror Live: The Soulless Ones is at Hoxton Hall, London, until 31 October. Box office: 020-7684 0060.