Paranormal Activity is so genuinely scary it made a West End audience scream

When I was just entering adolescence, I went on my first ever ‘date’ to see Paranormal Activity at the cinema.

My mum ate dinner in the restaurant next door while I sat in the dark, hands sweating, consumed by two equally terrifying questions: was it acceptable for our elbows to touch on the armrest, and what if the film was so scary that I cried and publicly humiliated myself?

Then the film started. During one jump scare, I leapt so violently that I kicked my pre-pubescent Romeo in the ankle hard enough to make him whimper and try to hide it with a manly cough.

But I eventually emerged from the cinema shaken yet tear-free, my pride mostly intact, my first awkward kiss safely out of the way.

Fast forward well over a decade, and I’m watching Paranormal Activity again — this time at the Ambassador’s Theatre in the West End, armed with the quiet confidence of adulthood. I know how to French kiss now, and I no longer worry about popcorn in my braces. Most importantly, I’m sure I won’t cry this time; I’m an adult, after all.

This confidence lasts approximately three minutes.

From the moment it begins, Paranormal Activity: Live understands exactly what horror demands. An ominous voice fills the auditorium as the lights cut to pitch black, provoking a ripple of nervous giggles from an audience far rowdier than your average West End crowd.

Horror, when done well, should be communal and unifying.

When the curtain rises, it reveals Fly Davis’s jaw-dropping set: a perfectly ordinary two-storey London house, complete with Alexa, spare bedroom earmarked for a future nursery, and the quiet implication that nothing good will happen here.

Headlights sweep realistically across the windows. Staircases and doorways become objects of suspicion as the light shifts. The house itself feels watchful and constantly shifting in the shadows that are created by some of the most remarkable lighting work in the West End now or ever.

The story centres on James and Lou, an American couple who’ve moved from Chicago to London partly for his job, and partly to escape something Extremely Bad that was happening in their previous home.

Lou believes she’s been haunted since childhood and while James wants to be supportive, he refuses to lie and say he believes in ghosts. She’s on heavy antidepressants, desperate to be seen as reasonable by him and by his relentlessly nosy mother, who regularly FaceTimes in.

Audiences are politely asked not to spoil the twists, so I’ll simply say that after the first act’s biggest shock, I physically launched myself into the arms of the man sitting next to me. He was already drenched in his other neighbour’s gin and tonic from a previous scare.

At the interval, the three of us apologised to each other through nervous giggles and mild shell shock.

What’s most surprising is that beneath the screaming and arm-clutching, there’s a genuine emotional centre.

Yes, some of Levi Holloway’s dialogue is undeniably cheesy. But there’s something quietly affecting about watching a relationship strain under the weight of an experience that exists — at least at first — only in one person’s mind.

As Lou’s internal battle becomes literalised, the ghost story functions as a metaphor for mental illness, belief, and the unseen histories our partners carry into relationships. With a few notable exceptions, it’s also a decent guide to being a good husband, as Jimmy fights relentlessly the forces seen and unseen that are threatening his beloved wife.

Horror is often dismissed as a cheap, often lewd form of entertainment – but it’s actually a delicate, deeply technical art form. Get the rhythm wrong and the illusion collapses or push too hard and you lose trust.

Under the direction of Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett, Paranormal Activity: Live executes this balance perfectly, proving that live theatre is not just capable of great horror, but uniquely suited to it.

Unlike the found-footage films, screens are used sparingly: a television for video calls from James’s mum (a scene-stealing Pippa Winslow), and grainy CCTV monitors offering a partial view of the house’s upper floor.

They nod to the franchise without overpowering the stage, reminding us that the real terror comes from what theatre can do better than film: shared breath, shared silence, shared dread, even shared screams.

Rather than relying on cheap jump scares, the production excels at sustained, crawling unease. When shocks do come, they’re often preceded by the sickening realisation that what you thought was happening absolutely was not.

Chris Fisher’s illusions are so technically astonishing that they provoke not just fear, but genuine awe at a master of his craft.

Crucially, though, this virtuosity is so seamless it never blunts the terror by causing you to wonder too long about the tech behind the scenes. Paranormal Activity: Live is properly, relentlessly frightening — arm-clutchingly, stranger-embracingly so.

This time, I did cry. Twice. Not because I was thirteen and overwhelmed, but because there was no screen to hide behind so the horror was live, physical, and alarmingly present.

At least I didn’t kick anyone.

Buy tickets for Paranormal Activity at www.paranormalonstage.com

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