It may sound strange to say it, but the best reason to attend the new Broadway show “Paranormal Activity” is the audience. Let me explain: While this new stage iteration of the popular horror film franchise has been deftly, even ruthlessly realized by very some very savvy theater makers, its entire raison d’être is to get a large crowd to lean in, watch and listen—to attune our every sense to the finest detail and perceived movement—with the singular goal of having our pants scared off. I must report that I have never, in all my years of theatergoing, felt a live audience more abuzz with eagerness for this experience, or more satisfied in its delivery.

I felt similarly about the summer’s hit film “Obsession,” which I saw with my teen son and a raucous movie audience. I am not a horror fan, and that film would almost certainly be grim solo viewing. But in a crowd, it was a blast. In an age of streaming entertainment, there is thankfully still a wide appetite for shared moments of sensation—and it just might save theatergoing, much as it seems to be rescuing moviegoing from its doldrums.

Is mere sensation enough to sustain an evening of entertainment? It works, more or less, for the stage version of “Stranger Things,” though that production has a more spectacular, shock-and-awe approach to pleasing the crowd than the spare, suspenseful build of “Paranormal Activity.” And while the script of “Stranger Things,” true to the original Netflix property, is needlessly convoluted and a bit silly, Levi Holloway’s script for “Paranormal Activity” is a lean, workmanlike effort whose main goal is to situate us with a young, troubled couple in a two-story London house where doors swing open on their own and the power seems to be selectively on the fritz.

James (Travis A. Knight) and Lou (Cher Álvarez) are Americans who have fled across the pond in an effort to move past a stressful period in which Lou was mysteriously haunted by a past trauma. The change of venue does little to solve the couple’s problems, as things very quickly start to go bump in the night, and little is what it appears to be.

“Places aren’t haunted, people are,” goes the memorable formulation of a spiritualist podcaster, Etheline Cotgrave (Eva Kaminsky), whom we first hear remotely, but who later shows up in person to give a paranormal diagnosis of the house (dire, naturally). While Etheline’s catchy phrase helps explain the events of the story, the hauntings of “Paranormal Activity” are in fact all about the place, and the design elements here are more crucial to the show’s success than the script or the performances. Ample kudos must go to scenic and costume designer Fly Davis, lighting designer Anna Watson, sound designer Gareth Fry, projection designer Luke Halls, and, last but not least, illusions designer Chris Fisher, who devised similar feats in “Stranger Things” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”

The talents of this crack team come together especially strongly in the show’s second act, aptly set in the “dead of night,” as shadows move, flashlights falter and the couple receives visitors—to say much more would be a spoiler. It is not spoiling anything, though, to mention a curious throughline that begins with Etheline’s opening voiceover, in which she posits that to believe in the paranormal implies faith in some kind of afterlife, and that the question, “Do you believe in ghosts?” might just as well be phrased, “Do you believe in God?”

It’s a question the two leads ask each other, in various ways. James is an apparent non-believer, though he was raised Christian by an evangelical mother, Carolanne (Shannon Cochran), whom we see mostly on a video screen, nattering about prayer as the ultimate antidepressant. James is similarly skeptical about Lou’s paranormal experience, telling her, “I believe you believe it.” Later, though, chastened by the strange events in the house, James has a different answer when Lou asks him if he’s still an atheist. “What do you call someone who knows God exists but doesn’t believe in him?” he asks rhetorically. “There a word for that?”

Well, yes, James, in fact there are words for that in the Christian tradition: dystheism, dualism, gnosticism and a variety of heresies that view the creator as either less than entirely good or a force of evil. I might add here that the only scriptures invoked in “Paranormal Activity” are from the Old Testament.

But as I’ve written in America before, to the extent that I find spiritual sustenance in the theater, it doesn’t typically derive from the content of a play’s text or its theological arguments, if any, but from the very communion of theater itself. That is precisely why I found “Paranormal Activity” so thrilling and vivifying. It may be true that to scare an audience is not a lofty goal; a roller coaster ride offers similar jolts. But it is a close cousin to catharsis, the Greek concept of the vicarious emotional cleansing offered by some art.

There was even something about my shared participation in this often séance-like sensory ritual—in the feeling of fusing my attention to that of a crowd similarly avid to be engaged and surprised—that felt to me unmistakably spiritual. Walt Whitman could have been writing about the audience I was part of at “Paranormal Activity” when he wrote, in “I Sing the Body Electric,” that “to be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough.”

Rob Weinert-Kendt, an arts journalist and editor of American Theatre magazine, has written for The New York Times and Time Out New York.