Horror stories are bone-chillingly big on and off Broadway this season

Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Paranormal Activity, 2:22 - A Ghost Story, and A Ghost in Your Ear all aim to give you goosebumps. Here’s how they do it.

Summary

• Cast and creative team members of the Stranger Things: The First Shadow; Paranormal Activity; A Ghost in Your Ear; and 2:22 - A Ghost Story discuss the trend of horror shows on and off Broadway and what goes into the show's most frightening moments

Be afraid, be very afraid. We're entering Halloween season, after all, and horror stories are all over New York stages. From Paranormal Activity and Stranger Things: The First Shadow on Broadway to 2:22 - A Ghost Story and A Ghost in Your Ear off Broadway, spook-tacles are having a moment to die for.

It’s not unprecedented. In the mid-20th century, theatre satisfied our cravings for creepiness with twisty, dark-toned works like Dial M for Murder, Deathtrap, Wait Until Dark, and Sleuth. And now, there’s a whole new slew of genre offerings.

“Thrillers have been missing for a while because they’re hard to do,” said Special Tony Award winner Chris Fisher, an illusion designer for Stranger Things, Paranormal Activity, and 2:22 - A Ghost Story. “From the buzz it’s getting, there’s a massive appetite for it — and a place for it on stage.”

New York Theatre Guide spoke with creators and actors about the terrifying trend and how their shows are turning theatres into haunted houses.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow: Turning Broadway Upside Down with fright

Set in 1959 in Hawkins, Indiana, decades before events in the Stranger Things Netflix series, this Tony Award-winning play dives deep into the town’s dark secrets, introduces young versions of key characters, and creates the frightful parallel world of the Upside Down.

“I love horror,” said Stranger Things: The First Shadow playwright Kate Trefry, also a writer and executive producer on the TV series. “There’s nothing more cathartic than a communal frightening experience.”

“We tried to create a story that had not just tension and dread and horror but also the feeling of a lack of safety,” she added. “In the theatre, anything can happen.”

Everything that goes down on the Marquis Theatre stage is the result of the collaborative effort of the creatives and cast. There were key moments when they realized they’d succeeded in scaring the pants off theatregoers.

Trefry and Fisher both named an unforgettable sequence realized through collaborative efforts — design, direction, acting, illusions — called “Scary Patty.” In a locker room, main character Henry Creel confronts a horrifying manifestation of his classmate Patty as a demonic monster.

The scene looks different in London, where the show premiered in 2023 and wraps on December 27. (Broadway performances run through January 3.) It was adjusted for NYC based on audience feedback. “We reimagined it,” said director Justin Martin. “And then when we brought it to New York, we finally got to realize it the way that we wanted.”

Martin acknowledged that the show spent plenty of money on its scares. “We invested in animatronics and some illusions,” he said. “But some of the simplest tricks are really effective.”

Like Henry’s unsettling, repeated nosebleeds, which come and go right under the audience’s, er, noses. “How that boy gets blood coming out of his nose every night is an amazing example of misdirection,” added Martin.

Smoke and mirrors — literal and figurative — and the art of diversion are invaluable when it comes to horror on stage. “It’s using darkness as our friend,” said Martin. “We just took that to the extreme and pushed it.”

Get Stranger Things: The First Shadow tickets now.

Paranormal Activity: Found-footage film adaptation scares the old-fashioned way

In playwright Levi Holloway’s horror adaptation of Paranormal Activity, married couple Lou (Cher Álvarez) and James (Travis A. Knight) move from Chicago to London to escape a seemingly supernatural ordeal that seems to have followed them.

Asked to describe his approach to the show at the August Wilson Theatre, director Felix Barrett (Sleep No More) summed it up in a word: “Restraint.”

That’s what drew him to the 2007 movie source in the first place. The play detours from the film's found-footage framework, but it keeps the spirit. “Unlike most modern-day horror films, which are all about schlock or gore, Paranormal Activity keeps its cards close to its chest,” he said. “It lets your imagination do the heavy lifting.”

On stage, Lou and James’s house produces unexplained knocks, blackouts, flickering lights, and more disturbances. Each member of the design team had a hand in pulling off the scary effects, which provide “nightmare fuel,” per New York Theatre Guide’s rave review.

“We use all the smoke and mirrors of theatre,” said Barrett, who admitted to using a few drops of stage blood. “There was a huge debate of whether we should. I don’t like gore at all. I prefer creeping dread. I like alluding to the horrific rather than seeing it.”

He acknowledged that Fisher’s work assumed added significance. “With shows I’ve done in the past, the illusionist comes in at the 11th hour,” said Barrett. “With Paranormal Activity, we did the opposite because the illusions are so intrinsically baked into the piece.”

Fisher, Barrett added, “does the big reveal. He does the punctuation.” The designer's flashiest exclamation point comes deep into the first act; suffice it to say that Lou appears to be in two places at once. “I’m really proud of the moment,” said Fisher, without sharing any secrets of the trade.

