Paranormal Activity is a crudely made, half-clever little frightener that has become something of a pop-culture sensation and most certainly the movie marketing story of the year. Midnight showings in US college towns and then in big cities, announced through minimal, viral publicity, have generated frenzied word of mouth and long lines at the box office.
And now, to capitalize on this success, Paramount is giving the movie, written and directed by Oren Peli on a minuscule budget of US$10,000, a full commercial release. It won’t be the same, though. At the midnight screening I attended in October, by far the most entertaining thing about the movie was the audience.
“Oh no. Oh hell no.” That was a stocky gentleman in the row behind me, whimpering as a door swung open on-screen. There was a lot of screaming later on — when, for example, the same door slammed shut — and also laughter, both anxious and mirthful. There was, above all, the sense of a communal, half-clandestine good time that is all too rare in an age of corporate entertainment. I was on the job, and also chaperoning a teenager, but I felt as if I’d snuck out of the house and broken curfew.
By any serious critical standard, Paranormal Activity is not a very good movie. It looks and sounds terrible. Its plot is thin and perforated with illogic. The acting occasionally rises to the level of adequacy. But it does have an ingenious, if not terribly original, formal conceit — that everything on-screen is real-life amateur video — that is executed with enough skill to make you jump and shriek. There is no lingering dread. You are not likely to be troubled by the significance of this ghost story or tantalized by its mysteries. It’s more like a trip to the local haunted house, where even the fake blood and the tape-loop of howling wind you have encountered 100 times before can momentarily freak you out.
The film starts abruptly and never leaves the nondescript house in San Diego where a young couple is dealing with an unusual problem. It seems that Katie (Katie Featherston) has been troubled by intimations of a supernatural presence, which her boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), has decided to capture on video. He rigs up a camera in their bedroom, which starts to pick up things that go bump in the night.
During the day, he and Katie argue about what to do, and their quarrels occasioned some interesting relationship advice from members of the audience. Half expressed the strong conviction that Micah should get as far away from that crazy shrew as possible, while the other half thought she should throw that idiot and his camera out of the house. Instead of seeing a couples therapist, they briefly consult a psychic (Mark Fredrichs), who can’t really help other than to provide the movie with a flimsy pretext for keeping poor Katie and Micah at home.
Further plot summary is beside the point. Weird stuff continues to happen, and Peli shows a measure of ingenuity in producing scares out of the simplest imaginable effects. You see no monsters, very little blood and nothing you don’t anticipate, and yet it all has some impact. A number of horror movies, from Blair Witch to Diary of the Dead to Cloverfield, have used make-believe amateur footage, but Paranormal Activity does so in a way that is rigorously sloppy, almost convincing you that this is a poor doofus’s record of his girlfriend’s harassment by a demon.
But the suspension of disbelief ultimately depends on the late-night crowd. In a sparsely attended theater, or at home on DVD, the creakiness of the film would be much more glaring, and its lack of subtext and visual polish would mute its modest, fleeting pleasures. It works best when it comes out of nowhere, because that’s, in the end, where it goes.
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