Director Felix Barrett on scaring audiences with 'Paranormal Activity'

Terrifying film franchise Paranormal Activity is heading to the West End. Director Felix Barrett lifts the lid on how he’s scaring audiences.

Summary

• Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett directs Paranormal Activity in the West End
• The stage show is an adaptation of the hit horror franchise
• Barrett has collaborated with writer Levi Holloway

“I've always been interested in doing the things that other people weren't doing,” says Felix Barrett. “I've always been excited about the dark. What's the space that you can't quite see? What lies in the nether?”

The visionary director, who founded innovative theatre company Punchdrunk 25 years ago and has been stretching the bounds of theatre ever since, has an impressive number of weird and wonderful titles under his belt — from the epic 12-hour livestream of The Third Day: Autumn, in which Jude Law battled the elements on Osea Island, to the global sensation Sleep No More, a wordless, film-noir-style take on Macbeth. “It’s part of our DNA trying to come up with shows that are really hard to explain,” laughs Barrett. But his next project (away from Punchdrunk) initially sounds a little more traditional.

For the first time in his career, Barrett will be working in the West End. He has collaborated with playwright Levi Holloway to create a stage adaptation of the horror film franchise Paranormal Activity, about a young couple haunted by a supernatural presence within their home. Barrett says they have just taken the “essence” of the film, relocating the action from San Diego to the family home of expats Lou and James in London. Some canonical elements have been excised, including the demon Tobi and the two sisters he torments, Katie and Kristi, to focus on the splintering marriage at the heart of this sinister story. The show also looks at what it means when a person, rather than a place, is haunted.

Barrett immediately said yes to producer Simon Friend when he first pitched the idea. The appeal was obvious for a creative always looking to work in “a space that no one’s gone to before”. Despite not having watched Paranormal Activity before the project — or even realising that it had spawned a seven-film series — Barrett remembers seeing the “bold and brazen” trailer for the first film, which just showed CCTV-style footage of audience reactions within the cinema. He thought, “How do we bring that conceptual bravado to the theatre?”

Found footage, a style popularised by films like The Blair Witch Project, is terrifying because the low-quality, grainy shots feel realistic. It is what the Paranormal Activity franchise is best known for, but it took half an hour of discussion for Barrett and the team to disregard the use of screens as an approach in the stage show. “We’ve got so much of it [video on stage] and it just felt a little bit like a gimmick,” says Barrett. He also thought it would remove some of the threat, because the show becomes too technical.

Instead, they decided to lean into another aspect of the film: restraint. “Very little happens. A lot of time is spent watching nothing happen and then the door opens. When everyone has such an attention deficit, how do you let them be patient and settle into something and then rip the rug from under their feet?,” he asks.

His answer to this is creating a false sense of security within the theatre, and it’s clearly working. The show had a run at Leeds Playhouse in 2024 and has just started a US tour, and Barrett says “people shout out at the stage in a way that I've only ever seen in the cinema.”

While Barrett isn’t a fan of contemporary, gory horror, he is drawn to things that produce adrenaline. “I like the threat of the dark,” he says, citing films such as the Donald Sutherland-led Don’t Look Now and The Shining as inspiration for Paranormal Activity on stage. Holloway, meanwhile, brought more graphic films such as Hereditary to the table so, between them, they have the horror spectrum covered.

The creeping dread bottled on stage is thanks to Barrett’s crack creative team, which includes illusions designer Chris Fisher (whose impressive credits include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, and Back to the Future The Musical), sound designer Gareth Fry, lighting designer Anna Watson, and set designer Fly Davis. The latter has created an extraordinary set: a lifelike two-storey doll’s house, which allows the audience to peer in voyeuristically. The couple can only ever be in a maximum of two of the house’s five rooms, which means there is plenty of empty space to prey on the imagination. The set also bursts out from the small stage of Barrett’s carefully selected, intimate West End venue, the Ambassadors Theatre.

“What’s interesting about the show is that it really works at scale, so you either need something epic like the Barbican or the Ambassadors, which is almost like one room. It’s like you’re in someone’s lounge. You’re so close, you're almost on the stage,” he says.

Sensory deprivation has also been a key part of creating the terror. Barrett says his work with Punchdrunk has been hugely helpful, as he has been so “sensorially aware” on those projects. In The Burnt City, The Drowned Man, and Sleep No More, audience members are stripped of their identities with Punchdrunk masks, while in Viola’s Room, everything becomes focused on light and sound, as Helena Bonham Carter narrates a fable through headphones.

“I've actually gone through the senses one by one,” says Barrett. “How do you tell Paranormal Activity with touch? How do you have the threat of touch [on stage] as a factor?” During the rehearsal process, cast members Melissa James (playing Lou) and Ronan Raftery (as James) are required to perform parts of the show in pure darkness. “They get to see the loss of control because that’s what the audience will be getting,” he says.

He also believes spontaneity is a part of the terror: “There are big chunks where I don't want to know what [the actors are] going to do that night. I'm definitely a fan of winding them up, letting them go, and seeing what happens.”

Barrett has a busy few months ahead of him. Sleep No More launched in Korea in August, and alongside opening commercial venture Paranormal Activity on both sides of the pond, he is breaking new ground with a mysterious, hybrid video game/immersive show called Lander 23 in London, as well as a musical in Shanghai based on the Netflix steampunk action-adventure series Arcane.

For a director always trying to push himself to break new ground, he says his biggest challenge on Paranormal Activity has been his own lesson in restraint. “I’ve really had to lean into what is needed for an audience when they’re watching a horror film and then apply that to the theatre,” he says. “I’m always trying to be subversive and fight against the obvious choice.”

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This article first appeared in the December 2025 issue of London Theatre Magazine.

Photo credit: Felix Barrett. (Photo by Stephen Dobbie.) Inset: production images of Paranormal Activity from Chicago; Barrett with Levi Holloway. (Photo by Kyle Flubacker)