The jump scare has been a hallmark of classic horror flicks at least as far back as 1976, when the title character thrust her arm out of the grave at the end of Carrie. You don’t encounter it nearly as often on the legitimate stage – perhaps it’s harder to suspend disbelief when the actors are flesh and blood? – but when you do it stays with you. I vividly recall screaming and leaping out of my chair when a supposedly-dead Robert Duvall lunged at Lee Remick in Wait Until Dark. And again when a supposedly-dead Victor Garber rose up to grab John Wood in Deathtrap.
But as of now, the live action jump scare champeen is Paranormal Activity, in Boston on the last leg of a tryout tour scheduled to land on Broadway next month. And there’s nothing supposedly-dead about this adaptation from Oren Peli’s 2007 found-footage indie hit. The whole place is wired up.
Scripter Levi Holloway’s dialogue gets flabby at times as it did in 2023’s Grey House, and the plot itself is familiar stuff. The movie’s longtime boyfriend and girlfriend actively court video evidence of the Next World to exorcise it from their San Diego home. Whereas here, Lou (Cher Álvarez) and husband James (Travis A. Knight) arrive in London to escape hinted-at weirdness back in Chicago. But it’s still all the usual horror tropes: believer vs. sceptic, established religion vs. paganism, should we have a baby, etc. Doors slam and lights flash on and off and curtains billow for no reason, followed by escalating events that call for a professional’s help.
There’s humor along the way, not just from Eva Kaminsky as a cracker-crisp variation on Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati, but also in the Southern-drawled Zoom calls from James’s mother Carolanne (Shannon Cochran, who knows her way around paranoia after creating the malleable Agnes in Tracy Letts’s Bug). But in the end, of course, everything ends up with Lou and James – and who- or whatever is haunting them – caught in a triangle of suspicions, revelations, and an escalating desire for release. Álvarez and Knight find more variety in their stock roles than one might think possible.
When all is said and done, it’s the technical accomplishments that linger in the memory, with a cryptful of artist-magicians in keen collaboration: Fly Davis’s expansive, two-tiered set and imaginative costumes, Anna Watson’s spectacular lighting, Gareth Fry’s sound design thrumming ominously; perhaps most of all, Chris Fisher’s illusions. One fears to give any hint of what is in store, but I can say that for my money, Fisher outdoes his work for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and his Tony-winning Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Not that they are necessarily more spectacular, mind you, but you care more, because you’re more wrapped up in the mood and the characters’ fate. And credit for that mood must also go to director Felix Barrett, who controls the action like a master puppeteer, unafraid to let silences last on and on and on before something blows: a knock on a door, the ring of a phone. And just when you least expect it, one of them damn jump scares.
Paranormal Activity, when it arrives in New York, is likely to be a trap for snobs. So was Stranger Things, as it happens, but that has enjoyed a healthy run here and in London and delighted many. I was thrilled by Liberation and Purpose and Leopoldstadt as much as anyone, don’t get me wrong; but there’s got to be room for an artful entertainment that wants nothing more than to shake us up for a couple of hours. In its way, the show is as immersive as Sleep No More (directed by Barrett): You realize very quickly that something could be happening anywhere at any moment on upper and lower levels alike, so your eyes are constantly moving through the darkness and shafts of light expertly managed by Watson. And this is weird: People on house right react to something they see, which galvanizes house left to strain to look even more closely, and gasps and moans cascade around the auditorium as if shockmeister William Castle were still operating the controls of “Percepto” during 1959 screenings of The Tingler.
The exit buzz from the Emerson Colonial was as excited as anything I’ve heard in months – maybe as great as at Death of a Salesman, in fact. And by quick, rough estimation, there wasn’t a dry seat in the house.
Paranormal Activity opened July 15, 2026, at the Emerson Colonial Theatre (Boston) and runs through July 30. Tickets and information: paranormalonstage.com
