Paranormal Activity | ★★★★☆ | Ambassador’s Theatre
Given the endless churn of lacklustre sequels, it’s easy to forget just how scary the original Paranormal Activity was. A found footage successor to The Blair Witch Project, it brought the same flavour of supernatural horror into a chillingly recognisable domestic setting that could be your own home. Through word of mouth and smart marketing, hype spread like a virus, making Paranormal Activity one of the most profitable films ever made, turning a $15,000 budget into a worldwide box office of almost $200 million.
Nearly two decades later, it arrives on the London stage (following stints in Leeds, Chicago and Los Angeles) with a new – but familiar – story written by Levi Holloway and directed by Punchdrunk alumnus Felix Barrett.
As is the way with this franchise, we gaze voyeuristically as a young couple settle into a new home. Fresh off the boat from Chicago, James and Lou seek a fresh start in London after an undisclosed trauma involving the latter’s mental health. The set is a cross section of their house, an open-plan living room and kitchen connected to three upstairs rooms by way of a shadowy staircase. Windows on either side cast eerie shadows as cars cruise by outside.
The strength of the play lies in its simplicity. Knowing this is a ghost story, your eyes are forever drawn to the darkened, unoccupied rooms away from the action, gloomy negative spaces that allow your mind to fill in the blanks.
The scares are – to begin with at least – restrained and genuinely unsettling: unexplained knocking at the door, a thud in an empty room, a mysterious shadow. As things ratchet up, sound is used to brilliant effect – crackling lights, jolts of static from the TV – and the inevitable jump scares are few enough to feel well-earned.
There are nods to the found footage origins of Paranormal Activity, with screens to the left and right of the stalls (and presumably in the cheaper seats, too) showing night-vision surveillance footage of the house. This feels a bit underdeveloped – there’s something creepy about glancing sideways at this distorted version of reality, the cameras cutting as they follow the couple through the house, but they’re not incorporated into the story in any meaningful way. In a post-Jamie Lloyd world in which splicing pre-recorded footage into apparently ‘live’ video is practically de rigueur, this feels like a missed opportunity.
The acting is competent without ever threatening to be great. James (Patrick Heusinger) is a fairly standard ‘brash American abroad’, painted in the broadest possible brush strokes. Until the final act he exists largely as a foil to his more introspective wife, resetting the tension with dumb jokes and false bravado. Lou (Melissa James) is a little more interesting, questioning whether she’s being haunted or is simply losing her mind (and wondering which is worse). Neither is given much in the way of challenging dialogue.
The real stars of the show are the team behind the set-piece scares. One in particular, which I will not spoil, is brilliantly executed, drawing gasps of amazement as much as fear. This is horror meets magic and I for one am here for it.
The horror genre is having quite a moment on the stage, perhaps owing to the celebrity-fuelled success of 2.22 A Ghost Story. Last week saw the release of the brilliantly self-contained A Ghost in Your Ear at the Hampstead Theatre, which played out in a single sound-recording studio. Paranormal Activity shows that formula can be upscaled without losing any of the frightening immediacy.