The Best Scary Broadway and Off-Broadway Shows to See for Halloween 2026

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The New York theatre scene is offering up a large amount of Halloween season programming this year—from new productions on and off-Broadway to long runners to entries in the concert and cabaret worlds. If you’re looking to get spooked in person this autumn, there are plenty of live performance options to choose from, including some very effective scares that have just started performances. 

At the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway, Paranormal Activity has been frightening audiences since late summer—but there’s no better time to see this chilling new play than around Halloween. Genuine fear pervaded the atmosphere at the house on 52nd Street throughout the performance I saw of Levi Holloway’s new play based on the popular horror film franchise created by Oren Peli. 

The Wilson proved a perfect home for the piece since the theater, originally owned by the serious-minded Theatre Guild, is more austere and less embellished than some of our other Broadway houses. The dark interior walls added helpfully to the dark expression of the show, assisting the design elements in pulling off the production’s special effects. While the August Wilson is not one of Broadway’s theaters most associated with ghost stories, it was once host to the legendary horror musical Carrie in 1988. Paranormal Activity now joins that horror genre legacy.

Prior to the start of the performance, audience members tittered in their seats about whether or not they thought they’d be scared by the show. The guttural screams and shrieks as the night went on answered that question. Holloway was previously represented on Broadway by the play Grey House in 2023, another horror venture. Successfully terrifying your audience is accompanied with a unique set of challenges when it comes to live theatre. Directed by Felix Barrett, Paranormal Activity hits the mark, with Fly Davis (scenic and costume), Anna Watson (lighting), Gareth Fry (sound), Luke Halls (video and projections), and Chris Fisher (illusions) deserving massive credit for their design work in telling the story of a seemingly ordinary couple who are haunted by the unknown in their new house in London.

The show, which presents a new story within the Paranormal Activity franchise, premiered regionally in England before moving to a successful run on the West End. It simultaneously bowed in America in Chicago before a tour to several major cities, all prior to its Broadway run. Four of the five cast members in Paranormal Activity are making their Broadway debuts, including the actors exceptionally playing the couple at the story’s center, Cher Álvarez and Travis A. Knight. If you want to be amazed by how terrifying live theatre can be, definitely schedule a visit to Paranormal Activity. 

Three other new theatrical entries all provide spooks in their own ways off-Broadway this fall. Audible’s latest venture at their Minetta Lane home is A Ghost in Your Ear, a unique piece that asks its audience to wear headphones throughout the performance. The headphones are an integral part of the storytelling of this tale revolving around a recording session—apt subject matter for Audible, who release their live off-Broadway performances as audio recordings. The two hander shows us an ordinary studio recording session for an audio book, with an actor and engineer working at their normal jobs. Lucas Iverson portrays the actor and Owen Campbell the engineer. The story that the actor records is of the gothic horror genre and soon the lines blur between the session and the story itself. 

A Ghost In Your Ear uses audio in several innovative ways to bring the audience along on the ride. The sound design precisely captures the work that Iverson does on stage, utilizing a dummy head, to craft a binaural experience and bring it directly to the viewer’s ears. The intimacy of the voice in one’s ear adds exponentially to the scare elements. Just as in Paranormal Activity, the world of the show must feel all-encompassing in order to capture the imagination of the theatergoer who otherwise is sitting in a large space with hundreds of strangers. This might inherently hurt the ability of any live performance to scare its audience, but in both of these cases, design elements combine with creative choices to focus the viewer and effectively thrill them. 

Prior to the start of the performance, a voice in the headphones reminds patrons that at any time during the show, they can simply remove their headphones if they are becoming too afraid. It also notes that those who leave will not be allowed back in—so removal of the device is probably the way to go if a scaredy cat needs a break. Taking an audio break during the show was almost spooky in its own way; nothing at all can be heard in the theater itself. Again the skilled design team under the direction of Jamie Armitage, who also penned the play, puts in key work to accomplish the show’s desired thrills. Anisha Fields (set and costume), Ben Jacobs (lighting), and Ben and Max Ringham (sound).

Uptown at MCC Theater on West 52nd Street, Anon is scaring its audience in a completely different way. The world premiere of a new play by Anne Washburn (Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play) directed by Anne Kauffman (Marjorie Prime, Mary Jane) is automatically cause to rejoice. The two tackling our current political landscape—specifically the far-right QAnon movement—is powerful and engaging. 

While not spooky in the traditional Halloween sense, the play subtitled “a tempest at our kitchen table” does make its audience jump. The truly frightening split in American politics and how platforms like TikTok have shaped the dispersal of conspiracy theories is at the center of Anon. The dramatization of a story about neighbors just like yours and mine isn’t necessarily meant for spooky season, but it spooks in a substantial way all the same. 

The cast of six includes Jeff Biehl, Crystal Finn, Andrew Garman, Izabel Mar, Jeremy Shamos, and Joel Van Liew, with Finn giving a particularly startling performance as a Texan woman who hopes to change the world via social platform with her misguided beliefs, spiraling into real-life events. The idea of who has access to our home—a horror trope—is deliberately played with by the production concept, which adds a chilling component. Anon is all the more chilling for its realism. 

Coming in deliberately on time for Halloween season is another off-Broadway entry: 2:22 A Ghost Story. The play by Danny Robins has several elements in common with Paranormal Activity: it has previously been a hit in London, its story follows average folks whose home may be haunted, and numbers and questions of the afterlife come into play. 2:22 A Ghost Story hits the Lucille Lortel for a spooky 13 weeks and stars Anna Camp, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Finn Jones, and Martin Marquez. 

Meanwhile, multiple long-running and ongoing shows on and off-Broadway fit the bill for a spooky night out this October or November. Wicked, which opened the day before Halloween in 2003, celebrates its 23rd anniversary with an event on Halloween itself. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which opened in 2018, continues its run as Broadway’s current longest running straight play. Also based on a franchise, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which opened in 2025, will conclude its Broadway run in the first week of 2027. This spooky season is one of your last chances to catch the special effects-filled play on Broadway. And two Halloween-friendly entries from last Broadway season are still going strong: The Rocky Horror Show and The Lost Boys. Both find audience members attending dressed in costume as they celebrate the subversive and eerie stories on stage, from queer aliens to vampires. The off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors has been running since 2019, with a revolving door of Seymours and Audreys; it remains one of the best horror works in the theatre canon. And finally, the immersive take on The Phantom of the Opera, Masquerade, is giving its audience up-close-and-personal chills and thrills as they explore the Phantom’s lair and become a part of the spooky story. 

 

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