If you enjoy the deliciously creepy feeling of your hair stirring on your tightening scalp in anticipation of terror, Paranormal Activity is the show for you.
Based on the titular film franchise that began in 2007 with a low budget feature which was initially shot for $15,000 and ended up making $194m, its shocks are all the more potent for being experienced live. It’s directed by Felix Barrett with illusions by Chris Fisher and shares a looming, pregnant atmosphere with the immersive shows Barrett created with his company Punchdrunk.
Oren Peli’s original movie features young couple Katie and Micah who set up a security camera to capture the entity that Katie claims has haunted her since childhood. Through scratchy “found footage” Peli ramps up the tension, from flickering lights, strange thuds and slamming doors to bodies hurled through air: in one frankly petrifying scene, the possessed Katie simply stands and watches the sleeping Micah for two hours, while the sped-up counter of the video ticks by.
In Levi Holloway’s stage story we have another young couple, Lou (Melissa James) and Jamie (Patrick Heusinger). They’ve moved from Chicago to London as Lou, whose parents died in a fire when she was a child, has experienced a menacing supernatural presence and started “losing time”.
Jamie is a lapsed evangelical, hectored in video calls by his mom (Pippa Winslow) for his lost belief and his failure to provide a grandchild. As a talisman, he gives Lou a replica of the handbell that the devout spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle promised (and failed) to ring from the other side after his death. We wait for it to sound.
Their home, created by designer Fly Davis, is like a dolls’ house with the front off. Passing car lights chase across the living room walls and the shower curtain stands ominously drawn across the bathroom, putting us on edge from the offset. There are two video screens at the back of the Ambassador’s stalls, which show monochrome live footage of scenes in the bedroom — but that’s probably due to sightlines rather than an attempt to replicate the film.
Instead, Barrett uses the full armoury of stage frights, from crash blackouts and sudden blaring rock music, to jump scares wrought through sound and lighting effects, to put the willies up us. He also has a superlative talent for misdirection. Though the techniques are familiar, it doesn’t make them any less electrifying. I’m not sure the story entirely makes sense, but this show is more about mood and nerve-jangling startlement than narrative logic.
I won’t give away any of Fisher’s clever illusions, but I will say they make for proper leap-out-of-your-skin moments, especially one frightening surprise in the kitchen. A scene with a medium (Jackie Morrison), where candles snuff out, furniture moves by itself and a guttural voice chants from the ether, is both hilarious and spine-tingling. There are moments towards the end of outright horror.
James gives a strong performance as the withdrawn and troubled Lou, and Heusinger is equally good as the mansplaining Jamie, whose cocksure self-confidence is slowly eroded. His performance, and the ease he and James share on stage, is particularly impressive given he only joined the production last week.
For decades, The Woman in Black was the only chiller in the West End. Now this show chases a wave of new shockers, including Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s Ghost Stories, Danny Robins’s 2:22 and Inside No 9: Stage Fright by Dyson’s former League of Gentlemen co-creators Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith.
Maybe the annual December screen adaptations of ghoulish tales by MR James and others from the fourth LOG member, Mark Gatiss, have also reminded us that ghost stories are for Christmas, not just for (after) life. Brrrrr.
Paranormal Activity at Ambassadors Theatre, until 28 March 2026, paranormalonstage.com.
