Paranormal Activity (2007)
Director: Oren Peli
Had I seen this before: No
One of the things I touched on in my Blair Witch post was the movie's funny-in-hindsight hyperbolic marketing which implied that the events in the movie might be real and also that the terror of seeing them might be fatal. But of course I am now a seasoned consumer of both cinematic horror content and cinematic horror advertising, a worldly and skeptical sort, not some nervous teen. And it is with that worldly and skeptical voice that I say to you now aaaaaaauuuuuugggggghhhhhh you guys. I can't believe I fell for this movie's over-the-top marketing for so many years. I was genuinely afraid to watch this film, which as it turns out is mostly about an annoying boyfriend and a door that swings open or shut once in a while, neither of which are the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.*
Released in 2007, Paranormal Activity took up The Blair Witch's found-footage torch in a major way, spawned seven sequels and counting, and kick-started a low-budget horror empire. It borrows a lot from its spiritual predecessor, including a chyron at the top of the film thanking the families of of Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat (the actors' real names), setting up the idea that this video footage was turned over to the filmmakers by the victims' families. (The fact that the last shot in this movie--spoiler spoiler spoiler obviouslyyyyyyyyyy--is of Katie's face morphing into a literal demon, makes that idea is very funny to me, like their families saw that, shrugged, and were like "well here you go I guess.") And like Blair Witch, it involves far more scenes of scared people arguing with each other than it does of scary things happening.
It also thoroughly convinced me that it was too frightening for me, a suburbia-dweller who is often alone in my house, as the premise seemed to be "your suburban house is constantly doing weird stuff when you're not looking and probably wants to eat you." In that sense it is also continuing a different legacy, that of John Carpenter's Halloween, which spends a shocking amount of its fairly short runtime on various characters just walking down the sidewalk through a quiet neighborhood in order to impress upon you that your nice suburban neighborhood might be harboring dark things, such as an inexplicable gentleman in a Star Trek mask. The dark thing in this case is not a seemingly motiveless knife-wielding maniac, but rather a demon who is attached not to the house itself but to the main character Katie. When I thought we might be dealing with a ghost, I was interested, because I find ghosts to be compelling and scary and good vehicles for storytelling because there are all manner of things that a ghost might want from you and figuring what that is can be pretty fun as a viewer. I have absolutely no use, on the other hand, for cinematic demons. Demons in movies are almost all the same, just raging asshole bullies who are overly attached to Latin. And like human asshole bullies, they are very boring to me. What does a demon want? To make you unhappy and cause pain. But...making someone unhappy is the easiest thing in the world! That's not narratively intriguing at all! Like, try tip-toeing through life trying not to cause other people pain if you want a real challenge, demons.
Anyway. This particular demon spends the days sleeping I guess (?) and the nights just sort of wandering around Katie and Micah's big ugly house, so Micah buys a video camera to try to record the goings-on. Now, I am personally in possession of one (1) camera-adoring husband, so I do have some immediate empathy for Katie on this front, but I want to point out that Dan is nowhere near as annoying as Micah is with that thing. I guess this is in the grand tradition of characters in horror movies being irritating so you don't mind later when a demon stabs them (spoiler), but ugh. For reasons knows only to the entity itself, it does a lot of things that don't wake up the house's residents but do look spooky when played back on a laptop screen. So is it just showing off for the camera? At one point it moves a planchette around a Ouiji board and then lights it on fire, but there is no one in the room when that happens. What was that for?? If you were trying to get a message across, why not do it when someone is looking? This demon is a bully and a weird show-off. YouTube was a brand new platform when this movie was shot, but it seems like it might have been a natural home for Katie's entity, a true stunt queen.
Anyway. The funniest character in the movie is the paranormal expert who comes over twice and both times is like "sorry, I do ghosts not demons, I'm getting out of here." Same, man. Same. And the most inexplicable decision made by the main characters is to pull the very cozy-looking comforter off their bed every night and just sleep under a flat sheet. Upsetting.
*The kind of thing that keeps me up at night: Victorian children, ventriloquist dummies, bad things happening to eyeballs
Line I repeated quietly to myself: "Knock it off Micah" (I might have improvised this line)
Is it under two hours: Yes
Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: San Diego
Butter Chicken from What's Gaby Cooking
At least Katie and Micah eat one solid meal before things really go sideways, and that meal looks to be some very tasty Indian food.
Up next: Gonna watch this VHS tape I found and hope nothing horrifying happens seven days from now
