A new Paranormal Activity videogame, from the creator of The Mortuary Assistant, has been announced. It should be ready in 2026.
The Paranormal Activity films have been terrorising audiences with their ambient, low-res hauntings for 17 years, and now it’s getting a videogame adaptation from designer Brian Clarke and DarkStone Digital.
Clarke previously made the 2022 horror game The Mortuary Assistant, which quickly went viral thanks to its found-footage-style scares. Interestingly, Clarke was directly inspired by Paranormal Activity when he made the game, so being commissioned to make an official adaptation brings things neatly full-circle.
“The success of the Paranormal Activity franchise epitomises the power and reach of the horror genre,” Clarke said in a statement shared with Gamespot. “If you thought The Mortuary Assistant was scary, we’re taking what we learned during the development of that title and cranking it up with a more reactive and horrifying haunting system. It’s going to be intense!”
Not that this is the first game based on the film series. In 2017, developer VRWERX released Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul, a first-person horror originally developed for VR headsets. VR has remained stubbornly niche, though, so that earlier bit of interactive terror appeared to fly a bit under the radar (you can now play The Lost Soul via keyboard and mouse, though, no headset required).
A teaser trailer accompanies the announcement, but it really doesn’t give away anything beyond what we’ve already typed. It’s included here, though, for the sake of completeness.
Writer-director Oren Peli made the original Paranormal Activity for about $15,000 in 2007, shooting the film in his own home using cheap digital cameras. The reaction was such that Paramount pumped in extra money to rework the film in post-production. The resulting film was a phenomenon, making almost $200m worldwide, and helping turn Blumhouse Productions into the force it is today.
It’s fitting, then, that a homemade horror franchise should be getting the videogame treatment from an indie developer working largely alone. Producer Jason Blum may have pronounced the movie franchise dead following the “terrible” reaction to Paranormal Activity: Next Of Kin, but perhaps its sinister spirit will live on in interactive form.
Paranormal Activity is in development for “multiple platforms” and is due for release in 2026.
