Interview: Writer Levi Holloway on What Goes Bump in the Night in Paranormal Activity

Do you consider yourself a horror writer?
I never intentionally set out to be a horror writer, and the first time I got that designation, I was surprised. I did grow up reading horror and seeing a lot of horror movies. I think I read The Stand when I was 12. I’ve always had a massive appetite for it. But I just start with something really human, and in going deeper and deeper, things get scary. I like the way the form of horror strips the characters down to their bare parts and forces them to face who they are and change. Horror is usually a visceral pursuit of honesty, which a lot of theater is, but horror is slightly more economical in that pursuit.

How did you and Felix Barrett approach the development of Paranormal Activity, particularly when it came to figuring out what you both wanted to achieve?
In the early days of development, Felix and I had a book club for two, and we started sharing literature. He has made me a lover of mid-19th-century horror short fiction by the likes of M.R. James and H.L. Mencken, and the Victorian era of the spiritualist movement. That was where our research started, and I wrote a draft based on our sort of palate. Most of my stage directions aren’t obviously achievable at first glance. One character spontaneously combusted at one point. Based on that draft, we brought in [illusion designer] Chris Fisher, and he offered some of his own mischief. So, the draft came first, and then it changed quite a bit, formed around the things Chris was looking to achieve.

How did working within the existing Paranormal Activity mythology compare with creating the world and rules of Grey House from scratch?
We didn’t have much of a mandate from the IP holders. Paranormal has a great tone and this awesome conceit that says it’s real, so we had to make sure it offered the audience something they felt like they shouldn’t be seeing. That’s how you make it unsafe: You have that voyeuristic quality, that peeking at a life through a keyhole feeling. In terms of the mythology at large, because of that long leash from the IP holders, I was left to my own devices, which was great for me.

In a horror story, you want to isolate your characters. You always ask, “Why don’t they run away?” so you have to make sure they can’t. In Grey House, I put them in a crazy blizzard in a cabin that only appears to people who need to see it. So, they can’t run. In Paranormal, they can’t run because the haunting is attached to them as people, not to the place, which was the answer to that question.

How do you approach building the jump scares and major illusions into the text?
I didn’t intentionally write jump scares. I wrote scary things, but in stage directions, it never says, “jump scare.” This show is not that different from a comedy or even a musical in terms of rhythm, so a jump scare is part of a greater rhythm. If you really break it down, a jump scare is almost a magician’s trick. Because it’s misdirection, and then it’s an event where you weren’t expecting it to take place.

Scene one is intentionally durational, and it even traffics in being a little boring on purpose. It tries to, I don’t know, relax you in a certain way, minus the alarm and a couple other things that happen. But then, by the time [the big first-act] illusion comes, we know if we have [the audience] or not. And then we all relax because it’s a very stressful illusion to watch, because there are so many things that could go wrong. And if it goes wrong, the whole show is ruined. It’s seat-dependent, too. We said our goal was always that we want one in 50 people to [be able to] see an illusion, except this one [which everyone should be able to see]. That way you get people chatting and getting a little anxious.

I almost want to go back and see it again to pay attention to the things that I missed the first time. But I also don’t want to ruin the visceral enjoyment that I had by knowing what’s coming.
These things have a shelf life. Looking to a show like Sleep No More, you have those code breakers who go in and know they’re going to follow this actor and get pulled into this room. We’re waiting for that to happen with this show, but we have some analytics, and I think 20 percent of our audience are second-timers. It’s a massive percentage of people. Which is good, because there’s a lot of signposting that goes on in the story itself. It’s nice to see people come back and be like, “Oh yeah, that was foreshadowed.” That’s satisfying to me.