Of all the movies in the horror genre these last ten or fifteen years,
nothing has changed the landscape more than the Blair Witch Project. Something
about the concept of attractive young people with cameras filming themselves as
they wander around in the woods just really caught on. I guess it’s like I said
in my “Why do modern horror movies suck?” post a few weeks ago – we’re the Do
It Yourself generation. We just love filming, documenting and recording every
aspect of our lives as if we are important. And thus, one of our newfound fears
is extremely close personal eye-level accounts of horror – we want to see up
close what’s killing us.
And though Blair Witch laid the foundations for all of that, Paranormal
Activity really took the idea to a new level and brought the fear into peoples’
own homes and everyday lives. It was also the series that showed us how cool
everything looked in that dark blue lighting. Since the DVD box proclaims it “a
scary at-home viewing experience,” who am I to contest the Confucianistic
wisdom of DVD box covers? Let’s review Paranormal Activity.
Director: Oren Peli
Starring: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat
We start right off with a guy named Micah who I think has some kind of
new sexual disorder – he loves cameras almost as much as his girlfriend.
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| "Don't worry, Camera! I was just pretending to still be in denial!" |
Seriously, this guy is obsessed with cameras. He carries it around
everywhere just to talk to her while she’s brushing her teeth or reading on the
couch. Like he couldn’t just do that without carrying the camera everywhere.
Seriously though, here’s the basic plot of this thing, if you haven’t
been living under a rock the last four years: he wants to use the camera
because his girlfriend Katie has been experiencing paranormal activity (TITLE
DROP!) since she was a little girl and hasn’t been able to stop it. She tells a
story about how when she was a little girl, she used to see a dark hooded
figure standing at the foot of her bed which wouldn’t go away. Then her house
lit on fire. Uh, I don’t think that’s a demonic spirit. I think that’s a drunk
member of the KKK who got the wrong house.
But the movie maintains that it was a demonic spirit. For some reason it’s
getting worse just as the movie is starting. Katie wants to go to an exorcist,
but because Micah saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose, he decided cameras were the
better way to go.
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| "Allow me to make sure you never have a private moment to yourself ever again..." |
The first twenty minutes or so are pretty basic set-up type stuff,
which mostly consists of Katie telling Micah to turn the camera off. Which is
one of the main things about this movie that imitators ended up copying! Isn’t
that awesome? Most of the dialogue in this is actually well done, and feels
realistic. But one of the main problems with this movie is just how many
excuses they have to make to have the camera in every scene, because, you know
– otherwise we wouldn’t have anything at all. So we get tons of scenes that
would otherwise be entirely natural and effective, broken up because the actors
have to shoehorn in a line about the camera being there – it gets kind of old
after the first three or four times.
Seriously, what guy really loves shooting home movies this much? I
mean, I get it – sometimes he’s just horsing around and experimenting with the
camera, but what about the other scenes, like the talking in the bathroom ones,
or just the random bits where she’s sitting on the couch or hanging out with
her friend? Did he need to have a camera for all of those moments?
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| "You could've just come and told us without the camera, you kn---" "SHUT UP!" |
It makes me think the film would have been generally more effective if they’d
just reigned in the camera stuff to the really effective scenes at night when
stuff really happens. It’s more original the way they did it, but there are
only so many ways to say “get that camera out of my face!”
Then we get the bedroom scenes, which are the ones the movie is often
remembered for. If you like dark blue lights and scenes of nothing going on while
the timer fast-forwards to show us that time is passing, you’ll be in heaven
with these. Look out for the special unrated version where they don’t fast
forward through these scenes. The movie is 28 hours long! You can also see
snippets of the cameraman flashing the audience if you look close at the scene
transitions. Buy it at your local Walmart today.
But then everything gets super serious the next morning when Katie
finds that – gasp! – her keys have been moved a couple inches off the counter
and wound up on the floor! The horror!
And not only that, but when they look at the tapes later, they see that
the ghost also added moving a door a few inches to its resume of blood-curdling
terror! Nooooooooo!
