Paranormal Activity

Synopsis: Katie (Katie Featherstone) and Micah (Micah Sloat) have just moved in together. Katie tells Micah that ever since she was a child she’s been haunted by something beyond the normal. Micah buys a video camera to see if he can record it. Then they call in a psychic who tells them it’s not a ghost, it’s a demon. And it’s coming for Katie.

Perversity is basically what drives Paranormal Activity. There are few better examples of a horror film mimicking the audience’s expectations. The story is quite simple: boyfriend learns that girlfriend is being haunted, boyfriend buys video camera to capture the creepy happenings, girlfriend gets more and more freaked out, boyfriend escalates the antagonism of the presence in order to prove his manhood. In other words, it’s the age old story of women who love jerks and seem unable to leave them even as they continually abuse their trust and dig them deeper into trouble.

Paranormal Activity is an incredibly effective fright-fest, and judging by the three or four girls who left my screening, bemused boyfriends in tow, it’s gonna scare the pants off women. But Micah is an incredibly unsympathetic character and his boneheaded actions, which drive the escalation in scares, make for a very unsatisfying story. Why a perfectly capable person like Katie stays in the house, even as Micah proves totally unreliable and selfish, beggars belief. You could take it as a metaphor for abusive relationships, which is pretty much what is depicted, but it feels more like lazy storytelling than a reach for meta-level meaning. Everything he’s told not to do he does with a smirk on his face. You just want to reach into the screen and smack the two of them.

Having said that, Paranormal Activity is a deeply unnerving experience. I was grinning the whole way through, chuckling as people left when they got too scared and enjoying the extremely well orchestrated scares. But when I was home and as the lights went out I found myself having to remind myself it was only a film. For all its many flaws, it gets under the skin. The sequences where the demon makes its presence known are beautifully creepy. And as much as I hated the two characters for their obvious flaws, I still found myself anxious as they descended further and further into trouble. Had it been more intelligently constructed, Oren Peli’s film might have been set to become one of the classics of the horror genre, but instead it’s just a damn good frightener.

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