It may be hard to believe in 2026, but there was a time when the Paranormal Activity franchise had the entire horror genre in a chokehold. Following the breakout success of Oren Peli’s original film in 2009, the Paranormal Activity franchise would go on to release a sequel each subsequent year come the Halloween season, a strategy that put them in direct competition with the Saw franchise, which was the reigning champion of the horror box office at the time. Not only did the young upstart Paranormal Activity sequels wind up besting Saw at its own game, but the franchise also became a bona fide cultural juggernaut unto itself for several years.
However, things began to fall apart somewhere around 2014. After four obscenely successful releases, the franchise was attempting to spin things off into various sub-franchises with Christopher Lambert’s Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, but the film failed to make the same kind of impression at the box office, despite its relative quality. The next film, 2015’s Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension stumbled even harder and wound up putting the franchise on ice for several years. Then in 2021, they attempted a reboot with Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, but the film was ultimately shuttered to being a Paramount+ exclusive that received a very poor response. But now, it looks as though the Paranormal Activity franchise may have found the perfect venue for its resurrection: Broadway. A Paranormal Activity stage play has just premiered on the Great White Way and is netting incredibly positive early reactions.
The concept of a Paranormal Activity play is one that sounds quite strange initially, but if you mull it over for more than a few seconds, you start to see the potential in it.
From their inception, the Paranormal Activity films were found-footage horror films that would chronicle the interpersonal lives of a group of individuals before gradually cranking up the creep factor and introducing hauntings of various kinds into the mix. Things would inevitably escalate, and the found-footage approach empowered the proceedings with uniquely invasive and palpable impact. In much the same way that watching a long, seemingly unbroken take from a handheld camera in the movies felt like it put you there with the characters in a much more direct way, so too does the act of literally sitting in the same room with the characters and the paranormal activities in question, maybe even more so.
The play was written by Levi Holloway, and following its Broadway premiere, the production has been praised for its innovative use of practical effects and its probing of the possibilities of horror within the theatre space. Up until now, horror has gone largely unexplored as an on-stage possibility in the modern era. That obviously wasn’t the case in decades past, where projects like a Bela Lugosi-starring Dracula or James Whale’s Frankenstein literally originated onstage, but things have shifted in immense ways since then.
Fortunately, Paranormal Activity appears primed to change that. The play has already netted rave reviews from audiences and critics alike, and given the high recognizability of its franchise title, it's likely to pull audiences in over the next few months. This is far and away the most positive response any Paranormal Activity-related projects have gotten in over a decade, so this bodes extremely well for the play and could prove to help rejuvenate the franchise's legacy as a whole. In addition to this, should the Paranormal Activity play prove to be a financial success on Broadway, on-stage horror shows may be the next fad coming to the Big Apple, and I would honestly love nothing more.
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