Paranormal Activity

2007
Director: Oren Peli
Cast: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat

Plot: After moving into a suburban home, a couple becomes increasingly disturbed by a nightly demonic presence.

Demons Got Ya Down?
by C. True
Paranormal Activity does not disappoint in the scares department. With all the hype surrounding its release I was hoping that it wasn’t ALL just a marketing machine and I wasn’t disappointed. But it is not quite the bulldozer of fear I’d hoped for. As we follow Micah and Katie around their big huge house while some weird shit is going down it dawned on me that this movie did not quite build in the overall dread department like it easily could have. Not to draw yet another comparison to the Blair Witch Project but in that movie every scene went towards this building sensation that this was going end in a creepy bad way. When it wasn’t night time you were right there with the characters dreading the inevitable time when it would be. This really gave the scares a lot of their impact when they happened in later scenes as I found out while watching this movie. Almost all the nighttime scenes in Paranormal Activity were scary but when it was day and Katie was still kind of freaked and Micah was just curious it gave me some time to catch my breath and I was more prepared and less brow beaten when the next scare came. It’s a good scary movie but for my money there’s nothing really like that unrelenting horror movie that never lets you catch your breath. Alien and the more recently brilliant The Descent come to mind as horror movies that left me exhausted from fear in a great way. And Blair Witch Project proved it didn’t necessarily have to be continuous horrifying events, but rather the anticipation of horror and the dwindling hope of a happy ending. Katie and Micah’s situation doesn’t seem quite so desperate, and although it didn’t get to an obnoxious point, towards the end of the film it was hard not to start wondering why they seem to spend so much time at home when most people would have gotten their asses out of there weeks ago. Regardless of what any psychics advise.

The truly scary and unique element of the film is how much scarier something is when it’s viewed in this passive way. The main characters are sleeping in bed for most of the scares and as if that wasn’t creepy enough, we are all too aware that there’s no one behind that camera either. It’s a real helplessness that helped make scenes that out of context wouldn’t scare anyone into gut-twisting experiences. And there was more story development and few neat ideas that really made this more than it might initially appear to be. Finally the two actors really help make the movie work, they are suprisingly charismatic and you feel their fear even more.