So yeah, this is your scares for the first act of the movie: doors
moving a few inches, and keys on the floor. Can you just feel the horror? I
guess it’s serious enough to warrant some exorcist doctor guy coming over
though. He talks about some stuff that the movie needs for the trailer: “it’s
not human,” “you can’t run from this,” etc, etc, etc…it’s all pretty bland, and
the guy is a fairly inconsequential character otherwise. I mean, do we really
need a guy sitting on the couch to tell us the thing haunting us isn’t human? Seems pretty
self-explanatory to me. What, do they think it’s Dennis the Menace? Is that
suddenly a convincing alternative?
We also get some scenes of Micah researching demons and whatnot – it’s
not too long of a scene, and I don’t mind it, but it does point out a chief
difference between this and the old movies of the 70s and 80s. It’s just too
serious and orthodox. The film takes its religious demon science as just that –
a science, and endows it all with a sort of dogmatic fervor that doesn’t really
lend itself to the kind of cool, bizarre and spontaneous feel that I liked so
much in movies like The Beyond, Suspiria or Evil Dead – those movies didn’t need to explain so much what the evil
things haunting us are.
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| Which is scarier - this, or... |
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| ...this, with just the bare minimum of explanation? |
Now, I am not trying to compare Paranormal Activity to those films as
some kind of a basis to slag on PA. They’re very different movies and they have
different ways of expressing themselves. But there’s one fundamental flaw in
the methodology of a film like this: research is not scary. It’s just not.
Having Micah flipping through a book and giving us exposition on the demons
sheds light on what should be shrouded in shadows, waiting to scare us. While I
won’t try and claim the film after this is bereft of scares, it would have been
even more chilling if the movie didn’t feel the need to explain itself and
bring in all this super-serious, dogmatic stuff. Horror is scarier when you
have no clue what it is you’re dealing with. As this is all obviously fictional
and made-up, you don’t have to really
go into detail on the science and history behind demons – sometimes it may be
beneficial, but most of the time it’s better just to go for the throat and
scare us, rather than wasting our time with exposition and explanation of what
everything is.
But I digress; you know what’s TRULY scary? A bug in the bathroom!
AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!
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| The true manifestation of evil...really.... |
Yup, another of this movie’s invaluable
contributions to the world of horror – Katie screams for Micah about a spider
in the bathroom, because you know; a girl who’s been haunted by demonic hooded
figures standing at the foot of her bed would really be afraid of fucking insects. And I also love how Micah goes
and grabs his stupid camera before going to help his screaming girlfriend –
just imagine if she’d really been in danger. He’d be a real dick in that case!
Ha ha ha! What a card.
Then we get some more scenes of sleeping with blue lights. There are
some loud noises and Micah shouts at the demon like a deprived pro wrestler
laid off for too much contact with the opponents’ genitals. Then they go back
to sleep and Katie decides it’s time to go for a little possessed walk down the
stairs!
You know, I’m having some trouble seeing into the logic of this demonic
creature stalking them. I mean, what has it really done so far? Moved some
keys, moved a door a few times, and now made a girl walk outside and sit down.
It doesn’t try to harm her, or kill her or anything – it just makes her walk
down some stairs and sit outside. Pretty weak there! I bet this demon is the
laughingstock at the annual demon convention…the Evil Dead demons and the guys
from Poltergeist laugh him out of the hall.
There’s a quite effective scene where Micah sets up some powder on the
floor to try and track the demon’s footprints. It leaves the footprints but
then leads them to the attic, where Micah finds a picture of Katie as a little
girl at her old house which burned down. This is a good, effective horror scene
because it’s so inexplicable and
chilling – why would that picture be there? It’s very nature is threatening.
For that this scene is very well done.
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| So the demon is that creepy guy from down the street who used to sit outside your house in a white van because "there was no parking by his house." |
Then we get the scene where, even though Micah promised he wouldn’t buy
a Ouija board, he does it anyway. His reasoning is that he didn’t buy it, he borrowed it! Ha ha ha! What a card, yet again. Somebody get this
guy a spot on Comedy Central. Or maybe a seat in Congress.
