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The parameters for judging a stage adaption of the horror film franchise Paranormal Activity<\/a>\u00a0are clearly quite different to, say, a production of King Lear.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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 \u2018oh my, yes\u2019.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s been haunted by a malevolent supernatural presence since childhood. He wants to be supportive but doesn\u2019t 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 \u2013 but then, suddenly, weird stuff starts happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n Clearly you can\u2019t have found footage theatre. But in some ways the fact that Fly Davis\u2019s set is\u00a0nothing but\u00a0the couple\u2019s mundane two-storey house captures the genre\u2019s claustrophobia nicely: did something just move in that corner? What\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been asked not to spoiler, so I won\u2019t, but key to the production \u2013 even more so than Levi Holloway\u2019s smartly constructed script \u2013 is that it\u2019s directed by Felix Barrett from immersive legends Punchdrunk. He practically wrote the book on creepily atmospheric theatre, and let\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n There\u2019s some pretty jaw-dropping stuff I\u2019d 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 \u2013 the play of light reflected from passing vehicles creates the sense of movement in the house at night \u2013\u00a0to full on: it opens in pitch darkness, with Nirvana\u2019s \u2018Lithium\u2019 raging around us, a truly weird experience, elated and suffocating at once.<\/p>\n Again, it\u2019s not Shakespeare: Holloway\u2019s 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\u2019s 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).\u00a0<\/p>\n The screen franchise exhausted itself in an endless slew of sequels. The play is wise to sever all ties with the story \u2013 and baggage \u2013 of the films. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Paranormal Activity is at the Ambassadors Theatre, until Feb 28 2026. Buy tickets here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025 and 2026.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n