“A beautiful, text-book showcase using horror movie to mirror theatrical ontology”
I sat down in the auditorium at the Ambassador, surrounded by my fellow audience members, feeling confident. The horror movie series Paranormal Activity is well-known for using a hybrid of fake CCTV-like camera and family DV to elicit horror, but I have this ultimate self-awareness that this is theatre. It is live performance by real human beings. We both know it isn’t true but just presuming it is true. There are hundreds seated with me. How can it be horrifying? No way.
But I was so wrong. It was super scary and the horror works so well in a different and unexpected way. In the original film, there is a hyper-heightened experience of anticipatory dread and sustained vigilance through long takes, minimal movement, and seemingly impoverished vision. Horror plays around with its watchers in-between presence and absence. Initially an independent horror film written and directed by Oren Peli in 2007 and then gained worldwide popularity through its unique found-footage style, the stage adaptation Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live On Stage, written by Levi Holloway and directed by Felix Barrett, now opens at the Ambassador Theatre after its premiere in 2024 and North American autumn tour in 2025.
Precisely knowing that the camera language is the fundamental underpinning logic of the franchise’s sole selling point of horror, the theatrical production translates it into a more technology-oriented presence. While the technology is unparalleled, the greater brilliance lies in its perception on the issue of “presence versus absence”, even after ripping off the series’ signature use of the camera.
Such perception actually mirrors the existential ontology of theatre and its making process per se: its live (un)presence. “Who’s there”(or what is there) is the eternal question asked not only in this production, but throughout the entire history of theatre criticism, speaking to the most mysterious part of human psychology mechanism. While we acknowledge a shared presence of the stage and the audience (a very relaxed performance also), it is the unseen, the disappearing, and the already disappeared, that ultimately defines.
The narrative follows the most signature pattern of Paranormal Activity: a couple in a domestic setting where psychological horror is always grounded in their not-so-healthy intimate relationship. In the show, Lou (Melissa James) and James (Ronan Raftery) just moving from Chicago to England. James’s mother Carolanne (Pippa Winslow) are chasing after a grandchild, but she doubt whether the couple could be good parents.
Besides the breath-holding illusions work by Chris Fisher, Gareth Fry’s soundscape and soundtrack are equally haunting, even when the melodies are rock and roll. Anna Watson’s lighting captures the nuance shifting in-between the normal and the abnormal within Fly Davis’s realistic domestic setting. Holloway intends to convey that the real problem lies with the not yet fully grown-up husband, but the dramaturgical connection isn’t sound enough between the couple’s relational dysfunction and thus the psychological horror grounded within.
Tickets are available here for performance up to March 2026.