Show based on huge Hollywood film is scarier than any horror movie I’ve ever seen | Celebrity News | Showbiz & TV

Complete darkness. No sound yet but the sound of tense breathing from the people sitting around me. And then a sound rising through speakers, growing loud enough to shake our seats, a growing sense of unease that grows and grows until an explosion of lights hit the stage and, suddenly, a house.

A simple, two-storey house belonging to a husband and wife. A living room, a bedroom, a bathroom. Off-stage, a nursery we know has never been completed. It’s the perfect setting for a horror film, complete with a shower curtain drawn across a claw-footed bathtub, perfect for a terrifying figure to lurk behind.

Only this isn’t a horror film. I’m sitting in London’s West End, at the Ambassadors Theatre, to see the on-stage adaptation of the iconic Hollywood film franchise Paranormal Activity.

After seven movie releases, and an eighth already confirmed for release in 2027, it’s hardly surprising the franchise has grown large enough to attract a full house of theatregoers each night. The small venue, tucked just off Leicester Square, is the perfect size to ratchet up the tension a little more – with an intimate audience, you never feel quite safe.

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Put simply, the play follows American ex-pats Lou and Jimmy, who move from Chicago to London – complete with obligatory Brexit jokes – to start a new life. Soon, however, it becomes clear that a malevolent presence is haunting not their home, but the characters themselves. As the play reminds us, places aren’t haunted – people are.

During the entirety of the show, my eyes can’t help but dart about to separate areas of the house, worried I’ll miss something spooky happening just out of the corner of my eye. In a nod to the found footage movies, two screens are set up at the sides of the stalls, showing grainy CCTV night-vision footage of the unoccupied rooms as the actors move around on stage.

The cast are – and this is an understatement – phenomenal. Juilliard graduate and Gossip Girl star Patrick Heusinger stars as Jimmy, the all-American mummy’s boy, while Coronation Street’s Melissa James falls seamlessly into the role of paranoid wife Lou.

Having such a small, tight cast, with only four characters – Pippa Winslow plays Jimmy’s mother Carolanne, while Jackie Morrison appears as paranormal expert Etheline Cotgrave – really pays off here.

There are some effects throughout the play that I still, in the stark light of day, can’t figure out the technique behind. One in particular, which I won’t spoil, had me wanting to sleep with the lights on after I got home from the theatre. The whole show is a perfect blend of the high-tech surveillance aesthetic the films got so spot on, and the immediacy of being so close to living, breathing actors who embody their parts so well.

I strongly encourage anyone who’s able to go and see the play before it leaves the Ambassadors Theatre before it leaves the venue for a brief hiatus on April 25th. Don’t worry if you miss it, though – it returns from 8th August until 3rd October, and is heading on a UK tour from September 2026 until May 2027.

Tickets are available to purchase here.