Paranormal Activity

During the week leading up to Halloween, we figured it was the appropriate thing to do to head to our local cinema and watch a scary movie. Paranormal Activity seemed to be getting some good buzz, so that was our selection.

For those who don't know, its a Blair Witch style horror film- hand held cameras manned by the characters in the movie. It's kind of a dream come true for producers, as its really cheap to make with low production values, and pretty easy to sell. Apparently, Paranormal Activity only cost $15k to make. That is pretty low. And to this point its made something like $85million, so something tells me we'll be seeing a lot more of this type of movie in the future. I just hope they do them better.

For me, Paranormal Activity was lacking in, oh, how do I call it, scariness. It was only an hour and a half long, but the total amount of actual scary parts probably boiled down to about 5 minutes. If that. Too much of the movie was a boring- waiting for scary things to happen. And when the scary things happened, they weren't that scary. Now, I don't scare particularly easily in movies. But I can safely say I've seen at least 5 movies scarier than this one (in no particular order, and off the top of my head: Alien, The Ring, The Orphanage, The Descent, and the scariest movie ever: Event Horizon). And that's without spending much time remembering all the slashers I've seen. Shoot, come to think of it, I think Blair Witch was scarier.

I appreciate what the filmmakers were able to achieve with a small budget. In fact, I think sometimes small budgets make for better horror movies as filmmakers are forced to rely on storytelling and subtler forms of building tension. Alien was great because you rarely see the monster yet you still feel the tension due to the setting and the atmospheric effects. Along those lines, the creepiest parts of Paranormal Activity were the smaller creepy moments- like when the girl sleepwalks and stands staring at her sleeping boyfriend for a couple hours in a row.

I have always appreciated horror as a genre; it highlights the ways that filmmakers can use all the tools of the trade to manipulate the audience's experience and control their emotions. It also (often) provides a platform to attack/question/portray social norms that other more "serious" films have a hard time doing. For those reasons, I'm always interested in seeing a different approach to horror, even if the end result is less than successful.