Young San Diego couple Micah and Katie are experiencing strange
phenomena in their upscale house--stuff that’s so strange that Micah, a day
trader, has bought a high-end video camera and audio recording equipment in the
hopes of capturing the weirdness for prosperity. Most of the odd occurrences
appear to be taking place at night when they are both asleep. Micah doesn’t
really take any of this spooky stuff seriously--unlike Katie, who’s already had
many scary experiences with the supernatural. Starting when she was a little girl,
Katie would see a dark shape that hovered over her bed at night. Her childhood
home later burned to the ground--with no injuries to Katie and her family--and
yet even after this, Katie has never felt truly safe.
When they call in a professional psychic, he tells the couple that he can not help them, because he deals with
ghosts--spirits of the dead. Their home is still relatively new, which nixes the
theory of a haunting from a previous resident. What’s actually haunting Micah
and Katie is a demon, and it appears to have a special interest in Katie. The
psychic tells them that the demon has apparently followed Katie from house to
house since she was a little girl. The psychic suggests that they call in a
demonologist. Yet Micah still openly mocks their late night
visitor, even after it starts showing undeniable--and frightening--signs of its
presence. Things get so bad that even Micah is forced to face the fact that this
is no laughing matter. Who ya gonna call?
Ten years after The Blair Witch Project scared the
living daylights out of movie goers, Paranormal Activity exploded onto the scene
to frighten the sheets out of a new generation. Using the same storytelling
technique as TBWP, where the entire tale is told through the POV of a character
who’s holding a single camera, PA is actually more scarier than Blair Witch. Because
while Blair Witch basically scared everybody out of the woods during the summer
of 1999, the unnerving events chronicled in Paranormal Activity take place in
the one area that’s supposed to be our safe sanctuary: the home. Director Oren Peli
makes great use of the enclosed space, as well as the single camera technique,
to create a genuinely scary story that sets the viewer further on edge the closer
it gets to its gripping ending.
I know there are some of you who probably hate the whole jittery camera movie
genre that’s been created by Blair Witch and lives on through such films as
Cloverfield and [rec]--along with its American
remake Quarantine (as well as
countless episodes of various TV shows), and that‘s understandable. But with the
camera mostly mounted on a tripod throughout the film, the camerawork in PA isn’t
as jittery as in previous films. Plus, fans of shows like Ghost Hunters, as well
as fans of supernatural horror films in general, should get a kick out of this.
Some of the unnatural events caught on camera here is the sort of spooky stuff
most ghost hunters can only dream of getting. Paranormal Activity is good, scary
fun. Try not to watch it just before you go to bed.
--SF
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