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Embodied Surveillance: The Theatrical Reinvention of Paranormal Activity

By. Professor Horror

                                                                             

This October, I had the absolute pleasure of experiencing PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE PLAY at The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater…and what a chilling, exhilarating adaptation this turned out to be. I’ve been a fan of the franchise since the original 2007 film introduced the world to Katie, Micah, and the dread of watching a sleeping couple through the grainy stillness of nighttime security footage. That film reshaped modern horror not because of its budget or its simplicity, but because of the quiet, suffocating terror created through stillness, repetition, and the unsettling act of watching people when they don’t know they’re being watched. So, when I learned that the franchise was being reimagined for the stage, my anticipation skyrocketed. The idea of translating Paranormal Activity (a series defined by cameras, angles, timestamps, and static frames) into a live theatrical experience felt almost impossible. And yet, originally premiering in London, the production has crossed the Atlantic with a vengeance, materializing first in Chicago before beginning a national and international run.

To understand the brilliance of this stage adaptation, you have to understand what Paranormal Activity actually is. The films are often reduced to their found-footage gimmickry (cameras in corners, bedsheets shifting, timestamp jumps) but the heart of the franchise was never just about cameras. It has always been about surveillance. About discomfort. About the moral and emotional tension created when we are forced to stare at something long after we want to look away. The movies taught us that horror doesn’t need to jump…it can also wait. And wait. And wait. Until waiting becomes unbearable. Surveillance horror weaponizes familiarity. A hallway becomes unsettling only after you’ve stared at it long enough to memorize every shadow. A kitchen becomes horrifying the moment a single chair moves an inch, because you know that chair. You’ve watched it night after night. You know it shouldn’t be there. By returning to the same spaces repeatedly, the films teach us the architecture of terror: how the safest places, mapped and understood, can betray us with the slightest shift. The play understands this deeply, and it weaponizes that familiarity better than any sequel ever managed. In many ways, it achieves something the films cannot: it makes us complicit in the watching.

The story mirrors the franchise’s classic setup: a young couple, Lou ( Cher Álvarez) and James (Patrick Heusinger), move from Chicago to London, hoping distance will help them escape the strange disturbances that plagued their previous home. But as Paranormal Activity lore has taught us, “houses aren’t haunted…people are”. No matter how far they run, no matter how many walls they replace or rooms they redecorate, something follows. In their new two-story flat, far from home, they attempt to rebuild their lives…but the past, and something far older than the past, follows with them. The play quickly makes one thing clear: you can change continents, but you can’t outrun surveillance. Someone (or something) will always be watching.

                                            

What struck me most is how the play transforms the audience into the camera. On film, the camera is a fixed observer. Onstage, we are the fixed observers. The stage contains a full two-story house complete with kitchen, living room, stairway, bedrooms, and from almost any seat, you can peer into multiple rooms at once. There is no cross-cutting, no editing, no convenient shift of perspective. Instead of the film’s static security feeds, we become the surveillance apparatus. The audience is forced into a perpetual state of attention, scanning every corner, every doorway, every unlit stretch of the second floor. This experiential shift is what makes the play so effective. We watch Lou and James move from room to room. We watch empty hallways and silent staircases for far longer than feels normal. We stare so long that we start to anticipate motion where there is none and the stillness itself becomes unbearable. And that, truly, is Paranormal Activity at its core: not the demon, not the shadows, but the dread built out of staring at the same frame for so long that your imagination becomes the antagonist. The play recreates that sensation flawlessly.

If anything, the play makes the house feel like our house. After forty minutes of staring into these rooms, their geography becomes etched into our minds. We know where the bed is. We know which door leads to the stairwell. We know how the light hits the kitchen counter. And that’s when the production starts to manipulate that familiarity: rearranging objects, altering lighting so subtly that the audience reacts in a wave, as if we all collectively noticed the same wrongness at the same time. It’s a brilliant theatrical equivalent to Katie standing by the bed the first movie or the bedsheet in the dining room in the third. The audience gasps not because something is big or loud, but because something is off. (Pro tip: avoid the first two rows…the second floor is harder to see from there, and you’ll miss some beautifully orchestrated background hauntings. The play definitely rewards the meticulous observer.)

Even without handheld cameras, the play honors the franchise’s obsession with technology-as-haunting. An Alexa device becomes a spirit medium, glitching and responding to questions no one asked. A TV linked to Facetime warps into a conduit for something watching back. The digital world starts to feel as volatile and possessed as the couple’s own bodies. What the play captures so cleverly is that in Paranormal Activity, technology is never just a passive recorder but an active participant. It invites the haunting. It encourages the demon. Here, smart-home devices become spiritual vulnerabilities with doorways left open, intentionally or not. It’s a reminder that in a digital age, we are always inviting more watchers than we intend.

Combined with stage illusions (objects moving on their own, rooms shifting in real time, impossible shadows creeping across the walls, and one scare that had everyone in the theatre yelling) the show feels like a hybrid of theater and magic. It remains grounded in character work and tension, but the technological sleight-of-hand frequently drew gasps, screams, and full-body shudders from the audience around me. It's not just that things move, but it’s how they move. Slowly. Logically. Consistently with the rules the play establishes. Nothing feels cheap. Everything feels earned.

                                                                          

For longtime fans of the Paranormal Activity universe, this stage adaptation feels both reverent and revitalized. It captures the slow-burn dread, the voyeuristic discomfort, and the architectural terror of the films while using live performance to deepen their impact. For horror fans in general, it’s simply an extraordinary theatrical experience: immersive, clever, and legitimately frightening. The Chicago audience around me was loud: gasping, shrieking, laughing nervously, and whispering “Did you see that?” more than once. Horror rarely works in a live setting unless the entire crowd becomes part of the atmosphere, and this production understands that. It knows how to tighten a room full of people into one collective heartbeat. It knows how to make silence oppressive. It knows how to turn watching into horror. And that, ultimately, is what makes PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE PLAY so successful: it understands why the franchise terrified us in the first place. Not because of ghosts. Not because of jump scares. But because of the dread of watching…and being watched.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE PLAY is currently haunting Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre, where it runs from November 13 through December 7, 2025. After its LA engagement, the production will travel to Washington, D.C.’s Harman Hall from January 28 to February 7, 2026, before heading to San Francisco for a run at the Toni Rembe Theater from February 19 to March 15, 2026. Across the Atlantic, audiences can experience the show at London’s Ambassadors Theatre from December 5, 2025, through February 28, 2026. With such strong momentum and enthusiastic reception, hopefully more cities and dates will be announced soon, allowing even more audiences the chance to experience this uniquely unsettling theatrical event.