Malevolent spirits be damned – theatres can be haunted simply by the memory of bad plays and perhaps unscary horror in particular. The last time London’s Ambassadors theatre aimed to give audiences the shivers, with The Enfield Haunting, it led to some frightfully poor reviews. But a couple of years later, this intimate West End playhouse is hosting Paranormal Activity, a new instalment in the franchise that was kickstarted by a low-budget supernatural movie about a couple plagued by inexplicable nocturnal noises. “Hold your nerve” runs the play’s tagline – a directive you suspect applies not just to the audience.

Arriving at the theatre on the day of the first preview, it’s not creepy bumps and thuds that echo through the building but whizzing drills, sound checks and the last-minute discussions of a crew with a deadline. Perched in the dress circle bar, US playwright Levi Holloway and director Felix Barrett (best known as the founder of immersive theatre specialists Punchdrunk) are discussing how rarely they have been frightened in the theatre.

“I saw The Woman in Black 20 years ago,” says Barrett. “I so wanted it to be the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. There were flourishes and moments but it just didn’t get me … I haven’t seen anything that has really scared me. We’re raising the bar on that ambition.”

Holloway’s CV includes Grey House, a hair-raising drama set in a cabin amid a blizzard, as well as a retelling of Pinocchio that amps up the fairytale’s fear factor. “I think horror in theatre is a burden and a privilege,” he says. “It’s pretty daunting. If the first question you ask is how you scare someone, you’re probably off on the wrong foot … Good theatre is usually about people being forced to change. And horror usually has people being forced to change in order to survive. So you just have to have a good, honest story. The weapons you deploy to unnerve or scare have to be in the narrative.”

The pair make the case that horror brings audiences together like no other genre – more even than musicals or comedy. “It’s a bit of a sanity check with your neighbour, which seems kind of relevant right now,” says Holloway. “Like, does this scare you too? Yeah, stranger, this does scare me too!”

Barrett says it provides catharsis “when the world itself is very scary” and the result is “bizarrely joyous”. Holloway adds: “Imagine if a rollercoaster only had one car. It’s a different thing. There’s something so thrilling about the camaraderie that happens in the lobby at the interval or after the show.” The pair enjoy eavesdropping on rattled audience members wrapping their heads around the show’s mystery.

Paranormal Activity premiered at Leeds Playhouse in the summer of 2024 (it has since been given a new ending) and a parallel production is touring the US to great acclaim. “What’s amazing about this, which is different from anything that I’ve done before, is that we did the illusions first,” says Barrett. Illusions designer Chris Fisher is more used to being summoned later in the process. “The clue’s in the title – we knew they needed to be baked in,” Barrett explains.

Set designer Fly Davis has created a two-storey house for the play’s couple who have recently married in Chicago and moved to London for a fresh start. “They quickly encounter a truth that they can’t run from,” says Holloway. “So it’s about a marriage and it’s about the ghosts each person brings into that marriage.”

The first Paranormal Activity film, written and directed by Oren Peli and filmed in his own house over seven days, suggested that people can be as unfathomable as the occult – perhaps as malicious as any demon. The seven films in the franchise also explore the frazzled states that come with change and leave us vulnerable – such as moving to a new city or having a family. Starting work on the show, Barrett and Holloway were as sleep-deprived as the average doomed Paranormal Activity character. “Our sons were born back to back when we started this process,” says Holloway. “The original haunting!” laughs Barrett. Holloway says he hopes that audiences find the couple in the play familiar as his script “gives teeth to the mundane”. For Barrett, “it’s a portrait of a marriage and then there’s a third force coming in”. Holloway laughs: “A throuple!”

What excited Barrett about the project was the memory of a trailer for the first film in 2009 featuring cinemagoers’ terrified responses. (It helped create a buzz that saw the $15,000 film make more than $100m within weeks at the US box office.) Barrett’s eyes flash as he savours the opportunity “to make an audience physically recoil in the theatre”. Seeing “the sweat and the fear in the eyes of the cast” will, he hopes, “bring it home all the more directly”.

