Paranormal Activity
Opening Night: August 25, 2026
Theater: August Wilson Theatre
Website: paranormalbroadway.com
James and Lou move from Chicago to London for a fresh start. But as the young couple settles into their new home, Lou is certain that something is… off. And eventually they will both have to grapple with the same truth: Places aren’t haunted – people are. An entirely new story inspired by the iconic film series, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY comes to Broadway.
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August 25, 2026
Watching “Paranormal Activity” with a crowd feels like watching a magic show on a roller coaster. We scream, then we laugh because we screamed (aren’t we silly?), then we scream again when the ride takes another drop. After having toured widely — the show has been in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington — it is polished to a cold shine. From a design and direction standpoint, it’s incredible, and the illusions designer Chris Fisher has a true sorcerer’s touch: an exhilarating scare in the first act breaks every brain in the audience.
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August 25, 2026
I love being scared, and Paranormal Activity is by far the best entry for horror theatre we have seen on Broadway, perhaps ever? Illusions Designer Chris Fisher worked with Holloway and director Felix Barrett from the jump creating the story with them, and his work here is as impressive as ever, and the glee the audience gets at certain moments are of course the standout crowdpleasers.
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August 25, 2026
Spare a thought for the 32BJ cleaners (now under a new contract) who must nightly contend with spilled popcorn and tiny puddles of urine left by horrified spectators unprepared for the jumps and bumps in director Felix Barrett’s marvelously sneaky production. Like a cat playing with a mouse, Barrett takes his time, winding up and drawing out the suspense as we buckle up for two hours of terror.
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August 25, 2026
The stage version of “Paranormal Activity” performs on an intimate and domestic scale yet delivers more thrills, chills and screams than Broadway has seen in years, and giving the franchise a legit afterlife.
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August 25, 2026
One of the more surreal responses to that experience is applause, which ripples through the audience of Paranormal Activity a beat after all the major scares, like rain settling in after a peal of thunder. Left to your lonesome, you wouldn’t normally start clapping when a malicious entity jump-scares you, but it makes sense to do so among the crowd in a big Broadway theater for the sake of collective relief and release, to remind ourselves that we’re just watching people — and mirrors, ropes, and pulleys — play pretend.
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August 25, 2026
Horror plays are hard to pull off on Broadway, as Holloway’s own somewhat creaky Grey House demonstrated in 2023. But Paranormal Activity is a much more successful fright night. Barrett, who codirected Sleep No More, leans into voyeurism and elicits excellent performances from Álvarez and Knight. The true shocks come in watching Lou and James lose their grips on their lives—and each other—and the liveness of theater heightens the tension by creating a kind of mass hysteria where even innocuous bumps elicit shrieks that evolve into the relief of communal laughter. The whole show is a scream.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 25, 2026
What happens next can only be described as two hours and 20 minutes of hair-raising, heart-pounding, and bloodcurdling horror mixed with a dash of unexpected heart and humor. Scenic and costume designer Fly Davis has expertly transformed its stage into a massive, two-story dollhouse in which viewers can follow Lou and James as they navigate their day-to-day activities. And yet, when the sun sets, the modern home soon becomes the place of nightmares.
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August 25, 2026
People screamed and jumped in unison just as they would at the cinema. It’s a lot of fun. At times, the spookiness is electric. And, far from creeping into deadly theme-park territory, patrons’ loud vocalizing comes from a rare and intense engagement. They’re riveted.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 25, 2026
Paranormal Activity’s nightmare fuel makes for a wonderfully inventive and terrifying variation on the American domestic drama, taking a couple on the brink and turning the ghosts of their guilt and unhappiness into an entrancing extravaganza.
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August 25, 2026
The bigger problem is everything between the scares. At more than two hours, the long stretches of dialogue do not build suspense so much as drain it. Holloway tries to give the haunting psychological weight through grief, guilt and marital tension, but the story remains too thin to sustain the running time.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 25, 2026
Theatergoers hoping for a sophisticated ghost story like The Weir or The Woman in Black will probably find the evening hopelessly lowbrow. But if you’re simply looking for a scary good time and can endure the frequently deafening sound level, Paranormal Activity is the show for you.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 25, 2026
Like an amusement park ride ascending an incline, the first act of Paranormal Activity deals out a gradual build-up of backstory detail and stormy night-type creepiness, prickly with relatively minor jump scares and climaxing with – well, let’s reveal no more but simply note this second act possesses even more backstory but also delivers some twists, turns and stage tricks that scared up highly audible responses from Saturday night’s preview crowd.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 25, 2026
The success of the play rides or dies on the quality of its illusions and its sound design and both Chris Fisher and Gareth Fry, respectively, nail their assignments. Fisher cooks up some chilling images that are wildly inventive and believable, even sitting very close to the stage. Fry’s sound design is perfectly timed to the twists and turns of Holloway’s writing and Fisher’s illusions, and the continual thrum underscoring the play is deliciously unnerving.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 25, 2026
[Alvarez and Knight] give performances of understated honesty that help to compensate for some of the horror-movie stupidity of their later actions. You may be tempted to shout: For the love of God, don’t open the door! But by the time that thought occurs to you, it will be too late. Paranormal Activity will have crept into your bloodstream like some unearthly virus, and you’re unlikely to shake that sense of dread anytime soon. You won’t dare sleep until you’ve checked under the bed thoroughly.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 25, 2026
Thankfully, “Paranormal Activity” avoids the self-aware tropes of tired horror franchises that have nothing left to do but parody themselves. Here, you get an honest, analog story, happily devoid of digital trickery but grounded in the kind of psychological realism that creates the best nightmares. This is a plot-driven, genre-fueled, audience-centered experience, for sure, and far from some artsy or pretentious affair that will be exciting the scholars of the American theater. Thank God, though. “Paranormal Activity” knows what it wants to pull off and the execution is first-rate.
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