This post contains spoilers for Paranormal Activity on Broadway
Don’t look now, but there’s something paranormal is happening on Broadway. After scaring movie audiences across seven films (and counting), a stage version of Paranormal Activity has opened to frighteningly good reviews and early Tony buzz in the beating, bloody heart of New York’s theater scene.
A loose adaptation of the very first Paranormal Activity film, the stage version ups the ante with live jump scares, creepy dialogue, and a two-story stage ripe for shadow play. Playwright Levi Holloway — who penned the spookily excellent Grey House on Broadway three years ago — updates the movie’s basic premise of a couple being menaced by a poltergeist in their home, delivering a deeper look at the trauma that main characters Lou and Jimmy (Cher Alvarez and Travis A. Knight) experience.
Paranormal Activity director Felix Barrett is known for immersive theater pieces like Faust, The Masque of the Red Death, and the very popular Sleep No More. Here he’s working on a fixed stage, but uses the drone-drenched sound design of Gareth Fry to jar our senses and make us feel dread during quieter moments.
While the stage production stands apart from the films, it does feature a few Easter eggs to classic horror favorites. Jimmy’s mother is named Carolanne, a clear nod to Tobe Hooper’s foundational Poltergeist scarefest. Meanwhile, a visiting psychic has the last name of Cotgrave, a nod in the direction of Mr. Cotgrave from Arthur Machen’s spooky Victorian-era short story “The White People.”
Barrett and Holloway recently sat down with Gold Derby to discuss this staged incarnation of the famed movie — and delve into its dark secrets.
Gold Derby: Felix, you’re creating a different kind of immersive experience by putting this on stage with immersive sound. How did it go?
Felix Barrett: Some of the things that I’ve learned over the past 20 years just inherently found their way in. I’ve learned that sound and light are hugely important if you want depth, and the way that sound can imperceptibly transform a scene. With this show, if you switch the sound off, it wouldn’t work at all. And if you light the stage so that you show everyone everything, there’s no magic there. It’s important that not everyone sees everything. I like my suspense and threat and horror to come when there’s ambiguity, and you don’t quite trust what your eyes have seen. My philosophy is, if one person notices it, then it’s completely valid. If everybody notices it, then you’ve gone too far.
Levi Holloway: We talked about the goal always being that one of 50 people can see every event. That sounds exclusive, but it’s actually the reverse because that’s how you start building community. Like, what did you see? What did you see? You make people lean in and try to be the one that sees it.
There are a few moments where the action onstage is really loud. How much did you think about how that might jar people?
Barrett: That’s quite deliberate. I remember the first time we were trying to get the sound levels right, we were saying “A bit more, a bit more.” Everyone’s such consummate professionals that they couldn’t go past a certain limit, so I said: “Can you just play what is too loud? Just say what your ‘too much’ is.” That’s what we’re doing! The sensory bombardment should be volatile. The atmosphere and the theater itself should become dangerous. There was an earlier incarnation of the show where the action started inside the theater with a show that Jimmy and Lou were going to see, and then you snap cut back to them in their house and they’re going, “Well, that was a crazy show.” That was because we want to try and make the actual space that holds the audience dangerous.
Why do we see Jimmy peeing in the bathroom early on in the play?
Holloway: It’s just naturalism and immersion. It sets the table for that thought of, “I shouldn’t be watching this.” It’s scandalous, and people giggle. It’s also a huge prosthetic; Travis says it’s not that big, but it’s crazy — very Dirk Diggler. We used to play games like “Hide the Dick” in tech. It’s a great sleight of hand, because it’s hidden and Travis palms it. Only 15% of the audience has access to the angle that the dangle is. [For the record, the best view of the prosthetic is from stage left, audience right.]
Is the moment with the ghost double in the robe a nod to Paranormal Activity 3? That scare gets one of the biggest reactions from the audience.
Barrett: Full disclosure: I’ve only seen the first Paranormal Activity. I haven’t seen the rest of the franchise because I wanted to keep it pure. That comes from a place where Levi and I were talking to each other about what scares ourselves. We weren’t trying to do a faithful adaptation, we were just taking the essence of the film, which is the naturalism and the plausibility of a real couple experiencing this. You can’t call the police, and there’s no Ghostbusters. What do you do in this situation as your life starts to collapse around you? It wasn’t big stars in that first film; they were real people, and it just feels very, very like it could be you.
Holloway: That particular illusion was based on a few things, and it’s really [illusionist] Chris Fisher’s darling. Felix and I were walking along the Thames talking about vestal trauma and nightmares and stuff that doesn’t have language. I remember one of us said, “If you were talking to someone and they just completely stop moving, how unnerving that would be?”
So we started stacking on top of that idea. Initially in the script, Jimmy’s cooking while he’s talking to Lou and she goes behind him. She reaches for something up in the cupboard and then she completely freezes, and he doesn’t notice and keeps talking. But the audience would have noticed. Then she appears elsewhere at the same time, simultaneously, which is horrifying for uncanny reasons.
The séance sequence is great because the phony psychic faces a real-life haunting scenario.
Felix: My starting point was Don’t Look Now, Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece, which also has a medium in it. I remember it’s all about creeping dread; there’s no gore and there’s no jump scares. I’ve done so much research into séances in other shows. We set Masque of the Red Death in Victorian Paris when mediums were at their height. We taught one of our performers to cold read and to deliver séances, and the whole point was that it was fraudulent. She was an actor, but it was unbelievable watching the fact that people believed she could do it.
In the end, we had to stop doing it within that show; it was too triggering for some of the audience because they really believed it was true. We saw firsthand how people want to believe. By the end, she would get people to share truths even their spouses hadn’t heard before, and it just felt too much. We felt we needed counselors to then deal with this information that was put on our table!
Levi, it was very clear that you wanted to tell a deeper story than what was on screen in the first movie.
Holloway: What I love about those characters — even though you could pick it apart a little bit if you if you felt like it, and I always feel like it — is that they don’t seem like actors. They just seem like real people that have been giving like given a couple of milestones to hit within a scene. I just love that raw feel to it, and I wanted to capture that.
You do wonder if you go too far sometimes. You really want to focus on the actors and their chemistry and what is their vibe. In terms of making them likable, that was definitely a quest. To make James just a guy that takes up too much space in a relationship and says things to that he can’t take back. He’s always hovering, he’s always trying to manage, he’s smart, but he also has a taste for his own feet in his mouth. I do that s–t all the time.
Travis and Cher have really good chemistry.
Barrett: Oh my gosh, they’re magnificent. We spent a lot of time working on the idea that they would be a couple who are on the cusp of marital collapse. But we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure it’s playful and they are still in the throes of tactile love because you want to be with them. It was very important to us that you really just love these two, and you just want it to work out for them against the odds.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
