[title]
★★★★
The parameters for judging a stage adaption of the horror film franchise Paranormal Activity are clearly quite different to, say, a production of King Lear.
It’s not the only consideration, but judgement does essentially boil down to one main question: is it scary? To which the answer here is a frazzled ‘oh my, yes’.
Paranormal Activity (the play) is not just a stage transposition of Paranormal Activity (the film), although you can see why it bears the franchise name: there would be a lawsuit if not. While the plot plays out differently in terms of specifics, the fundamentals are identical.
James (Patrick Heusinger) and Lou (Melissa James) are a thirtysomething US couple who have just moved to a rainy London for his job, and to get away from things that were happening at their Chicago home. She believes she’s been haunted by a malevolent supernatural presence since childhood. He wants to be supportive but doesn’t want to pretend he believes in ghosts. She is taking strong antidepressants because she wants to be seen to be playing ball. Nothing weird has happened since they moved – but then, suddenly, weird stuff starts happening.
Clearly you can’t have found footage theatre. But in some ways the fact that Fly Davis’s set is nothing but the couple’s mundane two-storey house captures the genre’s claustrophobia nicely: did something just move in that corner? What’s happening on the top floor while the couple are in the lounge? A couple of grainy screens off to the side show us a camera angle of the top floor, which feels like a nice nod to the films.
We’ve been asked not to spoiler, so I won’t, but key to the production – even more so than Levi Holloway’s smartly constructed script – is that it’s directed by Felix Barrett from immersive legends Punchdrunk. He practically wrote the book on creepily atmospheric theatre, and let’s just say a lot more happens here than bumps in the night (credit, of course, to the whole creative team, including illusions director Chris Fisher).
There’s some pretty jaw-dropping stuff I’d best not even obliquely describe. But on the whole it avoids manipulative jump scares in favour of unnerving moments of rug pulling, where what you assumed was happening in a scene is revealed to be horrifyingly off the mark. And the creepy atmosphere stuff is second to none, from subtle things – the play of light reflected from passing vehicles creates the sense of movement in the house at night – to full on: it opens in pitch darkness, with Nirvana’s ‘Lithium’ raging around us, a truly weird experience, elated and suffocating at once.
Again, it’s not Shakespeare: Holloway’s dialogue is shallow in terms of characterisation, but it constitutes an expertly wrought puzzle box. Line after line foreshadows the end, but they do so cleverly: the information required to predict the exact ending is carefully withheld from us, but much of what’s been casually fed to us over the course of the play satisfyingly clicks into place at its denouement (giving it considerably more internal logic than the film).
The screen franchise exhausted itself in an endless slew of sequels. The play is wise to sever all ties with the story – and baggage – of the films. It’s a slick, self-contained two hours of mounting terror that, as much as anything else, serves as a showcase for the type of tricks a great creative team can accomplish in a theatre: some techy, some old fashioned, all effective. Theatre and horror have an uneasy relationship: witness the godawful Enfield Haunting, which played at this same theatre two years ago. Thoroughly exorcising the memory of that catastrophe, Paranormal Activity is about as good as stage horror gets.
Paranormal Activity is at the Ambassadors Theatre, until Feb 28 2026. Buy tickets here.
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