My Variety Review: Broadway's 'Paranormal Activity'

Taking the spirit of the “Paranormal Activity” films and turning it into a scare-‘em stage experience could have been a terrifying trip for its creators, too. After all, horror isn’t exactly a Broadway staple and producers have mostly given up that particular ghost.

But the franchise — Oren Peli’s indie film was originally shot in 2006 for $15,000 and brought in almost $200 million — comes with its own young evergreen fan base. (An eighth film is set for next year.)

Following the stage show’s 2024 premiere in England and subsequent stops in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Toronto and Boston, it now makes its Broadway bow for a limited run. But will it succeed where others have failed? Well, stranger things have happened.

“Stranger Things,” too, pointed the path from film to the legit stage with its spectacular supernatural effects. The stage version of “Paranormal Activity” performs on an intimate and domestic scale yet delivers more thrills, chills and screams than Broadway has seen in years, and giving the franchise a legit afterlife.

The fresh element is that it’s live theater, without benefit of cutaways, close-ups or tracking shots. Yes, it’s only a play but the stakes feel higher when everything in front of us is all too real.

The original film told its story with only found footage — camcorders, security cameras — giving viewers a voyeuristic thrill. On stage, the audience is the camera, peering into a cutaway of set designer Fly Davis’ ominous, two-story house, lit with foreboding foreshadowing by Anna Watson. Instead of the movie’s single, confined perspective, theatergoers take in all the rooms of this haunted house simultaneously, seeing dread lurking everywhere.

Scripter Levi Holloway — who struck out with Broadway’s” Grey House” in 2023 — returns to the horror genre, evoking the mysterious and shadowy feel of the films. He creates two new appealing lead characters, not unlike its original movie’s young married pair. Lou (Cher Álvarez) is still deeply affected from an earlier paranormal trauma while husband James (Travis A. Knight) is skeptical-but-supportive. They have moved from Chicago to London hoping that a geographical change would help. Lou isn’t so sure. As we are reminded: “Places aren’t haunted. People are.”

Following strange electrical malfunctions, a stunning disappearing act and more than a few things that go bump in the night, James soon becomes a believer and the couple reaches out to a podcast spiritualist, Ethylene Cotgrave (Eva Kaminsky) a Brit-cool ghostbuster whose séance goes south.

Also on hand with intrusive advice via FaceTime calls from stateside — and projected on a flat-screen TV (a nice nod to the original film’s M.O.) — is James’ pious mother Carolanne (Shannon Cochran, terrifically terrifying in her own Southern smothering way).

Holloway’s plot often gets muddy or clunky, his characters don’t go beyond shared trauma and he overreaches for larger themes of faith, psychology, possession and parental responsibilities. But at the end of the day — or more aptly here, night — it’s all about the bogeyman.

And the who, what and why of the vengeful spirit is the narrative pull of the play — along with the tense anticipation of more revelations, suspicions and shocks. Perception is everything even when — or especially when — it’s misperceived.

Lightening the darkness of the story in the early scenes are the playfulness, banter and sexiness Lou and James. Álvarez and Knight bring a welcome contemporary charm and chemistry to their roles, and they infuse the dialogue with more fun and meaning than what’s on the page. But as all hell increasingly breaks loose, they also bring an impressive range of shock, fear and panic.

The real stars of the show are the illusions by Chris Fisher (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and his Tony-winning “Stranger Things: The First Shadow”). This time out his effects are not so much jaw-dropping as they are hair-raising. Luke Hall’s video design also adds to the creep-scape. But Gareth Fry’s thundering, rumbling sound design too often oversells the suspense.

Just as he did with Punchdrunk’s long-running date night phenom “Sleep No More,” director Felix Barrett creates an impressive otherworldly, immersive experience. But this time the audience is sitting in place, as he expertly guides the gasps like a sinister maestro, and offers an exhilarating funhouse night in the theater.