The movie “Paranormal Activity,” which turns 20 next year, famously was made for around $15,000 in writer-director Oren Peli’s own home. It revived the found footage genre (languishing since “The Blair Witch Project” eight years earlier), earned $193 million globally and inspired seven filmed sequels. And now there’s this staged horror drama, which played first in England and has a run at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston through July 30 before going to Broadway.
The low-cost, low-tech origins of “Paranormal Activity” are hard to recall watching this play, because the Colonial is a sumptuous and gilded hall and the staging for the action, a cross-section of a two-story London home, is stunning. Standing ovation for designers Fly Davis (scenery), Gareth Fry (sound), Anna Watson (lighting) and Luke Halls (video and projections). Another standing O and an encore for illusions designer Chris Fisher.
Mixed reviews for director Felix Barrett, who created “Sleep No More,” the immersive blend of “MacBeth” and Hitchcock that the A.R.T. brought to the empty Old Lincoln School in Brookline in 2009 before it moved to New York in 2011. Polite claps for playwright Levi Holloway with hopes that his next work will be better and wishes that he’d fix some problems before this “Paranormal Activity” goes anywhere.
The story is familiar but new: Lou (Cher Álvarez) and James (usually Travis Knight, but I saw understudy Michael Holding in the role) get a fresh start in London, where they hope Lou will be free of the supposedly psychological issues she suffered in Chicago – and has her whole life, since she was orphaned at 7 when her parents died in a fire. When the supernatural makes itself known, they bring in a psychic (at my performance, Eva Kaminsky). James’ mom (Shannon Cochran) also offers some hope, for a while; by the end of the play, the couple is enveloped in a haze of desperation and hopelessness.
Along the way come masterful bits of business by Fisher and the technical crew. The audience was delighted, roaring, gasping and left wondering – like all good magic does – “How did they do that?” This is the good fun of the “Paranormal Activity,” the source of excited chatter during intermission and as theatergoers filed out.
There’s no found footage in this staged version; the idea of the film series – of discovering seconds of something chilling and horrifying among the minutes or hours of mundanity caught on security cameras or home video – makes no sense as a play. Instead, suspense is built by watching over a wide cutaway set of two stories and five rooms, trying to keep track of where each character is. Light and dark areas, open and closed doors, the prolonged tension of when a character is offstage for too long and the misdirection crafted by Fisher and Barrett substitute for a cinematic obligation to keep watching, watching, watching until the thing happens that we dread but need to see.
Director Barrett, the actors and technical crew (Melanie Lisby stage manages) pull off almost everything flawlessly. The timing faltered at my production only at the very end, causing a misfire on one moment of action that was intended to shock – and maybe only because an understudy lacked enough practice getting the timing to the needed precision.
The play also attempts misdirection from Holloway’s script, and this doesn’t work. Holloway seems to be rejecting basic principles of storytelling, either arrogantly or optimistically refusing to raise plot points in Act I that matter in Act II on the hopes they will feel revelatory rather than random. At best, Holloway foreshadows with such a light touch that examining the plot after the curtains fall has the audience murmuring, “Well, I guess they kind of said something about that,” the emotional opposite of the pleasure of the magic tricks.
The acting is fine (I wish Álvarez brought a more palpable growing hysteria to Lou), but no actor is good enough to cover up the structural flaws here, and no actor should be asked to.
The script rhymes with the original movie in interesting ways. Peli all but accidentally created a film about partner abuse, and the play returns a few times to a similar criticism of James: that he’s “literally trying to gaslight” Lou, but mainly that he’s trying to make what’s happening to her – psychologically, supernaturally – about him. When Act II shows us that what’s happening is, in fact, about him, that’s amusing but confusing. In part because of this, the play doesn’t make enough sense to be satisfying. That the culprit in the movie is a demon, not a ghost, gets implicit attention here but then becomes explicitly confusing. This “Paranormal Activity” is frustrating. The pieces don’t fit together into a solid whole, and the whole thing falls apart when you pick it up for a closer look.
None of this is an issue during the play’s runtime. Holloway’s script is funny and sometimes clever (in dialogue delivered against a backdrop of demonic possession, Lou at one point tosses off the cliché, “I don’t know what got into me”) and filled with interesting ideas. A better book would make those ideas cohere.
It’s surprising that a play that’s been staged since 2024, with a tryout in Leeds before moving to the West End in 2025, hasn’t bothered to reassemble its pieces into something that’s fun to work at after the shrieks have died down. All I can imagine is that the stagecraft of “Paranormal Activity” works so well that the writer and director felt no need to make the story better, and fair enough. There’s a moment in Act I that’s so good as theater that I’d urge people to go to the Colonial just for it. (Though tickets start at $58.50 and go all the way to $269. Something else about “Paranormal Activity” that gets scary at the end!)
“Paranormal Activity” at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston St., Boston, through July 30.
This post was updated July 24, 2026, to reflect that Eva Kaminsky went from understudy to being given the role of Etheline Cotgrave for the the Boston and Broadway productions of “Paranormal Activity.”
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