Long before this spring’s Backrooms and Obsession captured the horror movie zeitgeist there was the Paranormal Activity series, seven Blair Witch Project-inspired “found footage” shockers with another on the way next year. Admittedly after almost two decades of frights the activity is idling, with declining boxoffice and a switch to streaming, but IP is as never-say-die as Freddy or Jason–it always claws its way back to life. Since 2024 Paranormal Activity, the stage show, has been scaring up viewers from London (its original home) to San Francisco, and it opens tonight at the August Wilson, whose shade may be amused. (He wasn’t above supernatural-tinged storylines, albeit more high-minded ones.) Its producers number the reconstituted Hammer Films and its “scare” apparent, the franchise-spinning Blumhouse, who know what they’re doing in this realm on the big screen. So: do they have what it takes to turn a Broadway house into a haunted house?
Answer: yes, mostly, with some renovation. Unlike the Harry Potter and Stranger Things plays, which embroider upon their well-known sources, Paranormal Activity eschews the series’ central conceit of spooky plots driven by home surveillance equipment. Which is all for the best–video is an excellent tool (as in Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day and Birthright) but too much in a live environment can be fatiguing. And with the movies lacking the sorts of memorable characters who’ll be missed in the screen-to-stage translation the “ghost” (sorry) is clear for playwright Levi Holloway to do his own thing with the material, which he does…by way of his prior Broadway thriller, Grey House (2023).
Though always happy to see someone explore this genre on stage I was mixed on that one, which had a similar trajectory to the main stem. This time he simplifies a like scenario steeped in angst and guilt and children-related issues as he again focuses on a couple newly arrived at a foreboding home. Garrulous James (Travis A. Knight), who works in real estate, has left Chicago and relocated to London with his newlywed wife, Lou (Cher Álvarez). But unsteady Lou is unable to leave her traumatic past behind, and feels that she’s being tracked by an unseen presence. No amount of anti-psychotic meds can shake her seeming delusions–even if she were taking them and not dumping them into the houseplants, just one of a few secrets she’s hiding from her husband, who has a way of talking at her and not to her. That habit is a flashpoint between them, and it only worsens as the fire alarm mysteriously goes off, the TV mysteriously goes on, and so on up the ladder of genre staples. Adding to the tension are FaceTimed appearances by James’ meddling mother Carolanne (Shannon Cochran, a veteran of the original production of the great stage thriller Bug), who thinks Lou is a bad match for her coddled son as the couple hesitantly talks about parenting…but maybe it’s the other way around? In time a medium, Etheline (Eva Kaminsky), arrives, dispensing the show’s tagline, “Places aren’t haunted, people are.”
And let me tell you, by that time, my teen daughter and I, horror fans both, were. The initially benign manifestations escalate to a crescendo toward the end of the first act, with a great jump scare I don’t dare reveal. I’m not sure the show tops it, but it keeps coming close for two hours (and if you miss something hidden in the recesses of the darkened stage chances are a variation will appear). Director Felix Barrett is a veteran of immersive theater productions like Sleep No More, and my aging heart is relieved that this isn’t one of those, with grabbing hands or whatever popping out during the walkthrough. He keeps the action on the split-level set flowing smoothly, and the interpersonal dynamics are less cluttered than in Grey House, with a smaller, less starry cast fulfilling the script’s two-dimensional demands as relationships and religiosity are plumbed. The performance we’ve come to see, and it’s a corker, is the one put on by illusions designer Chris Fisher, of the Harry Potter and Stranger Things shows. It’s a feast of room-shaking frights from the bedroom to the bathroom, ably supported by Fly Davis (scenic and costume designer), Anna Watson (lighting designer), Gareth Fry (sound designer), and Luke Halls (video and projections design).
One might ask why an embattled couple at their wit’s end would move to rainy, foggy London for relief, and there are other nits to pick. I think, though, you’ll laugh at the show for a bit (Paranormal Activity the play is, let’s face it, a concept to take skeptically), laugh with it…then scream. I believe I saw the spirit of shock movie maestro William Castle up there, helping Fisher dispense the sorts of live gags and gimmicks that made House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler so memorable for Fifties audiences. Arriving in the dog days of summer, Paranormal Activity is a real howl.
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