Paranormal Activity; Butter Chicken with Naan

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

BBC Ghostwatch and WNUF Halloween Special; Caramel Apples

Ghostwatch (1992); WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

Directors: Rich Lawden; Chris LaMartina

Had I seen these before: No

Since re-watching The Blair Witch Project, I've been thinking a lot about the legacy of Orson Welles's 1938 The War of the Worlds radio broadcast and how the (likely exaggerated) legend of its unexpected power over the populace has shaped modern attempts to thrill and chill. There is something almost admirably devious about sneaking a scary story into people's attention using straight-faced news as a Trojan horse, especially at a time when "the news" was something that the vast majority of the intended audience accepted as a reliable, categorically un-devious source of information. I had seen reference to the BBC's 1992  Ghostwatch program a few times, and understood it to be a a sort of Wellesian event wherein regular news anchors participated in a scripted story about a haunted house investigation that was presented as a non-fiction Halloween special. (One recent program that was obviously influenced by it is the very fun episode "Dead Line" from series five of Inside No. 9. And yes this is the second post in a row wherein I recommend a delightful BBC horror comedy to you, you are most welcome.) I had also seen reference to the idea that the British population absolutely freaked out about this fake demon house. Having not personally been a viewer of BBC in the early 90s, I'll never know for sure what it was like on the ground that night, but I suspect that, as with The War of the Worlds, the mythology of the event's impact does not entirely match with the reality of the reaction. Regardless, I wanted to see this creepy crawly betrayal of the public trust for myself.

Before I get into the details, I just want to say: I found this entire enterprise extremely charming, and I'm not sure I can even fully explain why. I think it's easy to get bogged down with how wretched everything seems to be and how unthinkably vile humans often are toward one another, especially if you spend too much time online (hello there, if you have found your way to this blog you are more likely than not Too Online). Obviously humans also do unbelievably generous and selfless things all the time as well, but if anything that often just makes me even more distressed that I am failing to rise to those lofty standards. But for whatever reason, this sort of endeavor is exactly the kind of thing that acts as a counterbalance to my more hopeless feelings about humanity--this silly little production where normally-earnest newscasters tell us a made up story and play pretend just for entertainments' sake, just to keep the actual darkness at bay for a while. I genuinely love that humans do that. Just a bit o' fun, innit? 

Of course, there can be a pretty wide gulf between finding something oddly life-affirming and finding it...scary. One of the most notable visuals is the main presenter's absolutely enormous hair bow, a trend which I had fully blocked from my mind until seeing it pop up on Jeanne Triplehorn in a rewatch of The Client a year or two ago. Do you remember when very serious grown-up ladies wore foot-long bows on their heads as part of a classy, professional look? This fact alone contributes a great deal to my emergent theory that the early 90s are one of the least gritty historical time periods, at least aesthetically. There is also the fact that this program relies very heavily on child actors--I don't want to be mean, they are fine, but they're not "I'm afraid this is really happening" good. They're no Osments, is all I'm saying. And then, perhaps most crucially, the participants continually refer to a scary space underneath the stairs as the "glory hole." Just...so many times. Is that not a slang term in Britain? I guess there wasn't an Urban Dictionary to check these things against in 1992? And while the sinister presence--an entity referred to as "Mr. Pipes"--is effectively creepy in the beginning, the lore spins out a bit too far by the end and is more confusing than anything else. At any rate, I thought Ghostwatch was a generally entertaining but not especially bone-chilling outing and I hope it made Halloween 1992 a memorable one for some Brits.

Now, if I found it slightly difficult to describe exactly what Ghostwatch is, it will be even harder to explain WNUF Halloween Special. It's a fictional movie from 2013, but it presents as a VHS tape of a Halloween night on local news in 1987--and when I say that's how it presents, I mean in every way possible. It's shot on vintage tape stock and includes numerous commercial breaks, including the bumpers with the station logo and announcement that you are watching the Halloween Special. (Ghostwatch's bumpers were also excellent.) It follows a similar plot to Ghostwatch (it even has one of its reporters joke about contacting Elvis, which is lifted directly from it), involving their reporters and a couple of "psychics" investigating a supposedly haunted house. It's a comedy, sort of, and horror, sort of, but more than either of those it's just a very historically accurate love letter to 1980s public access. Most of the commercials are played so straight that out of context it would be hard to tell they weren't real, although the cumulative effect is humorous. I wasn't exactly laughing but I was sort of mesmerized by the whole thing, and when I discovered that there was a sequel of sorts out this year, I was excited.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "She's in the glory hole"

Is it under two hours: Yes and yes

Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: Local news

Caramel Apples from All Recipes

Not a lot of food in these programs, so I just went with a treat to match the feeling of excitement and nervous anticipation of a classic Halloween night. 

Up next: The eternal question: is this house haunted or are you just having a mental breakdown?

