NEW YORK ‒ How does it feel to shriek in unison with more than 1,200 strangers? Bloody delightful.
“It’s a fun night out,” says Chris Fisher, the ingenious illusions designer behind Broadway’s “Paranormal Activity,” a spine-chilling, grab-your-seatmate sensation inspired by the hit film franchise. “It’s quite different to anything, and weirdly, that seems to be the infectious thing about it: that experience of laughter and shock and gasps and jumps en masse.”
Since opening in August, the critically beloved production has become a box-office golden goose and a minor viral phenomenon, thanks largely to a nerve-jangling jump scare that sends the audience into dumbfounded giggles for minutes afterward.
But more on that later.
On stage, “Paranormal Activity”
tells an entirely new story than the seven movies that preceded it, following a married couple named Lou (Cher Álvarez) and James (Travis A. Knight) who move from Chicago to London looking for a fresh start. But as you likely guessed, supernatural spooks and family traumas are a mother of a burden to carry, and James and Lou gradually lose their grip on reality.
After working his Tony-winning magic on “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” Fisher was approached by director Felix Barrett and playwright Levi Holloway about helping to develop a theatrical “Paranormal Activity.” Together, they rewatched the film series ‒ along with horror staples “The Sixth Sense” and “The Shining” ‒ to study what makes an effective scare.
Their conclusion: Don’t do too much too early, and take time to draw theatergoers in before pulling the rug out.
“The hard thing about putting horror onstage is how you pace it. Restraint is important,” Fisher says. “With magic, you always try to do an effect on an off-beat. You don’t do it when they think something’s going to happen and then bang! You get them.
“Another important thing is what I call the ‘Jaws’ effect: What your head imagines is sometimes scarier than what you can put onstage,” he adds. “We workshopped in a warehouse in South East London, so we spent a lot of time with everything turned off, just playing around with lights and sound.”
Produced in part by Jason Blum’s eponymous Blumhouse, “Paranormal Activity” dribbles out frights throughout the show’s foreboding first act, before unleashing wall-to-wall terror in its rip-roaring second half.
A fan of 19th-century Victorian magic, Fisher says much of the show relies on deceptively straightforward, old-school effects ‒ think flickering lights, rustling drapes and shattering glass ‒ although new technology was developed to achieve the illusions of objects flying off walls and a high-speed car crash (Fisher’s “hardest challenge” and proudest achievement, he proclaims).
There are also many direct nods to the movie franchise, such as a blood-curdling sequence when all the doors and cabinets fling open (an homage to “Paranormal Activity 2,” Fisher says). In another scene, a spectral being lifts a blanket off a sleeping Lou and James ‒ an eerie trick that Fisher discovered during rehearsals, in a tribute to the original film.
Before then, “I hadn’t even thought of it, but then I was just like, ‘Wait a second!’” he recalls. “I literally went to the end of the couch, and with my fingers, I just slowly [pulled] it back. It looked really cool and I was like, ‘Yeah, we should do that.’ It’s an iconic moment, and sometimes, the simplest things can be scary.”
Some of the movies’ most memorable images are of people being yanked across a room or down a flight of stairs by an invisible force. Fisher workshopped the stunt extensively, although for the safety of the actors, it didn’t make the play’s final version.
“You really want it to feel like they’re flying at a dangerous speed that’s really threatening, and we never could quite do that onstage,” Fisher says. “But who knows? If we do a ‘Paranormal 2,’ we’ll have them dragged across the floor!”
And what ultimately transpires is even better: To put it vaguely, there’s a scene in “Paranormal Activity” when James is surprised by a familiar specter. The illusion is perhaps the most mind-blowing thing we’ve ever witnessed on a Broadway stage ‒ an effect that is so startlingly unexpected that audience members couldn’t stop squirming and squealing even as the play resumed.
“American audiences are so vocal, so I never get tired of that,” says Fisher, a British theater veteran whose credits also include stage iterations of “Back to the Future,” “Black Swan” and “The Hunger Games.”
“The audience knows something’s fishy, and then before you even get a chance to think about it any further, we do the final piece,” he adds. “I didn’t quite anticipate the big reaction it would get, but the timing is so critical. We rely on every department for that illusion: props, set, lighting, costumes, hair and makeup, sound. All of those have to come together in that moment, and there are so many subtleties we put into it.”
“Paranormal Activity” is a minefield of misdirects, meaning there are constant illusions happening around the stage even while you may be looking elsewhere. (If you visit a second or third time, Fisher says, keep your eyes peeled for the ghoulish silhouette of a man nicknamed “Big Daddy.”)
Unlike “Harry Potter” and “Stranger Things,” which occupy fantastical and sci-fi worlds, what makes “Paranormal Activity” so uniquely terrifying is just how naturalistic it is.
“The number of people I read about online who are going home and saying, ‘Oh, my God! If I open this drawer, is something going to pop out? Did that just move? Am I going crazy?’” Fisher says. “You want to put paranoia into people. It’s a real adrenaline rush, and ultimately, it’s what people enjoy about this show.
“It’s one thing when you’re watching it on a TV screen,” he adds. “It’s another thing when you’re in a theater and it’s actually right in front of you. It makes you think: ‘Oh, could that happen to me?’”
“Paranormal Activity” is now playing at the August Wilson Theatre (245 W. 52nd St.) through Feb. 28, 2027.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘Paranormal Activity’ is by far the scariest thing you’ll see all year
