How ‘Paranormal Activity’ Is Making the Jump (Scare) from Screen to Stage

Paranormal Activity, one of the most recognizable franchises in modern horror, is about to do something none of the others have ever done. It’s coming off the screen and into your reality as part of a brand new stage show.

The show is called, simply enough, Paranormal Activity, and after a debut in Chicago earlier this fall, it’s opening at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles this week and running through December 7. From there, it’ll be at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, from January 28 through February 7, followed by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco from February 19 through March 15. It’ll also be in the West End in London from December 5 through March 28.

But what exactly is this show? How is the unmistakable found footage genre going to make the leap from screen to stage? Well, io9 sat down with the show’s writer, Levi Holloway, to find out.

Holloway, best known for the Broadway plays Grey House and Turret, starring Michael Shannon, came on board the project in 2023. Felix Barrett (who directed the popular immersive show Sleep No More) was already attached as director, and very quickly the pair got on the same page about what it meant to bring Paranormal Activity to the stage. “Felix and I had the same memory,†Holloway said about the original film. “It was less about the film itself and more about the marketing surrounding it. It was all the night vision and the audience kind of freaking out, and that seemed really exciting. It seemed like, ‘Well, that’s just an audience. We could do that to an audience.’ Not sure how, but we could do that.â€

Before they solved that problem, though, Holloway needed a story. And, thankfully, the franchise’s rights holder, Paramount, didn’t really interfere with that. “Paramount gave us a very loose mandate,†Holloway said. “The mandate, if anything, was tonal, and it seemed to be more about, like, ‘Okay, well, is it about a couple who are beset by something?’ ‘Yeah.’ And that was sort of it. They were pretty hands-off. There’s a huge leap of faith on their part, which we’re so grateful for.â€

The story that he and Barrett began working on is inspired by, but not narratively linked to, the movies in any way. Instead, it sort of mirrors their journey as creatives. Paranormal Activity is about a couple from Chicago who move to London and realize that places aren’t the only thing that can be haunted. People can be haunted, too. At the time, Holloway was newly married and living in Chicago, and he traveled to London to meet with Barrett to discuss the project.

“I spent about a year over in London, doing R&D over there, and really started looking at their relationship with ghosts and stuff like that,†he said. “I wasn’t really interested in the demon angle that the movies take. I’m not knocking it. It’s just that in this sort of Christian structuring of that and the sort of good versus evil, God versus the devil stuff, wasn’t really a story that I felt like I had a lot to add to. But I do have a lot to say about ghosts.â€

Specifically, Holloway found inspiration in the Victorian spiritualist movement, which he felt “really glommed on to this idea of the afterlife and ghosts and mediums and paranormal as a way of processing grief from this massive loss in World War I.â€

“So that was pretty fertile ground,†he said. “And that was a huge kickoff point for me in terms of storytelling. So you’ll see some of those bones very lightly buried throughout the script.â€

Holloway also found that, in addition to those historical inspirations, simply the idea of this couple moving to a new country helped give the show important staples of the horror genre. “With every good horror story, you try to figure out a way to isolate your characters because the big question is always like, ‘Why don’t they run?’†Holloway said. “So you have to honor that question. And for me, the way to do that was, number one, what if places aren’t haunted? What if people are haunted? You can’t run from something that’s in you or that is attached to you. And then the other way to isolate them is to make them strangers in a strange land, thousands of miles from everything they know.â€

The writer, of course, rewatched the movies (the first and third are Holloway’s favorites) and found two specific things he knew they had to recreate to make the show feel like a Paranormal Activity movie. “One is the restraint of it,†Holloway said. “For huge [amounts] of time in that first film, nothing happens. And it’s in that nothing where anything becomes possible. It’s very charged in its durational periods, and that was really exciting because that’s anti-theatrical, right? We have this feeling when we’re watching a play, people have got to be walking and talking, moving and shaking, you know? But that stillness, that negative space, those durational pauses are where you really start building a kind of electricity and charging an atmosphere with potential. And the other major ingredient was darkness. We play a lot with darkness. A huge, huge challenge, and something we are always talking about, is how do you submerge the audience in total darkness? When you do that, you’re not only building a community, but you’re also dislocating them… And I’m not talking about jump scares. I’m talking about breathless anticipation.â€

But there’s also the notion that Paranormal Activity is a found footage-driven franchise. Holloway admitted it would have been easy, and maybe obvious, to make it a more multimedia show with cameras and screens, but, instead, he and Barrett found a new way in. “[The play] fits in the movies in that it’s kind of this raw gesture of weaponizing the mundane,†he said. “We wanted to capture that feeling of placing the audience in front of this sawed-off dollhouse and letting them peer into every room and sort of letting them bear witness to something maybe they shouldn’t be seeing. And the audience is sort of a voyeur. Because we are voyeurs in this story, it becomes non-theatrical. It becomes kind of dangerous. It feels almost like Rear Window or something. We might as well be given binoculars to look into somebody’s house.â€

All of which, seemingly, could have been done without the name brand of “Paranormal Activity.†But Holloway thinks working within an established franchise was “both a gift and a burden.†“It has a very passionate built-in audience,†he said. “And, for the most part, I think the franchise is cashing the checks it writes. It’s cool. It plays with the eye. It’s stripped down. It’s mostly placing ordinary humans in extraordinary circumstances. And that’s a really cool catapult from which to launch a story. The burden of it is sort of all of those same things. As an audience, you have embedded expectations. You might meet audience members with crossed arms and say, ‘Prove it. Thrill me,’ and I take that seriously. I love a good dare.â€

For Holloway, that was the biggest dare of Paranormal Activity. Living up to expectations, while also giving audiences something new, exciting, and worthy. “[Found footage] is saying to the audience that this is real,†he said. “[But] you can’t really do that at the theater. You can’t bring an audience into a theater and make them think what’s happening is real unless you subvert their expectations, which is sort of the whole kit and caboodle for us.â€

Well, almost the whole thing. The Paranormal Activity franchise exists because of its sequels, and Holloway admits that while he doesn’t want to look too far down the road, that is something he’s thought about. “There are some very literal buns in the oven in terms of where this particular story could go, but nothing is set in stone,†he said. “Mostly, just the notebooks we have full of ideas and mischief that we want to make fit very neatly into the many more iterations in the Paranormal Activity world.â€

For more on Paranormal Activity and its Los Angeles run, visit this website. For more on the show itself, click here.

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