NEW YORK — Movie producer Jason Blum, who has revolutionized the modern horror genre, gets invited, as you might expect, to tons of plays billed as scary.
“Everyone is always saying if you could make a play and give the audience the feeling they have in a horror movie, it would be an amazing thing,” he says.
Blum, whose Blumhouse has produced everything from "Get Out" to "Five Nights at Freddy's," estimates he's gone to see 25 such plays, and 24 times "they come off goofy or you're not scared at all." That changed with his 25th — an adaptation of his "Paranormal Activity" franchise.
“I’ve never seen a play that’s made me scared ever and these guys pulled it off,” says Blum. “That they were able to make an audience feel like you felt when you watch the movie, I just couldn’t believe it.”
What's the play about?
The play, which has made its way through London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Toronto and Boston, is now on Broadway and is creeping out critics and audiences alike.
It's the story of a newly married couple who have relocated from Chicago to London and find strange things going on in their quirky new home, straining their loyalties and sanity and defying science.
The stage play — without film's benefit of cutaways, close-ups or jump scares — still makes audiences scream with quite simple effects: a TV flickering, candles getting snuffed out, shadows appearing and blankets mysteriously getting pulled.
“I think the lack of big effects actually makes it feel much more grounded and scarier and more real,” says Blum, who knows a thing or two about horror effects: He was off-camera on the floor pulling a sheet off a bed with strings during the filming of the first “Paranormal Activity” movie.
Variety said the play “delivers more thrills, chills and screams than Broadway has seen in years” and Entertainment Weekly called it “two hours and 20 minutes of hair-raising, heart-pounding, and blood-curdling horror mixed with a dash of unexpected heart and humor.”
Blum credits playwright Levi Holloway, director Felix Barrett and illusion designer Chris Fisher with bringing horror to the stage, a traditionally tricky place for it. He opened his wallet and invested.
How the team approached this stage horror
Broadway has pulled off eerie recently — Fisher delivered thrillingly with "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" and "Stranger Things: The First Shadow," while Tracy Letts' "Bug" was creepy and Stephen Karam had unsettling noises for "The Humans." But true horror, that sickening, throat-clenching dread, has largely eluded stage artists.
That's why Barrett, who created the immersive hit "Sleep No More" with his company Punchdrunk, jumped at the chance. He recalls as a fledgling director going to see London's long-running ghostly play "The Woman in Black" and feeling it was "desperately underwhelming."
“The opportunities to try and do something which really does get under the skin and really just treats it as an art form rather than something that’s comedic and full of gags was such an amazing opportunity,” he says.
Central to his team's approach was rooting the play in a truthful domestic drama. “This was only going to work if you saw a couple that you knew. You might walk past them in the street. You might even see yourself in that couple,” Barrett says.
Once that was established, the illusions and effects were baked into the set, not added afterward. Designer Fly Davis’ two-story, multiroom house is kept very dark, with some rooms empty, allowing the audience's imagination to fill in the gaps.
“You really want to almost forget it’s horror for a bit, just actually deal with the drama and then, suddenly, like the best sort of horror, the tendrils of dread come and tap you on the shoulder and, as you turn around, all hell breaks loose,” Barrett says.
‘Less is more’
Aided by lighting, sound effects and the set, Barrett manages various sleights-of-hands, like a magician making you look at one hand while their other is doing something else.
“We’ve learned that less is more,” he says. “The more you do, the less the impact because the audience becomes desensitized. So actually, in earlier drafts of the script, there were far more crazy things happening which we’ve cut.”
Humor is also important, and Holloway has seeded the play with jokes, moments of lightness between the couple and a mother-in-law from hell.
“If you get the audience to relax and start laughing, you become much more scared," says Blum. “You can’t keep an audience on the edge of their seat like this for 90 minutes. Eventually you get tired.”
Barrett says he hopes more theater-makers try horror, but find their own way. “I don’t want to say, ‘This is the right way to do it and don’t try a different way,’ because I want other amazing creators to come in and do their version.”
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