Things That Go Aieeeeee in the Night

 

    I remember about ten years ago- two movies that came out around the same time. The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense were decidedly different films, but both were out-of-left-field smashes and both held the promise that, perhaps, the next decade of horror movies wouldn't be bloated FX whores like the remake of The Haunting, but would build on atmosphere and character the way The Sixth Sense did, or go Blair Witch's route of plugging into our most basic fears.

    How justified was this promise? Let's put it this way, it's ten years later and the term "torture porn" is now part of the everyday lexicon.

    A few weeks ago a local library held a screening of a documentary charting the evolution of the American horror movie, and far too charitable it was to the current state of affairs. I think of the best horror movies I've seen this decade, movies like The Descent and Let the Right One In and there's hardly a yankee entry in the bunch (Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell a lonely exception). With the exception of putting out a gargantuan string of Saw movies, the American horror set nowadays seems devoted to one of two things: remaking every title from the glory (and not-so-glorious) days, and taking the exceptional ideas from other countries (read Japanese ghost horror like The Ring and The Grudge or the Spanish mega-hit REC) and de-foreign-izing them for American audiences. It can be said that if there's one thing American horror finds scarier than pale faced ghosts and zombies, it's subtitles.

    This is why it's very surreptitious that ten years after Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense we get Paranormal Activity. This is a movie that's definitely reading from Blair Witch's playbook: made on the cheap (a rumored eleven grand), released small and carried into multiplexes on the shoulders of excited hype and word of mouth. Both are faux-video shot documentaries about people fooling with things they shouldn't, and both use their fear of the mundane to great effect.

    But if Paranormal Activity is a return to the lovely art form of insurgent filmmaking, it doesn't share the same detached-from-fantasy mojo that made Blair Witch so damned palatable. Paranormal is a sight to see- I would recommend anyone who wants to feel their pulse skip not to miss it- but it's also a bit on the rack. It wants to have its shriek cake and eat it, too, dressing itself up in the kind of reality-based cinema verite style that sucked us into Blair Witch's mythology, while also hanging on to the desire to indulge in age-old scary movie standards. None of this is done badly, but it undercut's Paranormal Activity's chance to really connect with the kind of subdued terror one feels when they hear that creak in the middle of the night and wonders if it's really the house settling.

    It features two characters: Micah and Katie, living in an expansive San Diego home (the setting is real-life director Oren Peli's pad, part of his gestalt-therapy reason for making the film) when bizarre things begin to happen at night. This doesn't come as a surprise to at least one of them- Katie has been occasionally plagued by supernatural "visitations" since she was a child. Thinking this is a cool way to break into Youtube famedom, Micah buys an expensive video camera to document what happens at night as the couple sleep. As the scene cards label Night #1 and Night #5, we listen, at first, to random noises coming from downstairs which then evolve into a door suddenly swinging closed, a picture getting smashed, etc… The pacing of the movie is strictly build-up. At night, the fast-forward slows before something happens, giving us a good period of time to twist in the wind wondering what tidbit of spookiness we're expected to witness next. During the day, tempers get frayed down to the live wire as Micah's overly cool exterior gets worn down by the proceedings and Katie's resentment that her boyfriend's cavalier attitude may actually be encouraging the spirit flares.

    As I said, from a technical standpoint, Paranormal Activity is near-flawless. There isn't a single moment, particularly a fright scene, that telegraphs what's going to happen next, and Peli's pace makes no single event enough of a release that we don't slide into the denouement like a tightly-wound wire. The acting by an almost-unheard of cast (actress Katie Featherston has a couple low-budget shock titles under her belt) is dutiful, although the characters they play don't always register. Micah comes off, at times, as particularly glib and superior and also suffers from the biggest reality-vexing quagmire of these kinds of movies: that when the fit hits the shan, wouldn't even the most self-absorbed person just put down the damned camera?

    Story-wise, the movie is a bit of a disappointment. Its liberties are not exactly out of bounds, but the core conceit of the film- that Micah and Katie's unwelcome guest is not some reality TV-show spectre but rather a malevolent entity who has the hots for Katie- feels like a script tool. This is especially true of the ending, a change suggested by DreamWorks chief Steven Spielberg which, yes, is scary, but also for good slices-and-dices the oh-my-God-this-is-really-happening mystique Paranormal Activity tries to set up for itself.

    Is it worth going to see? Definitely. Will it influence how horror movies are made in the future? I doubt it, although if it takes even one future filmmaker who was considering making the next Hostel and sets him or her down a different road, then it will be worth it. As it is, Paranormal Activity is a curiosity, a distraction, although one best enjoyed with the lights on.