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| "What do you mean I'm a lying jackass?" |
So we get some pretty good scenes of them arguing and what not; the
scenes where you can see how worn out these two are, and the strain it’s
putting on their relationship, are quite effective. They try to call back that exorcist
doctor guy, who just tells them he can’t help and leaves. He never shows up
again even though he says he wants to try to help – so I guess that’s the
culmination of that subplot…that guy was a fuckin’ fraud the whole time.
Then because the movie doesn’t seem to know how to explain things aside
from turning to the Internet, we get some more backstory awkwardly shoehorned
in: apparently some girl named Diane in the 60s had the exact same thing happen
to her that Katie has now. What does this tell us? Let’s play a guessing game:
If you selected Answer C, “Nothing,” well, you win a million bucks and
the chance to keep watching the movie! (The million dollars is taken back
through taxes to pay for the movie.)
If the past few scenes have seemed entirely pointless to you, well,
let’s just cut to the chase…we then get the final scenes where they’re planning
to just leave, after everything that’s happened. Katie is despondent and weak,
and at the end she decides she doesn’t even want to leave anymore, the demon
perhaps finally having control over her mind. So they stay for one final night
until Katie gets pulled out of bed by the demon:
Then you get perhaps the greatest horror movie scream in the last
twenty years from Katie – I’m serious; it is fucking chilling how good this
scream is. It’s completely blood-curdling and insane, and most importantly: we never see anything. For once the
camera gimmick pays off, because we never see what’s happening to Katie to make
her scream like that – we just use our imagination, and that is scarier than
anything they could have put on screen. I think they should have just ended the
movie right here. Just fade out and give us the credits right now, you bastards!
Unfortunately…
Yup, we get an ending with Micah getting thrown at the camera like a
drunk game of college football and then Katie comes up and bites his neck like
a vampire who’s watched The Grudge too many times. It’s a hundred times scarier
than anything that shitty ass movie series could do, but it’s still pretty
weak. I remember seeing this ending in theaters and the whole theater burst out
laughing at this bit. I mean how lame can you get?
Fortunately for those among you who, like me, thought this ending was
horrible, we get an alternate ending. In this one, she wakes up, goes
downstairs and screams just like the theater ending. The movie unfortunately
still does not end right there. Instead, she comes back up with blood on her
and a knife in her hand, because I guess we really needed to see that or else we’d just assume Micah
used his super powers to beat the devil out of her. Really, this scene isn’t a horror
movie ending – it’s a promo for the next episode of hit internet TV sensation
Hot Girls with Knives!
Unfortunately her time in the spotlight is cut short:
So that’s Paranormal Activity. Was it good? Well…yes. Yes it was.
When this first came out, I thought this movie was a joke. I walked out
of the theater disappointed. And for a long time, while I acknowledged the
impact it had on the horror world, I just scoffed at people who said it was
really anything all that scary. But watching it again, all these years later, I
do think it’s good. It’s got some pretty silly and lame parts to it, but
overall it’s more good than bad. I see why it scares people. The idea of having
no control over your body and surrendering to this demon over such a long
period of time is pretty scary. And the movie, despite a few lame bits, has
some very good scares as well.
Maybe it’s watching this at home that did it – it really seems to work
better in that context, surprisingly enough. Very few movies do. While
Paranormal Activity has its share of limitations and flaws, it’s a well done
flick and has its merits, too. It influenced a whole new generation of
direct-to-video “found footage” films and helped to make that style more
prominent in the mainstream. With all the garbage in this subgenre right now,
it can be hard to find good shit, but I hope people keep doing it. I hope we
get some good movies out of this gimmick, because I really think the potential
is there.
Hmm, well, I’ve reviewed all the influential modern horror films I can
think of. Hostel isn’t worth my time, and I’ve done the main two. I’ll be
damned before I review any of the sequels to either this or Saw. So what’s left
for my final October review this year?
Of course! The actual most influential modern horror movie of all time!
Why didn’t I think of it before?
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