Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity, which has sat on the shelf awaiting release since 2007, is a movie that really tries its damnedest to scare the shit out of you. Every trick in the haunted-house genre is thrown at the screen with reckless abandon, from creepy footsteps to doors opening and closing on their own. There's even a paranormal investigator on hand to tell young couple Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) just how much trouble they're in (who ya gonna call?). Now, the problem is, none of this is very scary. But it tries so damn hard that it at least becomes endearing.
Katie has been, for lack of a better word, haunted by some sort of unknown presence since she was eight years old. She talks about it with a cool rationality for the most part, but from the beginning it's apparent that things are getting worse. Micah, ever the alpha-male, brings home a fancy video camera to try and capture some sort of evidence of the titular activity. And that right there is basically all the plot the movie needs to string together a series of creepy haunting scenes.
The device for these scenes is pretty clever. Micah sets up the camera across from their bed, and we're given labeled footage of roughly 21 nights. All of the 'action,' what little there is, takes place almost entirely in that one static shot, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of it. We always know something is going to happen, but it's different every time, leading to a lot of looking around the frame to see what the spirit will do this time.
The use of repetition in these scenes becomes both an asset and a liability. The sheer tension every time the camera shifts to that shot was palpable in the theater. The problem is, as I said before, these scenes are very rarely scary. A few of them are very, very creepy (including one that makes a brilliant use of time-lapse footage), and about two have a noticeable jolt to them (although jump scares really don't affect me as they once might've). After the second or third unexplained breeze, though, it starts to lose its impact. Furthermore, this movie is at least a good 15-20 minutes longer than it should be. Dropping a few of the milder stuff in the middle may have helped to make the transition from 'innocent poltergeist' to 'terrifying haunting' more jarring and, thus, more scary.
This movie has been, is, and will continue to be compared to The Blair Witch Project, and it's not unwarranted at all. From the creepy soundscape to the gimmicky opening and closing screens to the use of the actors real names - not to mention the first-person camera work - this one takes more than its share of cues from that film. The whole first-person gimmick has really taken off in the horror genre lately, and the results range from the fantastic (Blair Witch and the Spanish import [REC]) to the abysmal (George Romero's laughable Diary of the Dead and the painfully bad Cloverfield).
Even the best of these movies have issues to overcome, though, the most obvious being: Why the fuck don't these people ever put the camera down? Each film has tried to offer its own explanation (I'd say [REC] pulled it off best), from revealing a social injustice to an almost metafictional dedication to filmmaking. Paranormal Activity's solution to the problem is simultaneously very credible and pretty disappointing: Micah never puts down the camera because he's a bit of a stubborn, immature douchebag. The kind of guy who, after being told about seven times that the worst thing he could do is bring a Ouija board into the house, does exactly that. The kind of guy who thinks the haunting is "cool" even as his girlfriend is being driven to the brink of insanity. The kind of guy who, in a particularly nasty moment, tells Katie to "go upstairs and play with your little friend." I suppose it does play in nicely with the film's theme of negative emotions making the haunting worse, but it's also an example of one of my least favorite horror tropes: people doing stupid shit just to move the story forward. Still, Sloat gives a very believable performance in the role, and Featherstone is seriously impressive in what becomes a far more complex role than you might suspect by the end of the film.
Paranormal Activity may not live up to the inescapable hype, but despite its flaws, it's still a nifty little low-budget chiller. I have a real soft-spot for horror films that can do what they need to by relying on ideas, acting and camerawork instead of a big effects budget or big name stars. If he can move past the gimmick, I think Peli shows real promise as a horror director. It may not be out-and-out scary, but as I said, it is often very creepy, and most horror movies have trouble even accomplishing that.
Coming Soon in Movies: Friends of Eddie Coyle gets a second look.
(Poster image obtained via http://www.wikipedia.org)
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