Paranormal Activity, directed by Oren Peli

Paranormal Activity (2009)

Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat

Directed by Oren Peli

RT: 1:26:00

In 1999, a film was released nationwide with the following notice at the beginning

In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary… A year later their footage was found.

Of course, this comes from the love-it-or-hate-it hit, The Blair Witch Project. Shot on a budget of about $35,000, it went on to rake in nearly a quarter billion at the box office. It was part ghost story, part witch hunt, part documentary. At the time, it presented an original concept: found footage. By no means was this the first time such a technique was used, as it was also used in 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust (the shooting title for that film was Green Inferno, which was the release title of Eli Roth’s own cannibal film), but it did bring it to the mainstream in a fun new way. As a writer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that it is similar to epistolary novels such as Frankenstein.

Ten years later, the film Paranormal Activity debuted with a similar premise. It wasn’t the first since 1999, but it was arguably the scariest since Blair Witch.

What worked in the new film is what worked in the Blair Witch: the unseen. We spend the bulk of the movie as clueless as the actors as to what is happening. Because of the style it’s shot in, we aren’t privy to anything that they (ultimately) won’t be privy to. I say “ultimately” because at night, when they’re asleep, we get to watch. Like voyeurs on the 20^th floor looking down on somebody about to be mugged, all we can do is scream for them to look out. Of course, they can’t hear us.

Paranormal Activity takes advantage of both the jump scare and a build-up in suspense. It can’t really be called a slow-burn, because the first scares happen on “Night 1,” the first night of available footage.

Quick background if you haven’t seen the movie: Katie and Micah are living in a suburban San Diego home. She is an English student, and he is a day trader. They have been together about three years, but have only recently moved in together. It wasn’t until they began living together that Micah discovered Katie had been “haunted” her entire life by an unknown entity. To capture evidence, he buys a video camera and…

We get to see multiple nights following his camera purchase, each one more frightening than the last. Of course, Micah wants to capture the best footage possible, so he tries to provoke the entity through a Ouija board… And succeeds!

On Night 21, three weeks since buying the camera, the entity finally gets to Katie and Micah.

It’s no secret I’m not a fan of found footage films, that they are gimmicky at best and annoying (motion sickness anybody?) at worse. However, in Paranormal Activity it works. It harkens to the many ghost hunting shows we see on TV now, but does so in a low-tech way. Yes, we get the EVP and some strange footage, but we don’t get spirit boxes and infrared. It doesn’t try to shove it in our face that it’s going for “found footage,” or that it’s like any other ghost hunt. It’s a raw take on the original ghost story, and free of soundtracks and over-production, it makes you feel like you were a part of it..

What I think makes it work, is that it’s a simple telling of a simple story. It relies not on special effects or great plotting, but teases out the viewer’s own fears of the supernatural. Simply, it allows the audience to be haunted without ever dealing with their own ghost.