They're bringing horror to Broadway and scaring up big audiences

As the preeminent impresario of modern horror, Jason Blum gets asked to sit through many a scare — mostly in movies and shows but also the occasional theater venture.

"Everyone invites me to a scary play," says Blum, who counts "Get Out," "The Purge" and the "Halloween" reboot among his Hollywood producing credits. "Everyone has said, ‘If we could make a scary movie on a stage as a live event, it would change the world.’ So many people over the years have tried, but I had never seen a play onstage that was even nearly as scary as a movie."

But then he caught "Paranormal Activity," a stage play set in the world of the found-footage film franchise, last year in Los Angeles. Although Blum had produced the original 2007 movie, he wasn’t involved in the England-born theater production that was touring the United States. Open-minded as he was, the Blumhouse Productions founder measured his expectations.

Then the curtain rose, and the right kind of dread washed over him. The white-knuckle tension. The eerie intimacy. The gasp-inducing frights.

"I was floored by how it made me feel like the movie felt," recalls Blum, who subsequently joined the play’s producing team. "I just never expected that."

"Paranormal Activity" opened last month at Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre, having already frightened theatergoers in London and across the United States (including a run last winter at D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company).

Amid all the heartrending dramas, sidesplitting farces and toe-tapping musicals that make their way to Broadway, spine-chilling horror is exceedingly rare. But the genre is certainly thriving elsewhere. "Backrooms" and the Blum-produced "Obsession" upended the cinematic box office this summer. The spooky satire "Widow’s Bay" won over the Emmys. So can Broadway get in on horror’s moment in the zeitgeist?

"People are ready to see something new," says "Paranormal Activity" actor Cher Álvarez. "People are ready to just face the challenge of the difficult times that we live in, and I think horror is a great, great vessel for that."

Petrifying predecessors

There is some tradition of onstage horror. The ongoing Broadway spectacle "Stranger Things: The First Shadow" blends its terrors with science-fiction action and fantasy lore. Productions of "Sweeney Todd" naturally revel in Gothic bloodlust. "Paranormal Activity" playwright Levi Holloway also penned the haunting play "Grey House," which ran on Broadway in 2023.

Yet wholehearted horror has proved difficult to crack onstage. Blum theorizes that it’s easier to manipulate the audience’s eye and pull off jump scares onscreen. Holloway echoes that, calling live theater "merciless." Felix Barrett, the director of "Paranormal Activity," ventured years ago to see the long-running British ghost story "The Woman in Black" and left underwhelmed.

"Often horror in the theater becomes quite exaggerated and quite campy," Barrett says. "It’s always with a tinge of the pastiche or the heightened or the comedic."

Then producer Simon Friend approached Barrett a couple of years ago about transporting "Paranormal Activity" to the stage. Soon enough, the director embraced the idea of channeling the franchise’s voyeuristic conceit — observing haunted families in their homes — and delivering more simmering scares. When Holloway came onboard to write the script, it was with considerable freedom from rights holder Paramount Pictures to spin a new yarn in the fabric of "Paranormal Activity."

"We were given something close to carte blanche," Holloway says, "to find our own way through."

Thus Holloway channeled his own experience and anxieties. Having moved from Chicago to London to work on the play, he structured "Paranormal Activity" around newlyweds who, yep, have moved from Chicago to London. Holloway also channeled his thoughts around marital trust and collaboration into the couple’s conflict. After a psychic told the playwright that he was being followed by a water ghost — and his on-the-fritz radiators subsequently doused his apartment in boiling water — he weaved that supernatural idea into the play.

Then there’s the production’s unabashed naturalism. For long stretches, "Paranormal Activity" follows the newlyweds around Fly Davis’s set — a two-story, five-room house exposed to the audience throughout — as the couple, well, don’t do much. They make dinner. Take a nap. Use the bathroom. All the while, anticipation of the macabre builds.

"There’s a negative space to the house," Barrett says. "There’s a lot of darkness, so your imagination is filling in the gaps. Also, the longer that it goes where nothing’s happening, you get lulled into a false security. But it’s ramping up. As a director, I love a creeping sense of dread."

'How did they do that?'

Eventually, "Paranormal Activity" induces its fair share of shrieks — largely courtesy of illusionist Chris Fisher’s stagecraft. As those moments land with "How did they do that?" astonishment, a chicken-or-the-egg question arises. Did Holloway and Barrett dream up the unthinkable and see what Fisher could pull off? Did Fisher have tricks up his sleeve and ask that they be written into the play?

The answer, it turns out, is all of the above.

"I always say to a writer: ‘Don’t write thinking what can I put onstage. Write what you would like to see, and then it’s my job to try and realize that,’" Fisher says. "A lot of the time, I’d be led by what Levi wanted or what Felix had said. But there was an equal acceptance of taking something I’ve suddenly thought of then and putting it in."

The result is an audience experience like no other on Broadway. The crowd mutters in eerie anticipation. Screams and squeals accompany the biggest scares. So do waves of nervous laughter. Some theatergoers even shout warnings to the characters.

"We just started hearing people scream: ‘Don’t go in there! No, no, no!’" Holloway says. "The first time the public saw it, we had a bit of an allergy to the call-and-response nature of the show. But that allergy lasted hours, and we got kind of addicted to it."

"It is the most rewarding experience," Álvarez adds, "to hear a crowd’s uproar of disbelief."

After opening to critical acclaim, the production has largely played to sold-out crowds. Featuring one set and four actors, the show is cheaper to produce than most Broadway productions, following the low-risk, high-reward model that Blumhouse perfected in Hollywood. And the play is scratching the same itch for communal terror that helped turn "Obsession" — a $750,000-budget indie from a 26-year-old filmmaker — into a $500 million phenomenon.

"The world is very frightening at the moment," Barrett says. "There’s an awful lot of terrible things happening out there, and it’s scary. As humans, we’ve got a pent-up tension inside us because we can’t do anything about global warming or the conflicts around the world. We just need a place to let off steam and release that fear valve."

Demand for "Paranormal Activity," which runs through Jan. 3, figures to increase as Halloween creeps closer. Buoyed by this experience, Holloway, Barrett and Fisher have expressed interest in collaborating on another hair-raising production. With horror enthusiasts putting their money where their mouths are — in movie theaters and playhouses alike — it sure seems like the genre is carving out a lane on Broadway.

"In demand, there’s a gaping hole," Blum says. "I think there are millions of fans who would love to see something really scary on Broadway."