Demons gone wild!
Paranormal Activity, the low-budget haunted house movie now spooking audiences around the world, has to be the first horror flick to address the sub-prime housing collapse in the US, albeit indirectly. I mean, how could anyone be expected to stick around and make mortgage payments on a place haunted by demons? Especially the kind that like to pay regular visits to your bedroom around 3 a.m. (the internationally recognized “witching hour”)? No wonder so many housing loans went bust-o back in 2007.
As the film opens, Katie and Micah (conveniently having the same first names as the unknown actors who play them, à la Blair Witch Project) are a middle-class couple living in a suburban tract house in California. The boyfriend, Micah, has a new toy: a video camera that will be used to document the events to follow. He didn’t buy it to shoot amateur porn in the bedroom, as one might expect, but to capture digital evidence of paranormal activity in his new home. That’s because Katie, we learn, has been the victim of a demon “stalker” ever since she was a child (a little factoid she failed to share with Micah before they moved in together).
Now something’s going thumpa-thumpa in the middle of the night again, and they’re both getting creeped out. The demon — whatever it is — won’t leave them alone, as Katie explains to a Yellow Pages psychic who visits the couple one night. The psychic is one of those guys in horror movies whose function, as an “authority,” is to lay down the parameters and “rules” by which the movie will operate. One of them is, there’s no point in her going to a hotel or a friend’s house to stay; demons aren’t like ghosts, they’ll just follow the person wherever they go. Kind of like IRS agents.
A note on their house: it’s one of those bare-walled new ticky-tacky places with generic furniture and not a lot of lived-in charm. There’s an upstairs with two or three bedrooms, an attic, a swimming pool out back. We wonder how they can afford all this (Katie’s a student; Micah’s supposed to be a “data analyst” and investor, so he looks at computer screens a lot, plus he has lots of other gadgets, like an unplugged electric guitar and a laptop attached to the video cam at the foot of their bed to capture live-streaming digital video).
After an incredibly dull 30-minute story setup — documenting the unhappy couple as they brush their teeth, read, diddle with computers, strum unplugged guitars and engage in all manner of mundane activities before preparing for beddy-bye — we start witnessing an escalation of 3 a.m. activities: bedroom doors mysteriously opening and closing, bedsheets rippling on their own, evil thumps and other noises besetting the hapless duo while they try to get some shut-eye.
Like Cloverfield, District 9 and Blair Witch before it, Paranormal Activity requires that the video cam be running constantly to ensure documentary-style “found footage.” This is a surprisingly effective technique for horror films, yet it has its limitations: whenever something truly scary happens, the gimmick requires that at least one character has the presence of mind to unplug the camera, flip the battery pack on and charge out of the room, video a-rolling. This wouldn’t happen in real life, because people would be too busy crapping in their pants to fiddle around with gadgets. But not much in Paranormal Activity stands up to rational analysis.
No, like Blair Witch Project, this is an “event” movie, one meant to be shared in a darkened theater with other people, fully prepared to be scared witless. (In fact, part of the marketing for Paranormal Activity, as with Blair Witch, is to show movie trailers of audiences screaming during screenings.) Watching it with your loved one on a home TV screen, even with a bowl of popcorn and all the lights out (as we did, silly us) will probably diminish the communal shock value. Possibly because you’re too busy laughing at the characters’ inane behavior to suspend your disbelief.
As with most “home invasion” movies — whether it’s The Exorcist, Pacific Heights, Panic Room, Forced Entry or a dozen or so others — there comes a point in the story where you find yourself questioning the characters onscreen. Specifically: “Why are you still there, moron? You’ve got demons! What’s wrong with staying at a Holiday Inn?” Or: “Do you really want to bunk down in that haunted bedroom for another night?” Or: “Um, shouldn’t you be taking her to a hospital about now, meathead?” And so on.
This is a dilemma that Blair Witch successfully avoided because its characters were literally trapped, with no access to the outside world: they were lost in the woods, where any normal sense of direction was useless. The plot was then allowed to move along to its creepily logical denouement.
Not so with Paranormal Activity. Nothing — not burning Ouija boards, loud crashing noises in the attic, nor footprints left in the talcum powder Micah sprinkles at the threshold of the bedroom — seems capable of convincing the yuppies to move their keisters out of the house. It’s like they have too much home-ownership pride or something. The funniest scene has to be the return of the psychic for a second visit (the couple tried reaching an exorcist, but the dude was “out on a case” in another country). The psychic steps into the house (the video cam is stationed on a nearby counter, naturally, to take it all in) and immediately declares the energy of the place to be “overpowering.” He actually shudders. Then he reminds them again that they’re not to supposed to leave the house, because, well, you know, demons like to travel, it won’t do any good, yada-yada-yada. Then he just leaves! He leaves them there! What a royal douchebag! It’s hard to be scared when you’re laughing so hard.
Naturally, as the nights tick by with “Demons Gone Wild” playing regularly in their bedroom, a lot of friction develops between Micah and Katie, enough to make you think the shock ending would have probably happened eventually, demon or no demon, given enough time.
There are, to be fair, some genuinely creepy moments in Paranormal Activity. Some involve Katie in the grips of possession (think Linda Blair speaking in tongues); others involve a simple stationary shot of a living room with a Oujia board sitting on a coffee table. In another scene, the camera captures Katie’s strange nocturnal habit of standing next to the bed at midnight and staring, trance-like, at Micah for three hours straight — a moment that almost raised goose bumps in me, until the following morning, when Micah, after studying the previous night’s video exploits, jokes that Katie was “acting like a total weirdo.” Such wiseass skepticism tends to undercut any true feeling of horror lurking within us, and, in the manner of horror movie conventions, it almost always ensures that the skeptic will eventually die a horrible death.
Director/screenwriter Oren Peli knows where to put the camera most of the time, capturing both a casual sense of documentation and a ragged haste in deploying the video cam for crucial scenes. There is at least one shocking bedroom bit that immediately brings to mind Drag Me to Hell, but which is even creepier because it’s black and white and we know the camera can’t pick itself up and follow the victim out the door. In fact, it works to Peli’s advantage to leave the camera stationary most of the time; this forces the audience to imagine what’s going on in the scariest moments, a trick that Blair Witch Project’s makers understood at a very basic level. Plus, well, it saves everybody a lot of CGI and makeup costs.
