Review: Paranormal Activity

The big problem with seeing a mega-hyped movie a few weeks after it opened in the theaters is that it can never live up to those heaping piles of hype. I had that experience with The Blair Witch Project many years ago and again this past weekend when I finally got to see Paranormal Activity.

From the way people have been talking about the film, rightly or wrongly I expected more from it -- specifically, more scares. It's not that the movie in completely ineffective, but it's certainly not effective enough as a ghost story to become a classic, as some have promoted it to be.

To be fair, I suppose we have to keep in mind that the movie was made on less than a shoestring budget, yet by the same token if it's going to be compared to big-budget Hollywood movies in terms of effectiveness, then it has to be judged on an equal footing with them. So by comparison I'd say that it was nowhere as effective, intense or frightening as a film such as The Exorcist. Or if you'd like to compare it to a more recent film that was also made in the same cinema vérité style, then Paranormal Activity does not approach the creepiness of the Spanish film [REC] (especially the ending).

Paranormal Activity worked to a degree when it was trying to depict what an actual poltergeist experience can be like, and it's somewhat interesting on that level. (Many of the paranormal phenomena the couple endure in the film really do happen, and I'll be discussing that in an upcoming blog: what the film got right and what it got wrong.) It was when the film attempted to get "really scary" toward the end that it fell apart for me, maybe because the filmmakers just didn't have the budget to pull it off. I'm not saying it needed better, more expensive special effects to work, but it seemed that's where they wanted to take it, but couldn't.

I certainly do not think a horror film needs elaborate digital effects to be frightening. The most effectively scary films work on a psychological level, and the terror is often created by what is not seen rather than what is seen. The 1963 version of The Haunting, Psycho and much of Jaws are good examples. Even a lot of what made The Exorcist so terrifying was its psychological grip on the audience rather than its disturbing effects.

I'm not recommending that you avoid the film. It's finding a wide audience, obviously, and I understand that a good number of people are having trouble sleeping in their bedrooms after seeing it. I did not find it particularly scary and left the theater disappointed. Maybe I'm jaded... or I've just been around this stuff too long.