“The biggest hitters in terms of the illusions of Paranormal Activity are not based on technology, but just on practical effects,” he added. “The simplest trick can be the most terrifying.”

Get Paranormal Activity tickets now.

A Ghost in Your Ear: Headphone horror plays tricks on your ears

In this thriller written and directed by Jamie Armitage (Six) in collaboration with sound designers Ben and Max Ringham (A Doll’s House, Prima Facie), theatregoers wear headphones to hear each word and whisper in a whole new way.

A Ghost in Your Ear, beginning September 29 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, follows an actor (The Gilded Age's Harry Richardson) who’s recording a ghost-story audiobook. As a studio engineer (X’s Owen Campbell) guides the session, the script gets frighteningly flipped: Horrors leap off the page to haunt the studio and the headphones.

“What is so special about horror on stage is that it does what theatre is specifically brilliant at,” said Armitage. “And that is giving an audience, a congregation, the same emotional experience at the same time.”

That’s amplified by the starring role played by binaural sound technology, which creates immersive, three-dimensional spatial effects as the actor speaks into a head-shaped microphone. “We never deafen you. We never play horrible loud noises,” said Armitage. “That’s cheating.”

“But,” he added, “it is an excitingly strange experience where you’re looking at an actor who is 10 meters away from you, but he’s whispering into the microphone in a way your body tells you he’s right next to you.”

That’s bound to give you the creeps, and that’s the point. “At the top of the show, we say that if at any moment you’re too scared, you can take the headphones off and the voices will disappear.”

Armitage’s inspiration was Simon McBurney’s show The Encounter, which used 3D audio to trace a solo explorer’s Brazilian rainforest journey. “I was so astonished at the auditory tricks it was playing on my body,” said Armitage. “I remember thinking that the horror potential for this is enormous.”

Alongside the complex sound technology, visual effects and illusions manifest through sleight of hand and carefully integrated design teamwork. “We have no haze or elaborate makeup. Even the lighting is deliberately non-theatrical,” said Armitage. “I want to keep it really pure.”

For the Ringhams, A Ghost in Your Ear’s horror story presented fresh challenges. “There is something in the subtlety of sound that can create an unnerving feeling within you,” said Ben Ringham, who recalled fine-tuning the 2025 premiere production of A Ghost in Your Ear in London. “I made one small tweak to one sound [...] I turned it up just slightly more than I had the other the night before. Almost instantaneously, I saw the entire audience jump out of their seats.”

“This show never stops,” he added. “It just motors through in a really satisfying way. You can go to a lot of horror shows, but in this one you’ll literally have someone breathing on the back of your neck.”'

Get A Ghost in Your Ear tickets now.

2:22 – A Ghost Story: Waiting for a haunting to happen

Bank on things to go bump in the night in Danny Robins’s Olivier-nominated 2:22 - A Ghost Story, beginning October 20 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

In London, Jenny (Jasmine Cephas Jones) keeps hearing creepy noises through her baby monitor at 2:22 a.m. and believes their home is haunted. Her husband Sam (Finn Jones) dismisses that notion.

When Lauren (Anna Camp) and Ben (Martin Marquez) visit for a housewarming dinner, varying opinions fly about the walking dead. So, they all wait up until 2:22, and a terrifying truth emerges. A prominent digital clock advances toward the witching hour.

“We’re basically living in real time, waiting to see if this haunting is going to actually happen,” said Camp (Scream 7, Pitch Perfect), who also played Lauren in a Los Angeles run. “It really keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.”

That’s where the author wants them. “I love my horror to feel real,” said Robins, who describes his show as a “supernatural thriller.” “This couple and their friends are just like us, but their lives are transformed by a devastating moment, which begins so small and grows so big.”

The play, on a global tear since its 2021 London premiere, grew from a conversation with a friend. “She told me she’d seen a ghost, and it was the most compelling story,” said Robins. “It felt very real and shocking. In our social circle, people reacted in incredibly different ways.”

There’s the crux: Disbelief and mistrust fuel fear and anxiety, per Robins, who’s created several radio series and podcasts on the supernatural since working on this play.

A shrewd use of jump scares amps up the threats along with sound and lighting effects, from freaky screams of foxes to an odd red light framing the stage. But Robins and director Matthew Dunster heed the “Jaws law”: What remains unseen is scarier than what’s explicitly shown.

Fisher said he “looked back through Victorian magic books” to conjure effects for 2:22. There’s a doozy of an illusion, he added, “that leaves everyone going, ‘Oh my God.’”

Drawing that kind of verbal response is a good sign you’ve done your job of creating a world in which every nook, cranny, and baby monitor seems inescapably sinister. “The menace comes from the way this recognizable domestic landscape turns strange and intimidating,” Robins said. “The whole house can feel potent with dread that spreads across the night.”

Get 2:22 - A Ghost Story tickets now.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow Broadway photo credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Paranormal Activity Broadway photo credit: Matthew Murphy
A Ghost in Your Ear photo credit: Amil Dave
2:22 - A Ghost Story West End photo credit: Helen Murray