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Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli spent months preparing this static shot that composes the film's most frightening scenes.

Oct 16, 2009 By Chris Tinkham Web Exclusive

“Turn the lights on!” screamed a male moviegoer at the conclusion of a Wednesday night screening of the micro-budget fright phenomenon Paranormal Activity. The man, seated on the left side of the Cinerama Dome’s spacious interior, cursed the screen loudly for giving him such terror. On the right side of the theater, a woman complained, “That was not scary; that was the dumbest movie ever,” before expressing her preference for The Blair Witch Project, the low-budget horror blockbuster from 1999.

With so much hype now surrounding Paranormal Activity, there are bound to be viewers who leave the film unimpressed with its home-video look and moderation of action and visual effects; its best parts are like a ghostly take on Andy Warhol’s Sleep. Still, when the lights did come up, groups of friends congregated in the aisles, and the lobby was abuzz with chatter. This kind of post-screening electricity is rare for any film in its third week of release, but Paranormal Activity, shot in 2006 in seven days by writer/director Oren Peli for a reported $15,000, is not any film. Thanks to its sufficient dose of bloodless scares and a crafty marketing strategy by distributor Paramount Pictures, Paranormal Activity has reached event status just in time for Halloween.

The pretense of the film, that viewers are watching police-found video footage recorded by a young San Diego couple in 2006, is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, yet it yields some unique aesthetic characteristics. It begins peculiarly, with a brief bit of text acknowledging the San Diego Police Dept. and the couple who appears in the footage. There is no Paramount logo or any sign that this is a product of a production company or distributor, but most striking are the static bedroom shots that compose the highlights of the film.

Day trader Micah (Micah Sloat), attempting to discover the source of disturbing nighttime noises that are plaguing his live-in college student girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston), sets up a video camera and microphone in the bedroom of their suburban tract house and presses the record button each night before they go to sleep. It’s during these frequently spine-chilling time-stamped passages that Paranormal Activity most distinguishes itself from Blair Witch. In the latter film, the woodsy surroundings at times induced shivers, but our nerves mostly were rattled by screaming, running and disorienting camera movement. With Paranormal Activity, Peli works wonders with a bland upstairs bedroom and a fixed camera angle. He does cheat, however, by adding a creepy industrial drone (a technique used by David Lynch) to cue us when something frightening is about to happen.

Both handheld and static videotaped conversations between Katie and Micah constitute the footage between the late-night hauntings. Much of the time, the two are debating the effectiveness of Micah’s overnight recording strategy. Ironically, these sequences are more implausible than the paranormal activity, simply because of Micah’s relentlessness in capturing everything he and Katie say. Featherston and Sloat improvised much of their dialogue, and their exchanges are natural enough in the beginning. Featherston, who is on camera more often, is especially good early on, but the increasingly terrifying circumstances lead to the kind of increasingly unbearable squabbling that marred Blair Witch. Yet, to the credit of Peli, Featherston and Sloat, they refrain from the flurries of expletives that magnified the shortcomings of Blair Witch‘s narrative arc.

Paranormal Activity is a better-structured film; it delivers a spooky daytime scene two-thirds in and builds to a more satisfying payoff. However, it’s disheartening to learn that the ending was suggested by Steven Spielberg and is not the original. Rather than a re-shot ending, Paranormal Activity would have benefited more from the kind of mythology that was built into Blair Witch, but when a psychic consultant makes a return visit to Micah and Katie's house as all hell is breaking loose, the fun factor reaches such a high level that any nitpicking seems pointless.

www.paranormalactivity-movie.com

Author rating: 7/10