Paranormal Activity

After watching Paranormal Activity (2007), you might be tempted to say that director Oren Peli had learned nothing from breakthrough found-footage film The Blair Witch Project (1999). After all, some of Blair Witch's negative aspects are carried right over into Paranormal Activity. The biggest offenders are the non-scary filler scenes. Peli takes his cue from Blair Witch directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, sprinkling these daytime scenes with banalities, cliched trivialities, and the kind of petty bickering that made Blair Witch's characters so universally hated.

Upon further review, however, it's clear that Peli has indeed learned from the mistakes of Myrick and Sanchez. Not only does Peli downplay the most criticized aspects of Blair Witch, but he accentuates the things that did work. Love it or hate it, Blair Witch was easily one of the most genuinely frightening films from a decade that is infamous for its listless and tepid horror cinema. '90s horror was clean, polished, sterile, over-processed, and just downright unentertaining garbage. Then along came a little lo-fi indie digital masterpiece that taught everyone in the industry to remember that less truly is more. Following the trail blazed by such genre classics as The Haunting (1963), The Innocents (1961), and The Changeling (1980), Myrick and Sanchez cranked up the terror with little more than insinuation and circumstantial evidence. With found-footage cinema, there's not even any help from an artfully crafted score.

In Paranormal Activity, Peli sticks to the gameplan laid out by Myrick and Sanchez. Through episodic encounters in the dead of night, the audience learns the true nature of the being that stalks the San Diego home of Micah and his girlfriend Katie. The disturbances start small. A barely-heard jangling of keys from downstairs. Nothing more. A few nights may go by with nothing of note. Then, a faintly perceptible shadow. A garbled voice captured on specialized audio equipment. But slowly, never too slowly, but never jumping the gun, the tension is escalated. The jangling keys become scrapes and bumps in the night. The faint shadow becomes too obvious to deny. Sleepwalking, unexplained breezes, demonic voices. Each night, the disturbances become more pronounced, more sinister, more threatening. And yet, we never actually see much of anything. Peli plays off of the deep-rooted fear of the unseen and the unknown. But that's just the low-hanging fruit. He also deftly manipulates our fear of intrusion. What Micah and Katie experience is not just a simple haunting. It's not even a more insidious demonic possession. Katie is cursed. And not in the epic fantasy "the curse will be lifted when the chosen one finds the amulet of power" way. Truly, deeply cursed. A curse that is random, vicious, and will never ever be lifted.

Another Blair Witch trap that Peli and Paranormal Activity manage to avoid is the marketing campaign backlash. I'll say it right now: the decision to market Blair Witch as real found footage was genius. Unfortunately, it was doomed from the beginning. Eventually, the truth would come out. The filmmakers were just hoping that it wouldn't make a difference. But the backlash was vicious, eventually making a joke out of a film that deserved much better. Peli and Paranormal's eventual distributor, Paramount, thankfully make no pretenses about this being anything other than a work of fiction (despite a guy in the theater last night loudly proclaiming to his girlfriend that the film was a true story; I can only hope he was joking).

Unlike Blair Witch's herky-jerky shaky cam free-for-all, Peli's cinematography is tightly controlled. While the tripod-mounted bedroom cam that dominates the film's screentime feels like a deliberate (and less adventurous) snub to Blair Witch, when viewed on the big screen of a theater, the shot reveals Peli's genius. The wide angle encompasses Katie and Micah's bed on the extreme right. To the shot's extreme left is the open bedroom door, revealing the relative darkness of an upstairs hallway and the main stairs descending to the first floor. These positions on a theater screen mean all but the most wall-eyed of viewers will not be able to take both halves of the picture in at once. This forces the viewer to continually scan the screen for minute movements, shadows, or subtle changes in lighting. In to this atmosphere, Peli adds extended sequences of non-action, stretching the tension so thin that the slightest perceived movement elicits excited screams from the audience. When the demonic manifestations become more pronounced, a sudden sound from downstairs is enough to send the crowd into hysterics.

As far as Micah being really annoying and basically a humongous douche, well, he kinda is. This hyperbolic characterization is deliberate. Micah is the film's foil, the obvious ritual sacrifice. We are never meant to empathize or identify with Micah. He sets up a contrast to Katie, the true main character. We have to understand why the psychic disturbances surrounding Katie have escalated, and Micah is the obvious answer. I suppose an argument can be made about creating an entire character as a stand-in for a plot device, but found-footage cinema is limited in what it can reasonably show onscreen.

In Paranormal Activity, we finally have a worthy successor to the cinematic niche that Blair Witch carved a decade ago. I would echo a sentiment already put forth by other reviewers: Paranormal's greatest achievement will be in making you rethink what happens in your house in the dark after you've gone to bed. Good luck getting back to sleep.

Storyline & plot: 7/10
Cinematography & effects: 9/10
Mood (no music): 10/10
Performances: 8/10

The Reverend says: 9/10