The Blair Witch Project; Marshmallows

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Director: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez

Had I seen this before: Yes, somewhat against my will due to peer pressure from my 17-year-old co-worker at the mall coffee shop, what's up Kellan hope you're thriving

Hello and welcome to the time of year when I try to compensate for my utter exhaustion with summer by forcibly instilling my favorite of autumnal feelings: pleasantly creeping dread. I'm almost certain The Blair Witch Project was the first movie I went to see in the theater despite being absolutely terrified to do so--I'm not sure when I crossed the line from saying "I don't like horror movies, too scary" to "oh actually horror is one of those counterintuitive balms for my personal type of anxiety, like giving stimulants to people with ADHD," but 1999 was firmly in the prior segment. (Side note: I realize I have been spending a lot of time in or around 1999 in this space lately and I just want to say no you're having an extremely quiet and unobtrusive midlife crisis.) The thing is, the 1999 of it all is important context for this movie in particular, because the viral marketing strategy combined with the little baby internet really made it seem like this was going to be the scariest film ever presented to audiences. Like, there would definitely be people (maybe you!!) throwing up from fear at your screening. Maybe you would die. Of being scared.

Fortunately (for us all, am I right?) my attendance at that screening of The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1999 did not prove fatal, nor even especially scarring. I did find it scary, and I before revisiting it I did still remember a couple of especially creepy bits (the teeth!), and I'm pretty sure at the time I played up the fact that afterward I had to drive home in the dark by myself through a few miles of slightly rural area, can you even imagine. Watching it now as a--I don't want to say jaded, but certainly more horror-experienced--adult, I do still think it achieves its goals as a tiny-budgeted little twig-wrapped package of creepiness. But I am also sympathetic to those whose reaction to watching it now is "this movie is not scary, nothing happens, it's just three idiots in the woods yelling at each other." I could counter that what those people fail to understand is that making a mistake and consequently being yelled at is the scariest scenario of all, but I really do see where they're coming from.

I can't say I personally knew anyone who was convinced that the movie and the people in it were all real, but that was certainly the winky winky impression that the marketing was going for at the time. I was about to blame the fact that the internet debunking machine wasn't as lightning-fast as it is today, but then I spent .000001 seconds thinking about the general fate of false information disseminated online today and you know what maybe we were better off when everything was just a matter of checking Snopes, actually. At any rate, the whole point of found footage is to create the sense that everything happening on screen is real, documentary-style--no score, no obviously scripted conversations, no tidy plot mechanics. Just some unknown people stumbling into a bad situation. And having, in the intervening years, seen many low-budget found footage movies, I think Blair Witch does a better job than most of its descendants in terms of following its own rules and creating at least a semi-reasonable excuse for questionable behavior. 

The main plausibility hurdles in found footage tend to be: 1) who is filming this and 2) why are they still filming this? The answer to #1 in almost every case is that someone is making a documentary, but lesser films usually fail to answer why anyone would continue bothering to film things once they turn horrific. One of the smartest things this movie does, once things are very tense but not yet completely unbearable, is have Mike accuse Heather of using the camera as a sort of filter so that she can put some distance between herself and the real world and doesn't have to fully experience how bad their situation is. If you, as an audience member, buy that explanation, then the fact that the camera stays on until the bitter end makes internal sense. (They also make a more half-hearted gesture in the beginning of the movie toward how much back-up battery power they have, presumably in order to stave off complaints that the video camera should be long past dead by the end, but frankly I'm usually happy to have technology work or not work depending on what the scariness of the scene calls for.)

Anyway, you know what's scary? The freaking woods. You know who thinks so? Most humans who have lived in the vicinity of densely-wooded areas since the beginning of time. See also: all fairy tales. It's easy to get lost and gets very dark at night and you're far away from help and there's a bunch of stuff out there that probably wants to eat you or poison you or at least poke or scratch or sting you. The idea to just film some random people being scared (and querulous) in the woods turned out to be such a good one that they made $250 million on a $60k budget and the thing is...that's tough to argue with.

Some stray thoughts: Heather's serious documentary voice in the beginning veers slightly into Catherine O'Hara territory and did take me out of the moment a bit; I appreciated the 90s dirtbag vibe wherein characters could all wear flannel and smoke cigarettes without it being any sort of specific character choice; this is the second 90s movie I've rewatched recently (the other being Dazed and Confused) where characters have an extended conversation about Gilligan's Island, a reference which is fully lost on my children; for me the most relatable moment in this movie is when one of the characters, awake in the middle of the night, hopes out loud that it's at least 5:00 or something and then swears in frustration to discover that it's 3:00 am.

Comments from the 13-year-old: First, she said that YouTube apologizers should take notes from Heather's tearful apology to everyone's mother because "she seems really sincere." Second, she noted that the lack of music in the end credits really leaves you with that sinking feeling long after the movie stops, and compared it to the lack of music over the end credits of Cabaret. Was that my proudest moment as a movie-loving parent? Maybe not? But...maybe! And finally, this was, in her opinion, the scariest movie we have watched together so far. 

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "What the fuck is that?!?"

Is it under two hours:  One of the greatest strengths of this sub-genre is that it tends to keep it tight--this one is a lean and mean 81 minutes, only 55 or so of which is people fighting about a map

Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: Spending time outdoors

Homemade Marshmallows from Martha Stewart

One of my hesitations with doing horror for the blog was that I was worried everyone would be too busy running from their certain doom to bother thinking about food, but not only do the characters in this movie make a point of showing off their pre-journey grocery haul (complete with an extended marshmallow close-up), they spend so much of their time growing increasingly hungry while lost in the woods that they do talk about food quite a bit. So I had several options but I thought for this one I'd go with the campfire classic.

Anyway, I hope one or two of you are excited to join me on this Spooky Season journey or at least let out a less audible groan than my mother did!

Up next: Turns out I'm STILL not ready to leave 1999 and neither is the puking ghost of Mischa Barton