Paranormal Activity (2007) Review

Not often is there a film that keeps me up at night. Among the ones that do: The Omen, Evil Dead and An American Werewolf in London. Three days ago I watched Paranormal Activity for the first time and could not, for the life of me, fall asleep that night.

Flowing in the same vein as The Blair Witch Project, Quarantine and Cloverfield this particular film tells the story of a young, middle class couple whose happy life in suburbia is disturbed by a presence that may or may not be demonic. One thing is for certain. There is something that is bothering them and it happens at night. Micah (Micah Sloat) decides to set up a video camera to catch the nightly occurrences. The first night nothing happens but the bedroom door moving. Micah thinks it's a bunch of bull and makes constant jokes about the situation. Katie (Katie Featherson), who has had issues with the same malevolent force since she was eight years old, is convinced there is an apparition after her soul. It is not until the arrival of a psychic that the couple discover it is not a ghost but a demon that is terrorizing them. Every night gets worse and worse as Micah begins to become convinced that there is something in the house.

This is a truly great little horror film. What makes it so scary is that it is presented as factual events recorded on home video (although if you look at the end there is the usual copyright notice that says "the characters and events portrayed in this film are fictitious") as though someone got a hold of the tapes and released them. Little subtle effects, such as powdered footprints from an invisible source appearing before our very eyes or Katie being pulled out of the bed or (my favorite) unexplained shadows appearing on the wall, help to create that sense of realism. Personally I couldn't figure out how they accomplished many of these moments and since I couldn't figure how it was done my mind simply accepted that what I was seeing was real.

There is a slow burn to the film that works well. We slowly build from the atmospheric and creepy to the truly terrifying. The film doesn't overload the viewer with violence or images of the demon. Instead the film sticks to that old adage that what is in our imaginations is far more frightening than what we see.

At the start of the film the acting does not feel natural at all. It's as though writer-director Oren Peli only put the first several scenes in the film as filler and gave limited thought to how his actors should approach the roles at the beginning but somehow I found myself caring about the characters and their plight.

Don't worry. I have since been able to fall asleep.

★★★1/2