Horror has always had a useful problem in the theater: the audience can see the edges. A movie can cut away, hide information and make a dark hallway fill the whole frame. Onstage, spectators sit together in a room and know perfectly well that somebody built the wall, wired the lamp and placed the door. The Broadway version of Paranormal Activity, now playing at the August Wilson Theatre, begins with that disadvantage and turns it into the point.

The title carries the baggage of a film franchise built on surveillance footage, domestic spaces and the suspicion that the camera has noticed something before the people onscreen have. Transferring that vocabulary to a Broadway house requires more than reproducing a familiar plot. Theater cannot imitate found footage without becoming a pale copy of cinema. It can, however, exploit something film cannot: several hundred people watching the same apparently ordinary room and waiting for it to misbehave.

That shared waiting is the real machinery of stage horror. A closed door becomes interesting because it remains closed for too long. An empty patch of stage begins to feel occupied because everyone has been trained to inspect it. The audience does part of the work, manufacturing dread from absence. When an effect finally arrives, the release is communal. Laughter often follows a scare, not because the fear has failed but because a theater full of strangers has discovered that it was frightened together.

The August Wilson is a particularly curious home for the experiment. The house on West 52nd Street has lived several theatrical lives and was renamed in 2005 for one of America’s essential playwrights. In recent years it has hosted major musicals and plays. Now its proscenium contains a property associated with inexpensive digital filmmaking and suburban dread. That collision of Broadway polish and lo-fi horror is part of the attraction.

The room changes the story

The larger trend is impossible to miss. Commercial theater has become increasingly comfortable treating familiar screen worlds as raw material, but horror presents a more promising case than many movie-to-stage transfers. The genre is already theatrical. It depends on timing, misdirection, darkness, sound and the manipulation of attention. A ghost story told around a fire and a Broadway thriller are distant relatives. Both require the listener to agree, for a while, that an unseen thing might be standing just outside the light.

That agreement is harder to secure than a jump scare. The most effective horror does not simply startle; it reorganizes a space. After something impossible happens in a bedroom, the bedroom itself becomes suspect. The same transformation can happen onstage. A set that looked decorative at 8 p.m. can look dangerous twenty minutes later. Every practical lamp, staircase and doorway acquires a second job as a potential threat.

For Broadway, Paranormal Activity is also a test of audience appetite. The district has long made room for thrillers, mysteries and supernatural spectacle, but full-blooded horror remains less common than comedy, drama or musical romance. The success of an adaptation like this could encourage producers to think of fear not as a niche effect but as another reason people will leave home to sit in the dark together.

Paranormal Activity is currently playing at the August Wilson Theatre, 245 W. 52nd St. As with any effects-driven production, people who want the surprises intact should resist the increasingly difficult temptation to watch clips before going.

Sound may be the genre’s most useful theatrical weapon. A stage picture has borders, but a noise can arrive from behind the audience, above it or somewhere that cannot be located quickly. Horror filmmakers have exploited surround sound for decades; live theater adds the knowledge that the source may be physical. A creak in a Broadway house is normally nothing. Once a production teaches the audience to listen suspiciously, architecture itself joins the cast.

The domestic setting is equally important. Supernatural stories become more unsettling when the haunted place is not a gothic castle but somewhere meant to be safe. The original Paranormal Activity films understood the unease of bedrooms, kitchens and cameras left running overnight. A stage adaptation can make that familiarity almost architectural. The audience learns the dimensions of the room, then notices when those dimensions no longer seem reliable.

Broadway’s technical resources create one final risk: too much competence. Horror can die when every effect announces its budget. The genre needs texture, uncertainty and occasionally the feeling that something has gone wrong beyond the production’s control. The best stage illusion is therefore not necessarily the largest. It is the one that makes a spectator glance at a perfectly ordinary object several minutes later and wonder whether it has moved.