31 Nights of Terror! Paranormal Activity

When Blair Witch Project came out many people thought it was a real piecing together of film discovered in the woods, a phenomenon largely propagated by marketing surrounding the film which went as far as selling a book case-file of the police investigation following the disappearance of the hikers seen in the film. I know this because being the impressionable teenager I was back then I was one of the many sobs who not only saw the movie, loved it and believed it but also bought the t-shirt, the book and probably some playing cards or coffee mug which I most likely sold at a garage sale later in life. It would appear to me that this was the original marketing scheme that was set up for Paranormal Activity because the movie makes an extreme effort to pull off the same ‘real’ aspect, including no credits, the silly statement at the beginning explaining where the film came from and a quickly written out epilogue at the end.

For reasons unknown, the plug was obviously pulled on stressing this point to the public because for one I have not seen any kind of marketing pretending to be more than it is: a ghost movie and two, no one believes for a second that it is anything more than that anyway. What the marketers went ahead with was filmed reactions of test audiences, showing how nine out of ten people were scared witless by the film, thus promising you the same ride of terror should you dare go see this movie. Well, I took their dare to go see it and I can tell you the scariest thing about it is that it cost me $8.50 at the matinee. What has happened in this economy that I can go to the Ritz and get a good matinee in any day of the week for $6 but the giant corporate googaplexes need $2.50 more to function? Isn’t this supposed to be the other way around?

But I digress.

The test audience videos prove one thing I suppose, which is that people scare easily. This was further confirmed by the people around me who were jumping out of their wits and frankly I don’t understand: it’s just a door people, sure it’s swinging and I know it’s not supposed to do that but nevertheless it’s nothing to get all churned up about. Not to much of a surprise, Paranormal Activity didn’t live up to expectations, or even low expectations- in fact the film is about as boring as can possibly be. I wish I had gone back to the Chemical Heritage Foundation and watch the plants growing on exhibition, that was twice as exciting and it was free.

There is a reason that I don’t buy a hand held camera and live my entire life through it as if it were my eyes and then publish all of my exploits on the internet: it’s because I can safely conclude that a lot of the time I act like an idiot as most human beings do and my day to day mediocrity along with the impoverished humor and in-jokes I employ to keep myself from remembering that life is futile and we are all going to die are only funny to myself and perhaps a select few within my closest circles. I would be foolish to think that anyone else in the world would want to see such things let alone pay $8.50 ($10.50 at night, what’s more) to do so. As a result I am a bit displeased with Paranormal Activity for making me watch the two main characters acting this way for the better part of an hour.

Character development is always important but it also has to be interesting and, believe me, this is not going to be Broken Flowers so the slow paced multilayered action so slow you can see moss growing on it is not going to help a horror movie. The bottom line is that by the time the scares came on the screen I was half asleep and didn’t even care, I didn’t even feel very much in the mood for a scare anymore.

It’s probably for the better that I didn’t want to be frightened anyway because for the most part the film completely botched the creepy moments. The Idiot Plot makes a cameo again, with our hero Micah making foolish decisions throughout the film, he was basically a terrible human being and I can’t understand why anyone would want to be near him for long. If a daemonic evil were trashing my house I wouldn’t be cracking jokes and trying to provoke the spirit, I would be crying like a baby.

While Micah was a bad person, Katie was a bad actress, though I am willing to blame this one more on director Oren Peli than his cast. Everyone seems amazingly calm during certain moments when I would expect people’s minds to snap and never fully return.

Paranormal Activity is also funny at moments, though they certainly didn’t want it to be. There was one moment of serious laugh-out-loud comedy where I am sure I was supposed to feel bad for the characters but my friend and I could do nothing more than crack jokes at the pure stupidity of it all.

There are plenty of examples where the ‘we were filming something when evil arrived’ formula works: Blair Witch Project, REC and even its American remake Quarantine all are good examples but mostly because they are interesting, they have a pace and the acting makes us believe people are terrified, which in turn terrifies us. Paranormal Activity wants to do all of these things but fails miserably at it.