The Ingenious New Show Based on a Hit Movie Series Had My Audience Gasping

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When was the last time you heard an audience hold their breath? Screams are pretty common, laughter too, but it’s hard to catch 1,200 people truly off guard, especially when they think they know what they’re in for. But as primed as the crowd at Paranormal Activity was for spooky shenanigans and supernatural goings-on, they were still audibly shocked by some of its scares, and then thrilled by how thoroughly they’d been fooled.

I am speaking, to be clear, of Paranormal Activity , the play, currently up at Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre—not the 2009 movie , its five sequels, or the 2021 reboot that laid the groundwork for yet another movie scheduled to be released next year. Levi Holloway’s script takes elements from the original series, namely its focus on a young, perennially feuding couple whose house is inhabited by an unearthly entity with a penchant for slamming doors and rearranging kitchens. But it’s not a continuation of the movies’ increasingly complicated story , which grew from an elemental tale of demonic possession to one involving old-timey cults and time travel. We’re back to basics here: a man, a woman, and a mysterious someone, or something, else.

Where recent productions like The Lost Boys and Back to the Future have endeavored to bring big-screen spectacle to the stage , the Paranormal Activity movies are rooted in the mundane rather than the fantastic. Their protagonists are ordinary people, and often quite annoying ones, so preoccupied by their petty squabbles that they can’t unite to face the common threat until it’s too late—although another common element of the Paranormal movies is that it’s pretty much always too late.

At the August Wilson, the doomed couple are James (Travis A. Knight) and Lou (Cher Álvarez), who have just relocated to London to escape something unnerving that happened in Chicago. (The play was originally staged in Leeds, later in the West End, and, more uncommonly, in several cities in the U.S. before making its way to New York.) Exactly what isn’t clear, of course, but it leaks out in dribs and drabs, as when James’ fussbudget mother Carolanne (Shannon Cochran) FaceTimes in from Boca Raton and asks if Lou is still on her antipsychotics. (Anti depressants , Lou sharply corrects her.) Lou has felt a strange presence around her since childhood, but lately it’s been getting worse: She’ll black out, sometimes for hours at a time, and end up in another room with no memory of how she got there, and at night, she swears, she can hear something next to her, breathing. Spooky!

I wouldn’t make great claims for the Paranormal Activity movies as capital-C cinema (although the third, the one that straps a camera to an oscillating fan , is pretty neat). But there’s no denying that they work like gangbusters.