There are a lot of reasonable reactions to the discovery that life continues on after death, and that it’s mad at you: gasping, screaming, resolving to get in touch with the nearest exorcist. One of the more surreal responses to that experience is applause, which ripples through the audience of Paranormal Activity a beat after all the major scares, like rain settling in after a peal of thunder. Left to your lonesome, you wouldn’t normally start clapping when a malicious entity jump-scares you, but it makes sense to do so among the crowd in a big Broadway theater for the sake of collective relief and release, to remind ourselves that we’re just watching people — and mirrors, ropes, and pulleys — play pretend.
The scares in the stage version of Paranormal Activity are indeed applause worthy, and they’re served up by the playwright Levi Holloway, director Felix Barrett (of the immersive group Punchdrunk, behind Sleep No More), and illusions designer Chris Fisher in a neat Aristotelian structure, not unlike that of a blockbuster musical: rising action through the first act as the American married couple of Lou (Cher Álvarez) and James (Travis A. Knight) start to suspect something is very wrong in their new British home, a major fright right before intermission, mayhem at the top of the second, and a grand 11 o’clock finale.
Fisher has made a career of designing top-flight illusions for big stage properties — he made the Sorting Hat float for Cursed Child, the car fly in Back to the Future, the Mind Flayer do its flaying in Stranger Things. His work in Paranormal Activity is at once relatively subtle (I didn’t notice any actors stepping backward to their marks before being strapped in for a trick, a gesture I clocked more than once during Stranger Things) and briskly effective. The play depends on the creeping eeriness of thinking your place of comfort has been corrupted and undercut by evil. Its most shocking moments toy with those fears: Barrett and Fisher make you sit with dread as familiar things take on spooky forms, whether they’re candles, bedsheets, or people, who tend, in Paranormal Activity, to reappear all around Fly Davis’s dollhouse of a set in miraculous ways. My favorite scare must have been accomplished with the person-doubling technology from The Prestige.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
The slickness of Paranormal Activity’s staging — we’re here for the mood and the tricks more than plot and character — gives it the air of a product demo, or the sort of thing you’d watch in the holding area of an amusement park before your seat lurches forward for the rest of the roller coaster. That doesn’t make the play a bad hang (I’ve had the time of my life on Star Tours), though its attempts to make itself more than just a vehicle for oohs and aahs grow tedious quickly. Such are perhaps the contradictions of putting horror onstage: You might want to say something about theology and suburbia, but we’re here to have baser buttons pushed.
Paranormal Activity’s plotting is relatively taut, though Holloway — who took a previous stab at Broadway horror with the bafflingly lore-dense play The Grey House — has a fondness for giving characters lines about how this changes their relationship to God and digressions into the concept of “eigengrau.” Lou and James have relocated to Britain — after she’s experienced a haunting back home in Chicago. (The play was previously on the West End.) They hope the new environment and a stiffer dose of antipsychotics will cure her, but it seems she’s the one who’s haunted, not the old house. In addition to playing well off the choreography of the illusions, Knight and Álvarez effectively capture the generic normalcy of a bickering couple, though there’s only so far you can get with the kinds of sketched character types you expect to see in horror. He’s angsty, controlling, and frequently shirtless. She’s plaintive, wiser, but more than a bit icy behind the eyes. Along the way, we also meet his meddling Florida mom (Shannon Cochran) and a British psychic (Eva Kaminsky), which leads to a five-minute stretch of comedy where Paranormal Activity morphs into a more gruesome Blithe Spirit.
In the midst of Lou and James’s descent into paranoia, I started to feel a sense of déjà vu. Aside from the fact that known IP helps sell tickets, Paranormal Activity the play doesn’t directly tie itself into the film series, but it does chime with it in interesting ways. As I was watching the play, I kept getting flashbacks to watching the first few movies late at night at my friend’s house in middle school, competing to see who could withstand the most scares. The films also involve normie couples caught up in hauntings, dealt Old Testament–style punishments by forces from the great beyond. (If you dig enough into the movies’ tangled lore, there are witches involved; also, the Amish?) The play retains the sense of suburban foreboding, reiterates familiar anxieties about parenthood that recur in the franchise, and not for nothing, comes with a preshow playlist full of alt-rock that puts you in a very 2007 mindset, which is when the first film premiered.
What doesn’t translate to the stage, inevitably, is the use of found footage. The films arrived at a moment when we started to welcome more and more surveillance into our homes — and then, by virtue of the fact that those technologies found evidence of the supernatural, suggested that we were right to. Something evil does lurk inside your house; turn on your Xbox Kinect to catch it. The play gives a little lip service to the devices Lou and James have around their house — we get video calls with his mom; they’re told to unplug an Alexa before a séance — but it’s clear that we in the audience have stepped into the roles of watching these people instead.
That changes the tenor of the horror. A live audience is a warmer, more forgiving spectator than an impassive security camera, more present in the moment than home-video footage we’re told was supposedly recovered after the fact. The films were in-person midnight-screening sensations too, though there’s a distinction between watching material that’s taped rather than performed live. Watching a haunting play out in the moment around a thousand strangers gives the thing an odd and interesting warmth. We’re cheering on the technique, even in the midst of our dread. Paranormal Activity, the play, builds to the sort of slick and grisly finale that would be just right for the end of a cruel horror movie, but that lands awkwardly onstage. I could feel the people around me wanting a bit more sweetness. Or maybe just more of an excuse to applaud.
