If you plan to see Paranormal Activity while it runs in New York, fair warning: there aren’t just ghosts haunting this article, but spoilers too.
I am, by all accounts, not a fan of found footage films. They hurt my already bleary eyes, and I usually can’t make sense of them by the end anyway. So, when Blumhouse announced they were bringing their widely-lauded stage version of Paranormal Activity to Broadway this fall, I was mostly uninterested — until I got to see it for myself.
If you’re one of the many horror geeks like me who prefer practical effects over anything else, this new stage show from writer Levi Holloway is right up your alley. In a sea of CGI effects and growing concerns over AI slop, horror is the one genre where filmmakers continue to choose practical effects and in-camera tricks over digital renderings, bringing fear beyond imagination to life with the work of human hands. And Paranormal Activity seeks to bring that love of the tangible — however intangible its ghosts actually are — to life right in front of your eyes, no movie screen required.
As a horror fan who also did many years of theater in her childhood, I’ve seen my fair share of stage spectacles that pull off the seemingly impossible right in front of your eyes. I’ve also watched enough documentaries and spent enough time moving props from behind a plywood wall to know some tricks about how stunts are pulled off onstage. But Chris Fisher’s illusions designs are on a whole other level, one that makes Elsa’s costume change in Frozen look like child’s play.
Paranormal Activity’s setup is fairly straightforward: you witness the slow unraveling of a couple (played by Cher Álvarez and Travis A. Knight) as they move around one unchanging set, a cross-section of a two-story London home. On camera, you can fudge just about anything, even without the use of CGI, and you have the luxury of multiple takes. In front of an audience, though? You get one shot, and there’s nowhere to hide, really, unless the lights go out.
There’s a highly buzzed-about scare towards the end of Act One that no one can seem to figure out. With the central premise of the show being that “places aren’t haunted, people are,” a lot of the fear is generated just from the actions of Álvarez and Knight — or the absence of them. So, when Álvarez comes downstairs in a bathrobe and faces the sink, it's she that terrifies the audience rather than any kind of external effect, and trust me when I say that I screamed so loudly I think I spooked people watching MJ The Musical next door.
It’s a jumpscare unlike anything I’ve ever seen before on stage, and one that manages to perfectly mimic the style of scare that made its parent franchise so famous in the first place. I’m used to being totally relaxed at a theater show, even at something like Sweeney Todd where bodies are dropping left and right. But Paranormal Activity doesn’t need to drive up its body count to freak its sold-out audiences out. With just five actors, it just needs to spook you once, and then you’re on the edge of your seat the rest of the night.
There are, of course, things that exist in the show to cover up the seams, particularly the blackouts and playing of loud rock music between scenes so actors can change costumes and reposition. But the scares themselves are a special kind of magic that make me feel like I did when I first discovered artists like Rick Baker and Screaming Mad George. Live theater is full of those kinds of spectacles — I think back fondly to seeing The Play That Goes Wrong as a teen — but to bring such a specific style of horror to the stage feels like something really special, especially when avid theatergoers consider bringing true horror to stage an incredibly difficult task.
But it’s not just the big, impressive set pieces that make this new version such a great addition to the Paranormal Activity canon. While the story is a fairly bog-standard haunting, what impressed me the most was the subtlety of it— seeing smoke that appears after discussion of a fire, spotting ghostly shadows and self-moving objects that shift in ways you can’t quite comprehend. There’s a mundanity to it that reflects the escalating nature of the film series’ haunts, which make the bigger bursts of action — like a burglar alarm sounding or a seance going wrong — all the more terrifying.
Honestly, half the fun is trying to determine how the hell they did any of that in the first place. My partner and I spent the better part of our drive home from New York dissecting the effects that impressed us the most, hypothesizing about hidden wires, magnets under the stage, and other tricks that could’ve been used to mimic objects moving on their own. While we might never know exactly how Paranormal Activity creates its scares, it’s the craftsmanship of them that impresses us the most.
One that I can’t figure out, however, will continue to haunt me. (No pun intended.) Without spoiling too much of why it happens, there's a full-on Gage in Pet Sematary-style moment towards the end of the second act. (Iykyk.) It’s a moment as insane and shocking as I imagine the chandelier falling in Phantom of the Opera must have been for audiences when it first opened — not because it came out of nowhere, but because for the life of me I cannot understand how you make that happen safely.
It’s a moment that slots the play in perfectly with not only the films in its franchise, but also horror as a whole. It became not just a novel night at the theater, but a true haunted house story, made with clear love, care, and appreciation for the genre. Maybe it’s just the horror fan in me, but for as tense and grisly as the story ultimately becomes, it’s hard not to fall a little in love with it instead of being scared out of my wits.
Paranormal Activity runs through January 3, 2027 at the August Wilson Theatre in New York.
