Paranormal Activity

It took some doing, some marshaling of courage, but I finally saw Paranormal Activity today. I love the idea of horror, but just because I love and respect a genre does not mean I’m not affected by that genre. I still get creeped out, and, hyperbolic reviews aside, I had heard from people I trust that this movie was genuinely terrifying. And, yea, it was.

Horror, especially film horror, is a genre that is freighted with a ton of cliche. I mostly don’t watch comtemporary horror movies because they have a tendency to fetishize and conflate sexuality and violence–the most egregious offender of this was the first Hostel movie, which I loathed unreservedly. Horror is a film genre in which we expect cheap jump scares, loads of boobs, and very little actual terror.

Paranormal Activity is a film very much in the vein of The Blair Witch Project. Simply, the film is a reconstruction of alleged tapes left behind by a San Diego couple after documenting an apparent haunting in their house. Micah, the boyfriend, is mostly behind the camera, framing the action, with his girlfriend, Katie, on screen for most of the picture Part of the reason the movie is so effective in its conveyance of a sense of terror is this immediate narrative perspective. There is no degree of disconnect from the narrative and the characters–because the movie is being filmed by one of the film’s characters, we are never taken out of the world by artful camera work or manipulative editing. Instead, we are simply there with characters as these events happen. Shots go on longer than expected (which ratchets up the tension), the action is often out of frame (included the movie’s single sex scene, which we never see, instead taking place in the lost time between cuts), and sometimes Micah actually misses things because he has to quickly grab the camera when things start to happen. It’s a very naturalistic form of storytelling, and it’s perfectly suited to the horror genre.

In much the same way as a video game conveys horror, this movie literally makes the viewer a part of the immediate action at hand. It’s fantastic.

The movie is cut into clear demarcations of day and night, the former serving as times of reprieve from the tense, silent events of the night shots. Eventually, even this certainty is violated. Despite of its naturalistic filming, the movie does follow an escalating plot arch, with simple, almost benign events occurring in the film’s first half. After that, it’s a pretty amazing example of tension-building.

After a few years of half-hearted Saw films and flat-out insulting Hostel movies, the financial and critical success of Paranormal Activity signals to me that both film intellectuals and the general movie-going public have grown tired of the gratuitious gore and context-less sex. Instead, this movie, like District 9 before it, proves that something genuinely interesting can come from a genre with a shoe-string budget and a clear creative vision, and, most importantly, that people will go see it.

Paranormal Activity did more with $11,000 than any of the Saw movies did with millions.

See it. Support good horror.