‘Paranormal Activity’: How the movie was adapted for stage at Ahmanson

How do you make live theater feel dangerous? The jump scare is a classic horror movie trope, but can that be adapted to the stage without a quick cut or crash zoom?

Getting audiences to bolt out of their seats was the goal set by the team behind “Paranormal Activity,” a new play based on the popular horror franchise of the same name, which opens Thursday at Center Theatre Group’s Ahmanson Theatre.

“To create a show featuring an undercurrent of creeping dread and the shifting sands of not quite trusting what you’re seeing really spoke to me,” said director Felix Barrett on a video call from London with writer Levi Holloway and illusion designer Chris Fisher, who recently won a Special Tony Award for the illusions and technical effects for “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”

The “Paranormal Activity” films famously use a found-footage style to induce chills. The first movie, in particular, Barrett said, was created “of the screen for the screen.” That inspired the play’s creators to “make something that was of the theater for the theater.” Paramount, which owns the franchise, gave them free rein with the material so there was no beat-by-beat reconstruction of one of the seven films.

The original 2007 feature film, written and directed by Oren Peli, was made for $15,000 and grossed nearly $200 million worldwide. It featured a young couple terrorized by a demon in their new home, and was seemingly cut together out of footage the husband filmed on a camcorder in the house.

Seven films later, the play was born, and the haunting continues with a new couple in a new home. The story follows James and Lou, who have relocated from Chicago to London to escape metaphorical demons, only to discover that true hauntings aren’t of places, but of people.

Fisher was delighted to find that Holloway and Barrett were open to building the set around his illusions. The writer and director had bonded over historic literary and cinematic material that they both found terrifying, and called upon Fisher to bring those terrors to life.

To start, the group workshopped a handful of illusions that Fisher built, which they considered key sequences for the unfolding action and plot.

“We worked out some of these big moments — before Fly [Davis] even designed the set — to understand the infrastructure that would be needed,” Fisher explained.

Fisher was then able to dictate crucial design issues to make his illusions work, such as where a certain cupboard should be in the kitchen, the ideal position of a sofa and the framing of a window. After that, the team got to work figuring out what kind of house the haunted couple would live in and what neighborhood it occupied. All these details figured into Holloway’s final script.

The resulting set, in many ways, is the production’s pièce de résistance. It’s a two-story house with the front sheared off so the audience can see all the rooms at once. The key to the creeping horror lies in what remains unseen and in what viewers think they may be witnessing, for example, in one darkened bedroom upstairs while actors go about their business in the kitchen below.

The team gave itself a unique challenge in its decision to not abstract the space, said Holloway, whose horror-themed thriller “Grey House,” starring Laurie Metcalf, premiered on Broadway in 2023.

“It forced us, as story makers, to not be able to hide too much, since everything’s in plain sight, which actually lends itself to the horror,” Holloway said. “Because you could rotate the set, you could abstract it, you could travel to one room at a time, but here everything exists in real time. We didn’t allow ourselves the space to camouflage anything, and that in itself is its own kind of immersion.”

The set was built around illusions created by Chris Fisher, who won a Special Tony Award for his work on “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”

(Kyle Flubacker)

Barrett knows a thing or two about immersion. As the founder and artistic director of Punchdrunk theater company, he directed a show loosely based on “Macbeth,” called “Sleep No More,” which invited audiences to roam through the McKittrick Hotel in New York City, experiencing the production in various areas and rooms at their own pace. It played more than 5,000 performances during a 14-year run.

The director said he and Holloway have a shared attraction to tension that builds slowly and methodically, like in a turn-of-the-century Gothic horror novella — such as Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan.” That slow burn, with its attendant low hum of fear and anxiety, is achieved onstage largely through misdirection.

“It’s always about what you don’t see — the vacant, negative space of the house,” Barrett said. “You’re almost tricking the audience, where they’re looking at the whole picture, and you’re able to seed things and tease things and make them paranoid about where they should be looking.”

That’s when people begin to feel the crackle of dark energy in the theater.

“How do we make a doorway become the most threatening thing in this house?” Barrett asked.

Misdirection, Fisher adds, is the basis for magic and illusion, and that is why so much of it is used in the show. Controlling the audience’s gaze is key so you can focus it on one thing while another thing is happening.

The creators have also heightened the terror with repetition. The play originally premiered at England’s Leeds Playhouse in July 2024. Earlier this year it staged its North American premiere in Chicago and it’s now landing at the Ahmanson while work is being done simultaneously to open it on London’s West End in December. The creators have been watching and tinkering. The ending is now quite changed, with nail-biting results, the team said.

“As time has gone on, it’s been made leaner and more potent in its form,” said Holloway. “There’s something chilling about building a threat inside of the mundane.”