Paranormal Activity, one of the most recognizable franchises in modern horror, is about to do something none of the others have ever done. It’s coming off the screen and into your reality as part of a brand new stage show.

The show is called, simply enough, Paranormal Activity, and after a debut in Chicago earlier this fall, it’s opening at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles this week and running through December 7. From there, it’ll be at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, from January 28 through February 7, followed by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco from February 19 through March 15. It’ll also be in the West End in London from December 5 through March 28.

But what exactly is this show? How is the unmistakable found footage genre going to make the leap from screen to stage? Well, io9 sat down with the show’s writer, Levi Holloway, to find out.

Holloway, best known for the Broadway plays Grey House and Turret, starring Michael Shannon, came on board the project in 2023. Felix Barrett (who directed the popular immersive show Sleep No More) was already attached as director, and very quickly the pair got on the same page about what it meant to bring Paranormal Activity to the stage. “Felix and I had the same memory,” Holloway said about the original film. “It was less about the film itself and more about the marketing surrounding it. It was all the night vision and the audience kind of freaking out, and that seemed really exciting. It seemed like, ‘Well, that’s just an audience. We could do that to an audience.’ Not sure how, but we could do that.”

Before they solved that problem, though, Holloway needed a story. And, thankfully, the franchise’s rights holder, Paramount, didn’t really interfere with that. “Paramount gave us a very loose mandate,” Holloway said. “The mandate, if anything, was tonal, and it seemed to be more about, like, ‘Okay, well, is it about a couple who are beset by something?’ ‘Yeah.’ And that was sort of it. They were pretty hands-off. There’s a huge leap of faith on their part, which we’re so grateful for.”

The story that he and Barrett began working on is inspired by, but not narratively linked to, the movies in any way. Instead, it sort of mirrors their journey as creatives. Paranormal Activity is about a couple from Chicago who move to London and realize that places aren’t the only thing that can be haunted. People can be haunted, too. At the time, Holloway was newly married and living in Chicago, and he traveled to London to meet with Barrett to discuss the project.

“I spent about a year over in London, doing R&D over there, and really started looking at their relationship with ghosts and stuff like that,” he said. “I wasn’t really interested in the demon angle that the movies take. I’m not knocking it. It’s just that in this sort of Christian structuring of that and the sort of good versus evil, God versus the devil stuff, wasn’t really a story that I felt like I had a lot to add to. But I do have a lot to say about ghosts.”

Specifically, Holloway found inspiration in the Victorian spiritualist movement, which he felt “really glommed on to this idea of the afterlife and ghosts and mediums and paranormal as a way of processing grief from this massive loss in World War I.”

“So that was pretty fertile ground,” he said. “And that was a huge kickoff point for me in terms of storytelling. So you’ll see some of those bones very lightly buried throughout the script.”

Holloway also found that, in addition to those historical inspirations, simply the idea of this couple moving to a new country helped give the show important staples of the horror genre. “With every good horror story, you try to figure out a way to isolate your characters because the big question is always like, ‘Why don’t they run?'” Holloway said. “So you have to honor that question. And for me, the way to do that was, number one, what if places aren’t haunted? What if people are haunted? You can’t run from something that’s in you or that is attached to you. And then the other way to isolate them is to make them strangers in a strange land, thousands of miles from everything they know.”