Paranormal Activity and Fear

Like a lot of the general movie-going public, Jamie and I plunked down some change to check out Paranormal Activity Friday night. First, my quick review: very, very good. The story is simple, and the audience is really supposed to focus on the characters as they sink ever deeper into their fear over what is in their home. The film’s style is much like that of The Blair Witch Project from ten years ago. But, I didn’t find that movie at all engaging, much less frightening. Part of the issue for me was the migraine I left the theater with after enduring nearly an hour and a half of people who couldn’t hold a camera steady. Paranormal Activity solves both of those problems. In short, if you enjoy thrills and confronting your own fears, you need to go see this film.

Movies don’t frighten me very often. In fact, I’ve tried to remember the last film that really unnerved me when I saw it in the theater, but I came up empty.** Paranormal Activity actually left me rather shaken. It is frightening in a way I have never experienced with a film.

Most of what passes for modern horror isn’t interesting. Slasher films that rely on the “gotcha” moment were too effectively skewered by the first Scream for me to give them credit. The torture film phenomenon of the last six or seven years has only baffled me. Gore for the sake of gore isn’t frightening — it’s just disgusting. The first-person, documentary-style of The Blair Witch Project never seems to be done very well for some reason. And ghost films have come to depend on computer generated imagery that works fantastically well for large, space-alien robots. But it never seems to create convincing ghosts.

And the latter has often left me scratching my head. I love a good ghost story, which makes Halloween my favorite time of year. I love to curl up under a blanket with all the television programs about monsters, myths, legends, ghosts, and the general “paranormal” stuff that overtakes the History Channel and its kin throughout October. Whatever you or I may think about its legitimacy, it sure makes for a dang good story. So, why has Hollywood had such a dismal record with ghost-themed movies since, well, Poltergeist?

I think I found one answer in Paranormal Activity. In case you don’t know, the film was reportedly made a couple of years ago in one week for about $12,000 dollars. As far as I could tell, there is virtually no computer generated special effects, except for possibly the last 3 or 4 minutes. Buying into a film technique well documented with movies like Jaws, PA leaves its monster off-screen. Unlike Jaws, that monster never actually appears at all. We see a shadow where one shouldn’t be. A door moves for no reason. Lights flip on and off with no explanation. The action escalates nicely throughout, well paced and efficient. While details can be passed off as coincidence or electrical problems at first, the lead the audience to eventually confront details that can’t be explained conventionally.

To put it another way, Paranormal Activity allows the mundane and commonplace to not just build up to the extraordinary, it makes the viewer rethink the mundane as extraordinary — right up until one character is pulled by the foot from her bed while she is sleeping. Watching this movie, I had a stark realization. I knew where the film was going. I was conscious that it was a piece of fiction, although it was shot so as to breach my suspension of disbelief. But in the last 25 minutes of this movie, I was terrified of what I was watching. I began to understand that I was matrixing the visual and auditory contents of relatively explainable sounds and events with my own experiences in my own home. I’ve heard things in my house that made the hair stand up on my neck. But Jamie and I also live in a house that is 55 years old — we hear things all the time (especially with 4 cats running around!).

Look at the shadow on the door on the left side. Simple, yet effective.

Paranormal Activity’s real genius is that it relies on the audience to substitute their own fears into the void left by simple sounds and shadows. And does so so very effectively that I could just imagine the terror and horror that awaits once one of the characters is pulled by her foot from her bed in the middle of the night by an unseen force. It’s the first film I’ve seen in a long while that really relied on the audience’s imagination, and it does so in creative and tension-filled ways. It made me confront MY fears in my own emotions and psyche, not the spectacle on screen. That is what I think makes for not only a good horror film, but for a great film, period. It wasn’t frightening in an intellectual sense. It was terrifying in a visceral sense. I’ve never felt tension and adrenaline in a movie like I did Friday night.

What are your thoughts, either about Paranormal Activity or about quality scary movies in general? What makes some work and others only mildly interesting exercises?

**I saw Pan’s Labyrinth in the home theater of a friend over a year after it was released in the US, and not in theatrical release. Very good and very unnerving — but that’s something for a later discussion!

Tagged as: fear, Halloween, horror, Imagination, is paranormal activity real, October, Paranormal Activity, scary movies