I feel it. I feel it breathing on me. - Katie in Paranormal Activity
It took a decade for a movie to match what The Blair Witch Project did back in 1999. But Paranormal Activity did the trick - at least, for me. I’ve talked to some who weren’t scared in the slightest. Open Water tried to do it, as did Cloverfield and Quarantine. But the shaky camera, discovered footage genre was I think done the best in Paranormal Activity. It is an acquired taste.
This is a movie that uses an atmosphere of dread and spookiness instead of CGI or buckets of blood. It’ll scare a certain type of personality. I don’t see the skeptics of a spiritual world too susceptible to this type of movie. I think they may need to be jarred by the buckets or the all-out monsters. We need to keep that in mind though if we’re going to properly critique this. It’s in the shaky camera genre and it’s a movie about atmosphere and the ‘less is more’ angle. It builds tension very cleverly; and when the tension pops, it’s quite eerie.
After I saw this, those bumps in the night got pretty loud in my own house. I’m talking every little tick and plumbing noise. You want to turn your head around just to make sure.
The plot is simple. Katie and Micah are a normal couple living in a 2-floor apartment. She has been spooked out lately because she thinks some entity is haunting her. It’s been happening in the bedroom. So, they buy a camera to film the goings-on in the bedroom while they sleep. Micah mostly does this to prove nothing is going on. He is the naive skeptic, probably how 99% of us would act in situations like this - up to a certain extent. He is more interested in the footage than Katie. I won’t spoil the footage in the later parts of the movie. But I’ll just say that they are very spooky.
Katie is entirely believable. She seems like your normal college student. Micah acts just like your normal, macho guy.
They go to bed where the timer is in the bottom right part of the screen. The time speeds up to actual paranormal events, which get creepier and more aggressive as the movie progresses. The bedroom door creaks a couple of inches. Thumps are heard downstairs. Lights turn on and off. A sheet ripples and winds up the bed.
They consult an expert, but when he comes in the room he is immediately unsettled. He senses a heavy demonic presence and even as I type that I’m getting goosebumps.
We are trapped wherever Micah moves the camera. It never leaves the house. It has a tight, claustrophobic feel to it. It plays on our fear of the dark, how it symbolizes the unknown. There is a macabre feeling to the idea that the house is your normal suburban home that any of your friends would be living in. When nothing is happening, I wasn’t bored. It’s what is not happening that is the most interesting. Your imagination fills in the blanks.
