Here’s the thing about horror movies: I love ‘em. I always have and always will, and if there’s ever a day wherein I stop loving them it will leave me unsure of what to do with myself. Freddy, Jason, Michael, the girl from The Ring, Jigsaw, Pinhead, the folks from The Strangers – these have been the staples of a life spent in love with things that scared me.
So when the rumblings about Paranormal Activity were calling it one of the most deeply troubling and frightening movies in years – if not ever – it piqued my curiosity. Critics were losing sleep over it, the reports said. Viewing audiences were reduced to screams and tears. This movie reached you on a level at which you weren’t ready to be reached and played at the very deepest of a very natural, very common fear.
To say the very least: I was skeptical.
When I walked into the theater at midnight on Friday, I expected something that might make me jump once or twice. Maybe the plot would bring me in or the acting would kick things up a notch and I could walk out having experienced some decent scares, that sort of thing.
I was wrong to be skeptical. I left the theater terrified, and I only managed to sleep once I saw the sun coming up – a solid five hours after the movie had ended and four hours after I got home.
Paranormal Activity was actually made about three years ago and has only now started to see a decent release. Even so, it hasn’t reached more than 35 cities. Most of these places are college towns, where crowds are guaranteed to be active at midnight showings and word of mouth spreads like a dry brushfire. Written, directed and filmed at a budget of just about fifteen thousand dollars, it’s the single-camera “found footage” story of a couple experiencing – you guessed it – paranormal activity and looking to record the happenings so that they can at least have documented proof.
It’s a simple concept, and the plot really doesn’t try to get any more complicated than that. We have a couple. They’re cute. They bicker. They’re “engaged to be engaged.” They’re being haunted by something. They decide to film it. That’s all there is to it.
We know right off the bat that something went wrong, because the very beginning of the movie features a title card that thanks the families of the couple and the San Diego police department for allowing Paramount to distribute the footage. It’s a very subtle way of escalating the tension and anticipation, and it works like a charm. Furthermore, the first half hour or so of the movie is actually pretty light in scares. The audience is sucked in to the daily meanderings of this very natural, endearing couple. Micah – the man of the house – is funny, and he trades regular barbs with his girlfriend, Katie, as the movie unfolds.
It’s all part of the sucker punch.
See, what’s haunting this couple isn’t a ghost. It is established very early on that the problem isn’t the house, it’s Katie. She’s being tormented by something. The notion of “well, we’ll just leave the haunted house” is immediately dispelled and the audience is left to be immediately unsettled by the idea that whatever is plaguing this couple is going to stick around. It’s referred to as a “demon” by a psychic the couple brings in, and though the audience gets a good chuckle out of it the first two or three times it eventually becomes apparent that what’s going after this couple isn’t a typical ghost but is, in fact, something malevolent.
Let’s back up a second and talk about what makes a movie scary. When you find a film truly scary – when something sticks with you and makes you sleep with a light on – it’s because you can’t help but picture what happened in the movie happening to you. What makes “found footage” films so effective is that they remove that element of separation. In watching this movie, you know exactly how the haunting feels and looks. You can’t separate yourself from it because you’re living it right alongside the protagonists.
Part of what makes this film excellent, I think, is the playfulness of the opening hour. Much like the demon that’s haunting Micah and Katie, the movie doesn’t do anything outright horrifying for a while. It gives you time to settle in and be comfortable. You’ll be creeped out by a door opening and closing on its own or a random batch of footsteps here or there. You’ll think maybe this isn’t going to be so bad. As things move on, though, it picks up. The demon starts becoming more and more brazen and you, as an audience member, are glued to it all. The haunting builds and builds until the final half hour, which is where the sucker punch comes in.
There are no plot twists. There is no “gotcha!” moment. The final half hour – in conjunction with the hour leading up to it – is straightforward horror at its very best. It’s what earned this movie its reputation, and it’s what sent several women out of the theater crying at each showing I went to. I won’t spoil a thing. I will simply tell you that you will not understand the hype until those crucial final minutes. Further, you will not fully understand the depth of the movie’s strength until you go to tuck yourself in at night.
Word has it that Steven Spielberg took a copy of Paranormal Activity home with him from the studio one night and returned it the next day in a garbage bag. His reasoning? It was haunted. He wanted nothing to do with it.
When Paramount screened the movie for test audiences, they were alarmed by people walking out early. When asked if the movie was that terrible, the people who left early responded almost unanimously: no, it wasn’t bad at all – it was just too scary.
You hear these stories and you think surely they must be overblown. That’s what I thought, anyway, and I’m sure many others had the same opinion before going in.
I’ve never been more happy to be completely wrong. This is the scariest movie I have ever seen.
It is in a very limited release right now, so you have to look up times online – they won’t be in the paper unless you happen to be in a city it has come to. Do it. Trust me.
