Published: 5 July 2026 · Opens: Tuesday, 25 August 2026 · August Wilson Theatre, NYC · Sources: Playbill, Deadline, Broadway.com, BroadwayWorld, TheaterMania, New York Theatre Guide, Wikipedia

Paranormal Activity Comes to Broadway: The Complete Guide to the August Wilson Theatre’s New Horror Play

Broadway is about to get properly haunted. Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live on Broadway, the stage reinvention of the found-footage horror franchise that terrified moviegoers starting in 2007, begins previews at the August Wilson Theatre on 14 August 2026, with an official opening night now set for Tuesday, 25 August 2026. It arrives on the Main Stem after a remarkable run of sold-out engagements across Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Toronto, and an Olivier Award-nominated stint in London’s West End — making this one of the most thoroughly road-tested new plays to reach Broadway in years.

Unlike a direct film adaptation, this is an entirely original story merely inspired by the world of the Paranormal Activity movies, written specifically for the stage by playwright Levi Holloway and directed by Felix Barrett — the visionary behind Punchdrunk and one of the creative minds who built Sleep No More into New York’s longest-running immersive theatre phenomenon. That pedigree alone has made this one of the most anticipated new plays of the Broadway season.

What Is Paranormal Activity on Broadway About?

The official synopsis reads: “James and Lou move from Chicago to London to escape their past, but they soon discover that places aren’t haunted, people are.” The young American couple relocate across the Atlantic hoping for a fresh start, only for Lou to become convinced that something in their new home is deeply wrong. As the story unfolds, both are forced to confront a truth that has followed them rather than one confined to a single haunted house.

Playwright Levi Holloway has been explicit that this is not a stage version of any single film in the franchise, but rather a new story built from the same psychological DNA — the dread of the domestic, the terror of what might be sharing your home while you sleep, and the idea that the past cannot simply be outrun by changing your address. In a statement, Holloway called the production “a work of horror, heart and absolute mischief,” adding that he considers it unlike anything else currently on the American stage.

“That Paranormal Activity has earned the chance to trouble the sleep of Broadway audiences, that they’ll be immersed in the waking nightmare we’ve had the privilege to make, is the stuff of dreams. I offer it’s unlike anything else on the American stage right now.” — Levi Holloway, Playwright

The Complete Broadway Cast List

Full casting was confirmed in early June 2026, with nearly the entire company reprising roles they originated across the play’s earlier North American engagements. The complete Broadway company:

Notably, three of the four leads — Álvarez, Knight, and Cochran — are making their Broadway debuts with this production, despite having already built the roles from the ground up during the play’s extensive pre-Broadway life. Andrea Syglowski, who plays the enigmatic Etheline Cotgrave, joins as the one new addition to the principal cast for the Broadway mounting.

Meet the Leads

Cher Álvarez plays Lou, the young woman at the center of the story’s mounting dread. Álvarez’s television credits include Sugar, Matlock, Criminal Minds, and Grey’s Anatomy, with stage work at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Drury Lane, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Travis A. Knight plays James, Lou’s partner navigating the couple’s new life abroad. An ensemble member at Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theatre, Knight is known to television audiences from Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med, and Mind Games.

Shannon Cochran takes on the role of Carolanne. Cochran brings an extensive Chicago theatre pedigree, including credits at Writers Theatre, TimeLine Theatre, Steppenwolf, and Steep Theatre, alongside film and television work spanning several decades.

Andrea Syglowski plays Etheline Cotgrave. Her stage résumé includes the U.S. premiere of Bug at the Barrow Street Theatre (for which she earned an Obie Award), national tours of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Cabaret, and August: Osage County, plus film and television credits including The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Ring, and Star Trek: Nemesis.

The Creative Team Behind the Scares

Part of what has generated so much buzz around this production is the sheer pedigree of the design team assembled to engineer its scares. This is horror theatre built by specialists in exactly that craft:

The production is a Melting Pot production in association with Paramount Pictures. Crucially, Jason Blum, founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions — the studio that originally produced the Paranormal Activity film franchise — has joined the Broadway producing team, alongside Simon Friend, Hanna Osmolska, Ken Davenport, Gavin Kalin Productions, Seaview, Crooked Letter, the John Gore Organization, and several other producing partners. The show is also produced in association with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Center Theatre Group, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and American Conservatory Theater — the four regional houses that helped develop the piece before it reached New York.

The Road to Broadway: A Global Tour of Terror

Few new plays arrive on Broadway with as extensive a pre-Broadway résumé as this one. The production originated at the Leeds Playhouse in the UK before transferring to the Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End, where it earned a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play. From there, it toured extensively:

A UK and Ireland tour and a simultaneous return West End engagement have run alongside the North American rollout, meaning multiple productions of the play have effectively been operating on different continents at the same time — an unusually ambitious scale for a piece that started life as a regional theatre premiere in Leeds.

Ticket Information and What to Expect

Paranormal Activity is playing a strictly limited 20-week engagement at the August Wilson Theatre, located at 245 West 52nd Street. Previews begin Friday, 14 August 2026, with opening night now set for Tuesday, 25 August — moved up several weeks from its originally announced date. Ticket prices for early preview performances have started as low as $60–$82 depending on the night, though prices are expected to shift with demand as opening night approaches.

