Paranormal Activity (2009)
Paramount Pictures
d. Orin Peli; pr. Jason Blum, Orin Peli; scr. Orin Peli; ed. Orin Peli; cast. Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs (86 mins)
Things go bump in the night. Pipes rattle. Objects turn up in unexpected places. Doors show evidence of having moved without human contact. Is it a case of simple house settling, or something more sinister? Could this be a case of genuine paranormal activity? Either way, it has all the makings of a good haunted house movie, exactly the genre that Paranormal Activity reinvigorates with considerable aplomb.
Katie is a young woman who, since childhood, has seen a mysterious shape haunt her. It has followed her through adolescence and into young adulthood, from residence to residence, and is now perhaps the mysterious paranormal presence affecting her new house and living relationship with lover Micah, who is increasingly fascinated rather than distressed by the possible paranormal haunting. Indeed, Micah is at first sceptical but sets up camera and audio surveillance equipment controlled by his laptop in order to find evidence of a supernatural presence in the house and when he does, becomes obsessed with filming more evidence of it, maintaining that he is in control of the circumstances and will help Katie, noble new age traditional man to the rescue that he feels himself to be.
As the paranormal activity in question usually takes place at night, Micah sets up a camera to observe the couple’s bedroom whilst they sleep.
Katie is concerned that Micah’s attentions will aggravate the presence but indulges her lover’s pseudo-scientific whims to document actual paranormal activity. However, she also consults a psychic – whom Micah treats with jokey disrespect – who suggests she consult a demonologist and warns the couple not to attempt under any circumstances to communicate with the presence seemingly haunting them as this would be an open invitation to it to return with even greater force. Katie heeds the advice, but Micah is unconcerned.
The psychic here draws a distinction between the ghost and the demon, suggesting that a ghostly haunting is human in origin (ghosts being dead humans) but that a demonic haunting is another matter entirely. But: how to distinguish them and ascertain the truth of the matter, especially when the nocturnal surveillance system begins capturing an increasing amount of activity as they sleep and strange noises begin to keep them awake at night? There is something else in the house with them, in their bedroom as they sleep. Naturally – this being a horror film – Micah thinks it would be a good idea to communicate with the presence and obtains a ouija board, much to Katie’s worried disdain. And, of course, the presence has something it wishes to communicate.
As a contemporary ghost / haunting story, Paranormal Activity is an effectively spooky chiller for the age of reality television.
The entire film is shot from the perspective of the hand-held surveillance camera that Micah buys to record any signs of activity: a digital video / reality TV aesthetic pioneered in the hit The Blair Witch Project a decade ago and recently used to redefine the monster movie for a post 9-11 world in Cloverfield. It gives the film here a convincing home movie immediacy and dramatic intimacy to what is essentially a two-character piece. As a haunting drama, Paranormal Activity offers little new, however, beyond this contemporary aesthetic sensibility and its self-conscious allusion to home-movie making.
Paranormal Activity has some of the humour and novelty that Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper brought to the quintessential haunted house movie Poltergeist, some of the sense of afflicted femininity that was found in Barbara Hershey’s work in The Entity and speaks to the same gulf between professional psychics and amateur ghost hunters that influenced the more recent independent film Death of a Ghost Hunter, which also sought to bring a low budget, unpolished home movie aesthetic to the genre. And in Paranormal Activity, this digital home video aesthetic works surprisingly well: the raw look here is the result of clear studied planning – despite the appearance of a home video, Paranormal Activity is a well structured, amusingly characterized and effective scare piece, though surprisingly simple in visual design and execution.
Essentially though, Paranormal Activity is Poltergeist as reality digital video, novel enough for what it is to provide the requisite scares but somewhat repetitive in structure.
Its pseudo-scientific rationale is cursory, providing just enough to locate the film in some kind of theoretical basis but never really exploring such: it assumes the validity of supernatural phenomena, constructed to take much time to set up its premise of increasing paranormal-normal communication. By necessity though, this being a horror movie, the potential malevolence of the presence responsible for the title activity is suggested at the outset in the reference to the need for a demonologist.
Like The Blair Witch Project before it, Paranormal Activity seeks an ambiguous dynamic of presence and absence within which to situate its horror. Thus, the scares come from evidence of an implied but unseen presence – a chandelier is seen gently swinging, noises are heard, lights outside the bedroom are turned on and off, a photograph is found in an attic – which increasingly manifests itself in such activity through the course of the movie, though never in a physical presence. These manifestations are caught on Micah’s camera on an almost nightly basis: thus, the film is structured around its bedroom scenes, the camera capturing the increasing activity and even the possible threat of demonic possession, which is alluded to in the final act as Micah starts to investigate the possible meaning behind the presence’s ouija board communication.
As a scare piece, Paranormal Activity works competently within its home video aesthetic.
For its evident low budget it is capably made by a new generation of filmmakers well steeped in the traditional construction of fright but seeking new aesthetic means of deploying it. And, in an age where most horror films are remakes, the aesthetic novelty and pseudo-documentary construction of the film makes for some welcome invention. In that, Paranormal Activity is the latest (and most successful) effort of the ghost story / haunted house tale to replenish, reinvigorate and contemporize itself for modern Gen-Y audiences looking for a convincing fright.
