A new San Francisco play so scary that it sent some patrons running out of the auditorium has set an all-time box office record, drawing crowds of thousands at a time when the Bay Area’s theater scene has been struggling to fill seats.
After its run from Feb. 19 to March 22 — with an extension due to popular demand — “Paranormal Activity,” a standalone ghost story based on the popular found footage film franchise of the 2010s, has become the highest-grossing production in the history of the American Conservatory Theater. The new record of more than 27,000 tickets sold surges past the previous titleholder, “Hippest Trip — The Soul Train Musical,” which had its world premiere in 2023.
Directed by Felix Barrett and written by Levi Holloway, “Paranormal Activity” follows James (Travis A. Knight) and Lou (Cher Alvarez), a married couple from Chicago whose lives are turned upside down by unseen entities shortly after their move to a new apartment in London.
Notably, 80% of ticketholders for the show had never been to A.C.T. before, “reflecting the production’s remarkable ability to introduce new audiences to the theater,” a news release from the company said.
“This production has captured the imagination of Bay Area audiences,” A.C.T. artistic director Pam MacKinnon said in the release. “That ‘Paranormal Activity’ is breaking A.C.T.’s all-time box office record is exciting, but more important is the fact that this show is bringing a new wave of theatergoers through our doors.”
Watching the play myself in a sold-out crowd on its opening night, I can say the experience was electric. The story is gripping and the performances were incredible, but even more impressive were the set design and special effects. It’s one thing to be scared in a haunted house with a few friends, or while watching a horror movie in a theater populated by a few dozen people. But the visceral reaction of getting startled in an audience of over a thousand — screaming, laughing, weeping — was unlike anything I’d felt in a long time. A week later, I was back to see it again.
Word-of-mouth has largely propelled the success of the production, Chris Fisher, the Tony Award-winning illusions designer behind the show, told me last month. Much of it is centered around the sleight of hand tricks he taught the actors to pull off to bring the scares to the stage in ways I never thought possible. It premiered at the Leeds Playhouse in the United Kingdom in 2024 before playing at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, London’s West End and the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Critics have hailed it as “a triumph” and “a sharp, crowd-pleasing production.”
Theatergoers hoping for more suspense won’t have to wait long: Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” is coming to A.C.T. in September, and Peaches Christ’s long-running immersive horror experience, Terror Vault, is set to return to the Mint the same month with “SLASHED: Return to Hellville,” an ode to the slasher films of the 1980s.