The recommended age for the production is 15 and up, with the show’s own content advisory warning of intense scares, loud noises, and strong language. Given director Felix Barrett’s background in immersive, sensory-driven theatre, audiences should expect a production that leans heavily on atmosphere, sound design, and stagecraft illusion rather than dialogue-driven exposition — more experiential haunted house than conventional drama. One reviewer of an earlier engagement noted that the production’s “eerie ghost tale relies on special effects and mood to make audience members scream, faint, and jump into their partner’s lap.”

The August Wilson Theatre itself has some accessibility notes worth knowing before you book: a stair lift provides wheelchair access to the Orchestra level from 52nd Street, but the theatre does not have elevators or escalators, and the water fountain is located one flight down from the Orchestra in the lower lobby. Assisted listening devices are available on request.

Where It All Began: The Original Paranormal Activity Film

To understand why this stage production carries so much cultural weight, it helps to revisit where the Paranormal Activity name came from in the first place. The original 2007 film was written, directed, shot, and edited entirely by one person: Oren Peli, an Israeli-born video game designer living in San Diego with no previous filmmaking experience. Peli, who had been afraid of ghosts his entire life, decided to channel that fear into a project rather than avoid it — spending nearly a year preparing his own house for filming, repainting walls, adding furniture, and researching demonology to make the film’s mythology feel authentic.

The film starred two then-unknown actors, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, playing a couple who set up a stationary camera in their bedroom to document a mysterious presence haunting their home at night. It was shot in just seven days on a self-imposed schedule, using a single home-video camera, with dialogue largely improvised from loose scene outlines rather than a full script — Featherston has recalled that her entire audition consisted of Peli asking, “Why do you think your house is haunted?”

The finished film cost approximately $15,000 to make. After a string of festival rejections, it screened at Screamfest Horror Film Festival in 2007, where a CAA mailroom employee spotted it and brought it to his agency’s attention. DreamWorks (then a Paramount subsidiary) eventually acquired the film, with Steven Spielberg reportedly among the executives impressed enough to request a new ending, which was shot for an additional $50,000. Paramount then launched an unconventional grassroots marketing campaign, inviting audiences to “demand” screenings in their own cities through the website Eventful — the first time a major studio had used the platform this way. The gambit worked spectacularly: eleven of twelve initial college-town screenings sold out, followed by expansion to 20 more markets, all of which also sold out.

A Franchise Is Born

The original film ultimately grossed roughly $194 million worldwide against its microscopic production budget, a return on investment so extraordinary that it’s still cited today as one of the most profitable films ever made, rivaling even The Blair Witch Project. That single sleeper hit didn’t just make a star out of Peli — it also cemented the fortunes of producer Jason Blum, whose newly formed Blumhouse Productions used the film’s low-budget, high-concept model as the template for an entire studio strategy that would later produce Get Out, The Purge, Insidious, and dozens of other genre hits.

The success spawned a franchise that eventually spanned seven films in total, released between 2007 and 2021: Paranormal Activity (2007/2009), Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), Paranormal Activity 4 (2012), Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014), Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015), and Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021). Across the franchise, the films collectively grossed close to $900 million worldwide — an almost unfathomable return relative to the original film’s $15,000 shoot. The series centers on a malevolent entity known as “Tobi” that stalks a network of interconnected families across the films, using the same found-footage aesthetic of security cameras and handheld devices that made the original so unsettling.

Why a Stage Version, and Why Now?

On paper, adapting a found-footage horror franchise for the stage sounds like a contradiction — the entire appeal of the original films rested on static cameras capturing things just outside the frame, a visual trick that doesn’t obviously translate to a live theatrical space. But that’s precisely why pairing the material with Felix Barrett makes sense: Barrett’s entire career has been built around manufacturing the sensation of being watched, of not knowing what’s real, and of dread accumulating in negative space — the same psychological toolkit the films relied on, just built from architecture, lighting, and sound rather than a security camera.

The timing also reflects a broader trend of Broadway leaning into IP-driven horror and genre entertainment as a way of reaching audiences beyond the traditional theatre crowd — a strategy that has already paid off elsewhere on Broadway with Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which shares several of this production’s key collaborators, including illusion designer Chris Fisher. With Blumhouse’s Jason Blum directly involved as a producer, the production carries both genuine horror-industry credibility and access to the built-in fan base of one of the most successful horror franchises in film history.

Places aren’t haunted — people are. And this August, Broadway is about to find out exactly what that means.

Frequently Asked Questions

From a $15,000 home movie shot by a first-time filmmaker in his own house, to a seven-film, $900-million franchise, to a fully immersive Broadway production directed by one of the architects of modern immersive theatre — Paranormal Activity’s journey to the August Wilson Theatre is a genuinely unlikely one. Whether it’s the found-footage dread of the original film or the live, in-the-room terror Felix Barrett is promising this August, the underlying idea has never changed: the scariest thing isn’t the house. It’s what you brought into it.

Sources: Playbill, Deadline, Broadway.com, BroadwayWorld, TheaterMania, New York Theatre Guide, Wikipedia, Screen Rant, Wrapbook, SlashFilm, and The Hollywood Reporter. This article was compiled from publicly available reporting current as of 5 July 2026; casting, dates, and ticket prices are subject to change — always confirm with the official August Wilson Theatre box office before booking.