Copyright The New York Times
“Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin” went straight to streaming four years ago, which didn’t bode well for the once-popular horror franchise. Would that movie — the seventh official one — mean the end of a series that kicked off when the microbudget “Paranormal Activity” became an unlikely hit in 2009? Well, yes and no. A new “Paranormal Activity” has emerged on the pop-culture circuit, but it is not an eighth feature. It’s a play. Like the stage extravaganzas “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” this “Paranormal Activity” has an original script that piggybacks on its existing intellectual property to extend the brand. Unlike those other two popular stage shows, however, this one does not revisit characters or canon elements from the original source. So Katie and Kristi, the sisters from the films, won’t be dropping by for a visit; neither will that terror-inflicting demon Tobi. More radically, the production, which is running at Chicago Shakespeare Theater through Nov. 2, eschews the franchise’s aesthetic calling card: found footage. That storytelling device exploded with “The Blair Witch Project” in 1999, followed by films like “Cloverfield” and several “V/H/S” installments. Even M. Night Shyamalan has contributed to the flourishing niche, with “The Visit” (2015). Although video has become a common storytelling tool onstage — most recently in the buzzy Broadway productions of “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” — that wasn’t the course the creative team was going for here. (A TV does come into play a few times, however.) “We pretty quickly did away with screens and trying to literally take the idea of found footage,” the director, Felix Barrett (“Sleep No More”), said after the first Chicago preview of “Paranormal Activity” earlier this month. “The obvious way to do it would be becoming part of this sort of zeitgeist of cinematic theater, but I felt like it was a worn path.” Instead, the goal for Barrett and the playwright Levi Holloway, whose supernatural-infused play “Grey House” toyed with Broadway audiences’ nerves in 2023, was not to directly copy the “Paranormal” films but summon their nature. That meant finding ways to sustain a state of near-constant trepidation. To create a foreboding ambience, they bet on elements you don’t often get at the theater — stretches of silence, a relatively long scene in near-obscurity — and that make audience members lean forward in anxious anticipation. During rehearsals, they even had the actors run some scenes in blindfolds so they could experience “what it’s like when your other senses compensate and everything magnifies,” Barrett said. It helped that both the intellectual property holder, Paramount Pictures, and the franchise’s creator, Oren Peli, stayed out of their hair. “If there was a mandate, it was sort of tonal,” Holloway said of the general directive. He pointed out that at its core, the franchise “is sort of mundane, so it lulls the audience into a sense of security, and then it pulls that rug.” The new story follows a young couple, James (Patrick Heusinger) and Lou (Cher Álvarez), who have relocated to London from Chicago for his job. Everything is going fine in their nice, big house, until mysterious forces start messing with their minds. We get it, the TV remote always disappears — is that why the channels switch on their own? It starts with Fly Davis’s large-scale, incredibly detailed set of a two-level abode, which the audience sees from a dollhouse perspective. “In the early script development, we were like, ‘What if we just can see into every room?,’” Holloway said. “What if the nucleus of the action is in the kitchen and it’s very domestic? What if your eyes were to zoom up to the bedroom, and what could be going on there, if anything at all?” To make herself at home, so to speak, Álvarez explored the set’s every nook and cranny, starting with counting the number of steps on the staircase. “I do that in my everyday life because I don’t want to trip, I don’t want to fall,” she said. “And I love that kitchen. I just wanted to familiarize myself with it, like, where would Lou put things purposefully that flow for her?” (To help defray costs, the show is a co-production with four major regional companies: Center Theater Group’s Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles, where it will run Nov. 13-Dec. 7; Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, from Jan. 28-Feb. 7; and American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, from Feb. 19-March 15. A separate commercial run begins on Dec. 5 in the West End.) He started working on the effects even before a set was in place. “If you’re going to bring a haunting, you’re going to create those moments of inflection and they need to be so real,” Barrett said. “So we just started with the tricks. It was an absolute joy coming in and seeing —” (We now must interrupt this quote to avoid having Barrett spoil his own show.) The first major illusion is the moment when the production switches gear, like a roller coaster car that had been slowing going uphill and plunges down. “That’s the one I’ve been the most nervous about — you’re spinning so many plates at the same time,” Álvarez said, reflecting on the first preview. “Hearing the audience’s reaction last night, I was like, ‘They bought it! It worked!’” Barrett recalled thinking: “Oh my gosh, imagine if we could do that in a theater? So I said, ‘Yes, I’m in.’” Then, in early 2023, Holloway joined the project as well. To prepare for their play’s debut last year, at the Leeds Playhouse in Britain, the two men brainstormed by sharing references that included films such as “Don’t Look Now” and “Jacob’s Ladder,” and stories by the Victorian writer Arthur Machen, who was fascinated by the occult. Fans of 1980s horror will get a kick out of James’s mother (Shannon Cochran) being named Carolanne, a nod to the Carol Anne character in Tobe Hooper’s classic movie “Poltergeist” — and a hint at the play’s direction. At one point, an immersive element was considered. Holloway and Barrett said they worked out a concept in which the show would involve mind-reading featuring real audience members, “so it would be a different type of theatrical danger,” said Barrett who, unsurprisingly, is friends with the British mentalist and magician Derren Brown. “You asked for a couple to get onstage into a spirit cabinet and it would disappear. And then you start the play proper.” Eventually, the pair decided to stick to a traditional framing, though the set still gives Barrett many options to control the audience’s gaze (with big assists from Anna Watson’s lighting and Gareth Fry’s sound) and move the characters around. “You get inherently empty space because they can’t populate all the rooms at the same time,” he said, “so suddenly you’re having to imbue the house with absence and what could happen.” Horror at the theater is as old as, well, theater and horror: Think of the blood-soaked “Macbeth” and its hallucinations and witches, or the assorted macabre atrocities of Grand Guignol. T.R. Sullivan’s play “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” premiered on Broadway in 1887, a mere year after the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, and what is “Sweeney Todd” if not the tale of a serial killer? Part of the appeal of the productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a sequel of sorts to the original books, and “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the popular Netflix series, is that they unleash Dementors and a Demogorgon. Meanwhile, immersive experiences have been freaking out willing victims with increasing sophistication — New Yorkers with solid stomachs might be familiar with the Psycho Clan company, whose “This Is Real” made thrill seekers try to escape their kidnapper, and there are escape rooms inspired by the “Saw” and “Blair Witch” franchises in Las Vegas.
