paranormal activityOne of the most recognizable franchises in modern horror is about to do something no one else has ever done. It’s coming out of the screen and into your reality as part of a brand new stage show.
The show is called just that, paranormal activityAnd after debuting in Chicago earlier this fall, it’s opening at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles this week and running through December 7. From there, it will be at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C., from January 28 to February 7, followed by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco from February 19 to March 15. It will also be in London’s West End from 5 December to 28 March.
But what exactly is this show? How is the unmistakable found footage genre going to make the jump from screen to stage? Well, io9 sat down with the show’s writer Levi Holloway to find out.
Holloway, known for his Broadway plays gray house And turretStarring Michael Shannon, joining the project in 2023. Felix Barrett (who directed the popular immersive show) no more sleeping) was already attached as director, and very quickly the pair got on the same page about what it meant to paranormal activity On stage. Holloway said of the original film, “Felix and I had the same memory.” “It was less about the movie and more about the marketing around it. It was a whole night scene and the audience was kind of nervous, and it felt really exciting. It was like, ‘Okay, it’s just an audience. We can do this for the audience.’ Not sure how, but we can do it.”
However, before he could solve that problem, Holloway needed a story. And, thankfully, Paramount, the rights holder of the franchise, didn’t really interfere with it. Holloway said, “Paramount gave us a very loose mandate.” “The mandate, if anything, was tonal, and it seemed to be more about, like, ‘Okay, well, is it about the couple surrounded by something?’ ‘Yes.’ And it was like this. He was quite handsome. A huge leap of faith on their part, for which we are very grateful.
The story he and Barrett began working on is inspired by the films in some way, but is not narratively connected to them. Instead, it reflects his journey as a creative. paranormal activity It’s about a couple from Chicago who move to London and realize that places aren’t the only thing that can be haunted. People may also be haunted. At the time, Holloway was newly married and living in Chicago, and he flew to London to meet Barrett to discuss the project.
“I spent about a year in London, doing R&D there and really started looking into their relationship with ghosts and things like that,” he said. “I wasn’t really interested in the demon angle that was shown in the movies. I’m not dismissing it. It’s just that in this kind of Christian structure and this kind of good versus evil, God versus Satan story, it wasn’t really a story that I felt I had much to add. But I have a lot to say about demons.”
In particular, Holloway found inspiration in the Victorian Spiritualist movement, which he felt was “really proud of this idea of the afterlife and ghosts and mediums and the paranormal as a way of working through the grief from this enormous loss in the First World War.”
“So it was pretty fertile ground,” he said. “And that was a huge starting point for me in terms of storytelling. So you’ll see some of those bones buried very lightly throughout the script.”
Holloway also found that, in addition to those historical inspirations, the idea of the couple moving to a new country helped give the show important staples of the horror genre. “With every good horror story, you try to find a way to isolate your characters because the big question is always, ‘Why don’t they run away?'” Holloway said. “So you have to respect that question. And for me, the way to do that was, number one, what if places aren’t haunted? What if people are haunted? You can’t run away from something that’s inside you or that’s connected to you. And then the other way to isolate them is to make them strangers in a strange country, thousands of miles away from everything they know.”
Of course, the writer re-watched the movies (the first and third are Holloway’s favorites) and found two specific things he knew he had to recreate to make the show feel the same. paranormal activity Movies. “One is its sobriety,” Holloway said. “For Vishal [amounts] In that first movie, over time, nothing happens. And it is in that void where anything becomes possible. It’s very charged in its duration, and that was really exciting because it’s anti-theatrical, right? When we are watching a drama we have the feeling that people are walking, talking, moving and moving, you know? But that stillness, that negative space, that long-term pause are where you really start to build a kind of electricity and fill the atmosphere with potential. And the second major component was darkness. We play with darkness a lot. A huge challenge, and something we’re always talking about, is how do you immerse the audience in complete darkness? When you do that, you’re not only creating a community, you’re also displacing them… and I’m not talking about sudden fear. I’m talking about breathless anticipation.
But there is also such a belief paranormal activity is a found footage-driven franchise. Holloway admitted that it would have been easier and perhaps obvious to make it a more multimedia show with cameras and screens, but, instead, he and Barrett found a new path.[The play] “It fits the movies because it’s a raw gesture of weaponizing mundane things,” he said. “We wanted to capture the feeling of putting the audience in front of this sawed-off dollhouse and letting them peek into every room and letting them witness some things that maybe they shouldn’t see. And the audience is like a voyeur. Since we are voyeurs in this story, it becomes non-dramatic. This becomes kind of dangerous. it almost feels like rear window Or something else. We may also be given binoculars to look into someone’s house.”
All of this, seemingly, could have been done without the “Paranormal Activity” name brand. But Holloway believes that working within an established franchise was “both a gift and a burden”. “It has a very passionate built-in audience,” he said. “And, for the most part, I think the franchise is cashing the checks it’s writing. It’s cool. It plays with the eyeballs. It’s stripped down. It’s putting mostly normal human beings into extraordinary situations. And it’s really a great slingshot from which to launch a story. The burden of it is like all of those things. As an audience, you have built-in expectations. You’re looking at audience members. You can roll up your sleeves and say, ‘Prove it to me,’ and I take it seriously.”
This was Holloway’s greatest adventure paranormal activityLiving up to the expectations, while also giving the audience something new, exciting and worthy, ,[Found footage] Telling the audience this is real,” he said.[But] You can’t really do that in the theater. You can’t bring an audience into the theater and make them think that what’s happening is real unless you subvert their expectations, which is completely complicated for us.
Well, almost the whole thing. paranormal activity The franchise exists because of its sequels, and Holloway admits that while he doesn’t want to go too far down the road, it’s something he’s thought about. He said, “There are some very literal buns in the oven where this particular story could go, but nothing is confirmed.” “Mostly, the notebooks we have are full of ideas and pranks that we want to fit very neatly into many more iterations of paranormal activity World.”
For more information paranormal activity And it runs in Los Angeles, visit this website. Click here to know more about the show.
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