Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity is a horror play, not a musical, spun off from the found-footage film series that Oren Peli started. Do not expect a stage copy of the first movie: Katie and Micah, the couple from that film, never appear. Playwright Levi Holloway invented a new household instead. James and Lou are two Americans who have just married and who cross the Atlantic to put a hard stretch of their lives behind them. What they hoped to escape turns out to travel well.

Felix Barrett, the founder of the immersive theater company Punchdrunk, directed the piece, and its scares come from a design team that includes illusions designer Chris Fisher. The play opened at Leeds Playhouse in England in 2024, toured North America, ran in London's West End and arrived at the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway in August 2026 as a limited engagement. Blumhouse, the company that produced the films, is among the Broadway producers.

Because the couple and their story are new, you do not need to have seen any of the films to follow the play. Its advertising boils the central idea down to one line: the trouble lives in people rather than in buildings. Cast members on Broadway have also described it as a love story about a husband and wife who have to come clean with each other about their past.

James and Lou start married life by leaving Chicago for London. The relocation is partly for Lou: before they left, she had been struggling with her mental health and with a series of strange episodes. They settle into a two-story home, talk about having a baby and plan to turn the spare room into a nursery.

Lou soon becomes convinced that something in the new place is wrong. James is the skeptic of the pair and keeps reaching for ordinary explanations.

Bit by bit, the couple realize that whatever unsettled them in Chicago did not stay there. The haunting starts to wear on the marriage, and the two of them have to face it together. James calls in Etheline Cotgrave, a medium and expert on the paranormal, to deal with the disturbances; the audience first hears her as the host of a radio program about ghosts. Meanwhile his mother, Carolanne, a religious woman, stays in touch with the newlyweds from the United States through video calls.

That is where this guide stops. In a thriller the turns are the whole point, and they land harder when you have not been told they are coming.

Holloway wrote the play for a small, close-knit company, with four actors in the principal roles. Alongside the scares, he gives the couple ordinary pressures to cope with: Lou's struggles before the move, the hope of starting a family and the parts of their past they have not yet shared with each other. The Broadway cast has said that audiences scream and laugh together during performances.

Holloway works out of Chicago, where he belongs to the ensemble of A Red Orchid Theatre. His earlier Broadway play, Grey House, ran in 2023. He co-founded the Neverbird Project, which makes theater with Deaf and hearing young people, and spent about a decade teaching in the Deaf program at Bell Elementary in Chicago. For the North American tour he also restaged Barrett's direction.

For all his work in immersive theater, Barrett staged this play in the traditional way: you sit in the auditorium and watch the stage. He also dropped the films' signature device. There is no found-footage camerawork; the frights are made live, with Fisher's illusions, Watson's lighting, Fry's sound and Halls's video design working together.

Fly Davis's set presents the couple's two-story London home as a cut-away, so the audience can look into its rooms from the outside. In the London staging, screens were kept to a minimum: the couple's television, used for the video calls, and monitors at the back of the auditorium that showed the set as if through a security camera.

Oren Peli wrote and directed the first Paranormal Activity, which was shown at film festivals in 2007 and released across the United States by Paramount Pictures in 2009. Its hook was that the couple turn cameras on their own home to record the haunting. Blumhouse and Solana Films made the series, which runs to seven films as of October 2026, and the play is presented by arrangement with Paramount Pictures.

The play had its world premiere on July 4, 2024, in the Courtyard Theatre at Leeds Playhouse and ran there until August 3, 2024. The first cast was Patrick Heusinger as James, Melissa James as Lou, Pippa Winslow as Carolanne and Jackie Morrison as Etheline Cotgrave.

The North American premiere came at The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, from October 8 to November 2, 2025. Los Angeles came next, with Center Theatre Group presenting it at the Ahmanson Theatre from November 13 to December 7, 2025. Shakespeare Theatre Company opened it in Washington, D.C., on January 28, 2026, and San Francisco followed, where American Conservatory Theater ran it from February 19 to March 15, 2026. The touring company featured Cher Álvarez as Lou, Shannon Cochran as Carolanne and Kate Fry as Etheline Cotgrave. Travis A. Knight, an assistant director on the tour, took over as James from the Washington stop onward.

In London, performances at the Ambassadors Theatre started on December 5, 2025, for a planned 12-week run. The engagement was extended twice, played through April 25, 2026, and came back to the same theater for a second London season on August 8, 2026. Toronto's Ed Mirvish Theatre hosted the original London cast from June 9 to July 5, 2026, and a separate UK and Ireland tour opened at Richmond Theatre on September 7, 2026.

The Broadway transfer was announced on May 12, 2026. Andrea Syglowski was first named as Etheline Cotgrave, and on July 10, 2026, Eva Kaminsky was announced as her replacement. The Broadway company first played Boston's Emerson Colonial Theatre from July 11 to July 30, 2026. Previews at the August Wilson Theatre began on August 14, 2026. Opening night was first planned for September 15, 2026, but was moved up, and the play officially opened on August 25, 2026.

The engagement was first announced as a 20-week run. On October 9, 2026, it was extended by eight weeks. In the week ending October 11, 2026, the production sold about 97 percent of its seats across eight performances.