‘Paranormal Exercise’: How the film was tailored for stage at Ahmanson

How do you make stay theater really feel harmful? The leap scare is a traditional horror film trope, however can that be tailored to the stage with no fast lower or crash zoom?

Getting audiences to bolt out of their seats was the aim set by the staff behind “Paranormal Exercise,” a brand new play primarily based on the favored horror franchise of the identical identify, which opens Thursday at Middle Theatre Group’s Ahmanson Theatre.

“To create a present that includes an undercurrent of creeping dread and the shifting sands of not fairly trusting what you’re seeing actually spoke to me,” stated director Felix Barrett on a video name from London with author Levi Holloway and phantasm designer Chris Fisher, who not too long ago received a Particular Tony Award for the illusions and technical results for “Stranger Issues: The First Shadow.”

The “Paranormal Exercise” movies famously use a found-footage type to induce chills. The primary film, particularly, Barrett stated, was created “of the display for the display.” That impressed the play’s creators to “make one thing that was of the theater for the theater.” Paramount, which owns the franchise, gave them free rein with the fabric so there was no beat-by-beat reconstruction of one of many seven movies.

The unique 2007 function movie, written and directed by Oren Peli, was made for $15,000 and grossed practically $200 million worldwide. It featured a younger couple terrorized by a demon of their new residence, and was seemingly lower collectively out of footage the husband filmed on a camcorder in the home.

Seven movies later, the play was born, and the haunting continues with a brand new couple in a brand new residence. The story follows James and Lou, who’ve relocated from Chicago to London to flee metaphorical demons, solely to find that true hauntings aren’t of locations, however of individuals.

Fisher was delighted to search out that Holloway and Barrett have been open to constructing the set round his illusions. The author and director had bonded over historic literary and cinematic materials that they each discovered terrifying, and referred to as upon Fisher to convey these terrors to life.

To begin, the group workshopped a handful of illusions that Fisher constructed, which they thought-about key sequences for the unfolding motion and plot.

“We labored out a few of these massive moments — earlier than Fly [Davis] even designed the set — to know the infrastructure that will be wanted,” Fisher defined.

Fisher was then in a position to dictate essential design points to make his illusions work, corresponding to the place a sure cabinet needs to be within the kitchen, the perfect place of a settee and the framing of a window. After that, the staff started working determining what sort of home the haunted couple would stay in and what neighborhood it occupied. All these particulars figured into Holloway’s remaining script.

The ensuing set, in some ways, is the manufacturing’s pièce de résistance. It’s a two-story home with the entrance sheared off so the viewers can see all of the rooms without delay. The important thing to the creeping horror lies in what stays unseen and in what viewers suppose they could be witnessing, for instance, in a single darkened bed room upstairs whereas actors go about their enterprise within the kitchen under.

The staff gave itself a novel problem in its resolution to not summary the house, stated Holloway, whose horror-themed thriller “Gray Home,” starring Laurie Metcalf, premiered on Broadway in 2023.

“It pressured us, as story makers, to not have the ability to conceal an excessive amount of, since every thing’s in plain sight, which really lends itself to the horror,” Holloway stated. “Since you might rotate the set, you can summary it, you can journey to 1 room at a time, however right here every thing exists in actual time. We didn’t permit ourselves the house to camouflage something, and that in itself is its personal sort of immersion.”

The set was constructed round illusions created by Chris Fisher, who received a Particular Tony Award for his work on “Stranger Issues: The First Shadow.”

(Kyle Flubacker)

Barrett is aware of a factor or two about immersion. Because the founder and creative director of Punchdrunk theater firm, he directed a present loosely primarily based on “Macbeth,” referred to as “Sleep No Extra,” which invited audiences to roam via the McKittrick Lodge in New York Metropolis, experiencing the manufacturing in varied areas and rooms at their very own tempo. It performed greater than 5,000 performances throughout a 14-year run.

The director stated he and Holloway have a shared attraction to stress that builds slowly and methodically, like in a turn-of-the-century Gothic horror novella — corresponding to Arthur Machen’s “The Nice God Pan.” That sluggish burn, with its attendant low hum of worry and anxiousness, is achieved onstage largely via misdirection.

“It’s all the time about what you don’t see — the vacant, damaging house of the home,” Barrett stated. “You’re nearly tricking the viewers, the place they’re trying on the complete image, and also you’re in a position to seed issues and tease issues and make them paranoid about the place they need to be trying.”

That’s when individuals start to really feel the crackle of darkish power within the theater.

“How can we make a doorway change into probably the most threatening factor on this home?” Barrett requested.

Misdirection, Fisher provides, is the premise for magic and phantasm, and that’s the reason a lot of it’s used within the present. Controlling the viewers’s gaze is essential so you’ll be able to focus it on one factor whereas one other factor is occurring.

The creators have additionally heightened the phobia with repetition. The play initially premiered at England’s Leeds Playhouse in July 2024. Earlier this 12 months it staged its North American premiere in Chicago and it’s now touchdown on the Ahmanson whereas work is being accomplished concurrently to open it on London’s West Finish in December. The creators have been watching and tinkering. The ending is now fairly modified, with nail-biting outcomes, the staff stated.

“As time has gone on, it’s been made leaner and stronger in its kind,” stated Holloway. “There’s one thing chilling about constructing a menace within the mundane.”