Paranormal Activity

As readers of this blog, all six of you, know, I love it when two movies with the same basic premise come out within months of each other. Such occasions allow for an illuminating glimpse at the zeitgeist (ZEITGEIST!) as well as the chance to contrast and compare film techniques and sensibilities. Now, on the heels of Sam Raimi's triumphant return to splatstick horror, Drag Me To Hell, comes another movie about a young woman stalked by a soul-hungry demon while her skeptical boyfriend tries to use science to fathom the unfathomable. Oren Peli's micro-budget scare-fest Paranormal Activity offers a useful contrast with Raimi's movie. Drag Me To Hell relies on a hysterically over-the-top tone and an escalating series of operatic shocks and gross-out gags, while Paranormal Activity uses Blair Witch-style first person video cameras and cheap practical effects. As a consequence, Drag Me To Hell is relentlessly entertaining, frequently hilarious, but never really scary, unlike Paranormal Activity, which creates a mood of gut-churning dread that deepens as the movie progresses, culminating in a series of wrenching, upsetting shocks.

The story is simple: Kate and Micah are an upwardly mobile twentysomething couple in a nice condo in San Diego. They've been experiencing weird sounds at night, so Micah, like a good consumer and media-addict, buys a digital camera to record what happens and examine it. The film alternates between shots of the couple's bedroom at night, with the camera on a tripod recording an escalating series of unnervingly realistic apparitions, and footage of Kate and Micah freaking out and arguing during the day. The arguments have that same true-to-life, improvisational edge as The Blair Witch Project, but the characters never come close to being as unpleasant and inarticulate as those jagoffs. They're relatable and likable and their relationship has a welcome degree of texture. Also, the sterile suburban surroundings and Micah's technofetishism raise the issue of how people raised in a secular world would attempt to deal with forces beyond scientific understanding.

More than anything, Paranormal Activity shows how important it is for a horror film to create a sense of palpable reality for it to be truly frightening. The cheap gimmicks that most horror films use to generate tension; an overbearing score, predictable fake-out scares, disorienting camera moves, only serve to disperse tension. They remind the viewer that they're watching a movie, that the people in danger are just actors, that the threat is wholley imaginary. Movies that succeed at creating real moments of unease and fear, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Descent, and now Paranormal Activity, do so by making the audience forget that they're in a movie theater. There's a place in the horror universe for gleeful gore-fests and exercises in blood-camp, but the only way to really scare the shit out of a group of strangers sitting in the dark is by making them feel the fear of the protagonists, and the only way to do that is to make the protagonists, and their world, feel as real to the viewer as the person sitting next to them.