Grounding the story in realism has been key. The franchise followed the found-footage technique of The Blair Witch Project, with the first film featuring a series of timecoded nocturnal video recordings made by the couple who – like the audience – scrutinise each frame to help uncover the uncanny activity. It’s a “genius device” for a film, says Barrett. “But we made the decision on day one to not do that – let’s come up with a story that’s about liveness and about the threat and plausibility of what a live audience would be scared of.” He adds: “There’s a lot of cinematic trickery and camera work happening across theatre generally … we wanted to get under your skin and play with the idea of safety, what happens when that is under threat.”

Horror theatre is all the rage. 2: 22 – A Ghost Story, with its celebrity-led casts, had several West End seasons and is on tour. The macabre comedy Inside No 9: Stage/Fright returns for another London run in January. Rose Glass’s haunting film Saint Maud was brought spectacularly to the stage in Newcastle last year. Meanwhile Stranger Things: The First Shadow has run for two years at the Phoenix theatre in London and is likely to get a boost from the fifth season of the Netflix show.

What do the pair say to those who bemoan the dominance of plays based on such existing IP? “They’re in the service of bringing new audiences to the theatre,” says Holloway, who points out: “We’ve been lucky enough to do something original that is tied to a franchise, but it is about our fingerprint.”

Barrett says that while the Paranormal Activity banner will attract new theatregoers, Holloway has written an emotionally affecting play that “could have a different title and be on at the Royal Court instead … There are touchstones that audiences are going to know if they’re into the franchise but we’ve striven to create something with substance.”

On the play’s previous outings, both have noticed an audience new to the world of theatre. “Like people shouting at the stage, ‘Don’t go in there!’ It’s so noisy,” says Holloway. “It took a minute, but then we just started embracing it because people are coming in and they’re like … is this what theatre can be?”

Horror films and books fuelled the duo’s collaboration and burgeoning friendship. They rewatched Don’t Look Now, Jacob’s Ladder and When a Stranger Calls, turned to the stories of Arthur Machen and the novels of Joe Hill. “We love creeping dread rather than schlocky gore,” adds Barrett. “The tendrils of a film wrapping around your neck.” As such, atmosphere is critical to Paranormal Activity, which has a sound design by Gareth Fry and lighting by Anna Watson.

“The lights are as much a part of the narrative as the design, the illusion, the cast … You need an alchemy of ingredients to have the space in between,” says Barrett. “With a two-storey house you can’t watch everything simultaneously. There are corners and shadows where your imagination fills in the gaps. Anna’s lighting is amazing. You think you can just see to the back of the room but you can’t quite. As the claustrophobia builds, your imagination is starting to play tricks on you, like when you’re a kid in your bedroom.” In rehearsals, the company discussed their childhood fears and played games such as “grandmother’s footsteps”.

Holloway: “The whole thing is kind of a dare.”
Barrett: “It is! I yelped with fear and joy yesterday.”
Holloway: “Yesterday! You’ve seen it a thousand times already …”
Barrett: “It’s a visceral response. And it’s taken the journey from Leeds to here to get to that physicality.”

The Ambassadors, with its proscenium arch, is a very un-Punchdrunk setting. “It’s like an amazing holiday,” Barrett laughs. “I’m getting a taste for it!” His company, founded in 2000, built a huge fanbase by taking over often unconventional spaces for site-specific spectaculars. More recently, their shows (including the gothic Viola’s Room) have been put on at their sprawling headquarters at Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, south-east London. But years of finding the right sites for their shows have given Barrett an astute understanding of a building’s feel.

“The base job of any Punchdrunk show is to listen to the atmosphere of the space, work out where the threat is, the perceptible residue of something that’s gone before – the weight of time that can be felt keenly in a space.”

But how much do they believe in the whole supernatural shebang? “I would love to believe,” says Holloway. “And I do believe people when they believe it. But I’ve never experienced the paranormal. I’m open to it.” Barrett adds: “I profoundly don’t believe but I’m obsessed with the history of spiritualism.”

Several West End theatres are said to house ghosts, from “the Man in Grey” at Theatre Royal Drury Lane to an actor-manager at Theatre Royal Haymarket. But the Ambassadors is not famously haunted. “It will be after this show,” jokes Barrett. Holloway chuckles: “We’re working on it!”

• Paranormal Activity is at the Ambassadors theatre, London, until 28 March and on a US tour until 15 March