Paranormal Activity

“The Blair Witch Project” has a lot to answer for. Its dizzying use of ultra cheap hand held camera-work, its cheeky faux documentary style, and, most significantly, is then-innovative use of viral marketing to drum up a buzz around the film before its release has been copied numerous times since it first polarised audiences in 1999. Some people were truly terrified by its low budget realism. I was not one of those people. Though I admired the skill with which the film was marketed and I admit it was in some ways genuinely innovative, I found that the great lengths taken to make the film seem “real” were generally distancing, leaving the viewer coldly watching and assessing the levels of realism achieved. Still, the film was phenomenally successful and since then numerous film makers have attempted to replicate its profits. Last year we had George Romero taking the technique to his ghoul franchise with “Diary of the Dead” alongside the Godzilla-inspired “Cloverfield”, both of which were relative large budget pieces trying to look cheap. This year we have “Paranormal Activity”, a low-budget enterprise combining the cinema verite style with an “Exorcist” inspired storyline, with a stripped down cast of unknowns and nicely understated special effects. Like “Blair Witch” most of its scares come from its attempts to seem as realistic as possible, opening with captions thanking the police and filmed entirely on one rather wobbly hand held camera.

But, again like “Blair Witch”, it’s totally fictitious, and therein, for me, lies its main fault. Though an unremarkable film can be made truly unnerving when based on a true story, take “The Strangers” or “The Mothman Prophecies” for example, a good film that pretends to be real and clearly isn’t can be rather distracting. Projects like this really excel on transmissions rather than in the cinema; Orson Wells famously terrified Americans who tuned in late to his updated version of “The War of the Worlds” on radio, and in the 80s British television viewers were horrified to see what they assumed was a true life poltergeist attack in “Ghost Watch”, and “Paranormal Activity” really needs to be viewed on a battered videotape or stumbled upon late on television. In the cinema it feels a little too safe, suffering from that same sense of “yes but it isn’t really real is it?” that plagued “Blair Witch”.

It’s a shame really, because this is really not a bad film. Following the attempts of a young couple to investigate an eerie unseen presence that has been stalking ordinary student Katie since her childhood, it’s engaging and brilliantly acted. The two young leads are phenomenal: utterly believable throughout as they flirt, argue and experience pure terror. It does a far better job in capturing a sense of realism than “Blair Witch” ever did, meaning that the moments in which the audience feels distanced by the gimmick are comparatively few. The direction is, of course, rather minimal in that the camera is usually either being carried around or left on the tripod but director Oren Peli does much within these tight parameters; it’s a rare film that can use regular jump scares without depleting tension! Again striving for total realism, the special effects are nicely minimal too, creaking doors and shaking light fittings slowly give way to ghostly shadows and sinister footprints in creepy approach reminiscent of the original version of “the Haunting”, with plenty of spooky noises to add to the atmosphere. It manages to be tense, gripping, witty and surprisingly original, drawing influences from other works but altering them satisfactorily.

It’s refreshing to see a film that relies on an invisible monster, but although some moments are handled deliciously, I have to say there were aspects of it that could have used some work. Part of what makes an unseen horror so frightening is not knowing its limits but the entity hounding Katie in this film slowly turns from something omnipresent to an invisible man, which really weakens its hold over the audience. I was also a little disappointed with the film’s keenness to classify the entity as a demon in the Biblical sense, with Katie’s boyfriend cheerfully leafing through a book of medieval woodcuts and a helpful psychic insisting that the creature is inhuman and thus “not his field”. It gives the film an uncomfortably religious, Exorcist-like feel despite refusal to mention any actual religious ideas and with the film calling itself “Paranormal Activity” the audience surely expects… well the paranormal rather than cod philosophy. I would have preferred a little more ambiguity to allow those of us who don’t believe in demonic possession to enjoy a little of the film’s attempted realism, since fear is a very personal thing, but this is a minor quibble I suppose. Those who like true ghost stories may also be disappointed as the paranormal elements of the film are cobbled together from a range of disparate cases combining standard haunted house fare with poltergeist and possession stories and create a “case” which is unlike any real case, which is again a shame as it dents the realism of the piece.

All in all it’s a fairly impressive horror flick, and the trailers that showed audiences jumping and screaming were not exaggerating: highly-strung members of the audience were indeed shrieking and even a seasoned horror nerd like me jumped more than once. It will certainly have your heart pounding, though whether it keeps you awake at night is quite another matter.