At first glance, Paranormal Activity seems ripe for adaptation to the stage. The cast is small; primarily just a troubled young woman and her loving boyfriend. The original Paranormal film takes almost entirely place in one location; the couple’s simple suburban home. And its scares are mostly built out of suggestion and imagination, rather than elaborate and explicit special effects. A woman creepily sleepwalks. Something off-camera goes bump in the night.
But then you think about Paranormal Activity’s specifics, or you look back at the original film (which is currently streaming on Paramount+) and you realize: It’s actually a horrible candidate for a stage play. First and foremost it’s a found-footage movie, which means the entire story is organized around scenes that could plausibly be captured by an amateur photographer and his home-video camera. A lot of the movie consists of time-lapse video of the couple sleeping, punctuated by brief glimpses of vague spookiness. Imagine a play that faithfully recreated that on stage. It would be unbearable.
So first and foremost Broadway’s Paranormal Activity is a canny act of transformation. While the show contains the basic elements of the famous movie — a troubled young woman, a skeptical man, a single setting, dark secrets of the past coming to light — it possesses few of its formal qualities. The couple never records their home or what transpires in their bedroom while they’re asleep. Instead, their descent into paranoia and terror builds to multiple crescendos of supernatural dread as their rickety old home (beautifully replicated on stage by scenic and costume designer Fly Davis) fills with inexplicable shadows and smoke and unexplainable happenings. This Paranormal Activity is closer to Grand Guignol than found footage — and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
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The victims of its supernatural shenanigans are Jimmy (Travis A. Knight) and Lou (Cher Álvarez), recent transplants to London from Chicago. Playwright Levi Holloway’s script teases out murky trouble in their past; Jimmy asks Lou about her medication, and some sort of incident in their home that sparked their voyage across the Atlantic.
Jimmy loves and cares for Lou, but he may not necessarily believe everything she says. (She claims to experience gaps in her memory, where she wakes up in a place with no memory where she went or what she did, and occasionally senses some sort of spiritual presence floating around them.) But gradually the evidence begins to pile up Jimmy (and the audience) — flickering lights, home electronics suddenly turning off and on, knocks on doors and windows when no one is there — that becomes impossible to ignore.
Knight and Álvarez make a very credible couple, and they do a convincing job depicting their happy home’s bout of unearthly madness — and, without spoiling too much, of performing some of Holloway’s spooky plot twists. (They also get ghoulishly effective support from Shannon Cochran as Jimmy’s mother Carolanne.) But the real stars here are ultimately the staging and the scares which, through careful use of lighting (designed by Anna Watson) and sound effects (Greath Fry), generate an enormous amount of suspense across Paranormal Activity’s two-ish hours (including one intermission).
The set is a two-story cross-section of a London home, with a large kitchen and living room on the ground level, and an upstairs containing a bedroom, a bathroom, and a mostly unseen guest room whose door can open ominously on its own when required. Part of what made the original Paranormal Activity film such a phenomenon was the way it used low-fi digital photography to create a highly plausible simulacrum of reality. It was easy to get caught up in the film’s haunting because it was so simple and small.
A play can’t rely on judicious edits or careful camera placement to conjure such a specter of danger; there are no edits or cameras. Instead, Holloway and director Felix Barrett control the audience’s attention with blocking, movement, and very sneaky sleight of hand and misdirection. (The Playbill credits Chris Fisher as “Illusion Designer.”) Sometimes the action unfolds simultaneously on multiple levels; tracking it all at once suggests that Carrie director Brian De Palma and his famous split-screens might have been as much of an inspiration on Paranormal Activity as the movies that gave the show its title.
By pure coincidence, the same day I saw Paranormal Activity at New York’s August Wilson Theatre I finished reading a history of illusions and stage magic called Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer. The book reveals the origins of some of the most famous magic tricks in history; making objects or animals disappear, sawing beautiful women in half.
The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous; Barrett deploys some of the same 100-year-old illusions detailed in the book to bring Jimmy and Lou’s paranormal activity to life (or, uh, afterlife). All these decades later, they will work chillingly well. The result is like a modern fable set inside a haunted house, and a play that’s not only worthy of the movies that inspired it, it’s far more effective than a lot of them. I’m not sure you’ll find a more satisfyingly scary fright fest this Halloween season.
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