Film review: Paranormal Activity

Published on Thursday 26 November 2009 19:40

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (15) **** DIRECTED BY: OREN PELI STARRING: KATIE FEATHERSTON, MICAH SLOAT, MARK FREDRICHS

• Katie Featherton plays a woman who has been plagued by strange occurrences for most of her life

WITH Paranormal Activity, first-time film-maker Oren Peli proves once again that the horror genre is at its most robust, innovative and effective when minimal amounts of money are involved.

Ten years on from The Blair Witch Project, the last benchmark DIY effort to make a serious impact on the mainstream, Peli has taken the camcorder "found footage" device used to such brilliant effect in that film and delivered a creepy, unsettling little shocker, the premise of which is so simple aspiring film-makers the world over will be slapping themselves on the forehead for not thinking of it first.

Also like Blair Witch, it has managed to capitalise on new media and good old-fashioned word of mouth to scare up audience interest, grossing more than $100 million (60m) at the US box office to date, from an initial budget of $15,000 (9,000).

Cynics can sniff all they want that this is just clever marketing from its US distributor Paramount, who exploited Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to generate demand for the film. But that doesn't change the fact that, unlike last year's "found footage" monster movie Cloverfield, this didn't begin as a studio- initiated "word of mouth" campaign.

Paranormal Activity is not a major multimillion-dollar production masquerading as an under-the-radar phenomenon. Peli raised the budget himself, shot the film in his own San Diego suburban home, spent a year editing it on his PC and first unleashed it on an unsuspecting audience at a small LA festival dedicated to home-made horror more than two years ago.

The reason it works so well is that Peli has a clear understanding of the limitations imposed by his lack of resources – and a canny way of turning them to his advantage.

The plot, for instance, doesn't require any major effects-heavy set pieces. Having been plagued by nightmares and strange occurrences for most of her life, San Diego college student Katie (Katie Featherton) agrees to let her stockbroker boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat) set up a video camera in their bedroom to find out what's going bump in the night.

That's it. There's no blood, no gore, no motion-sickness-inducing shaky-cam footage; just lots of tension as Peli lets progressively stranger events play out in long static takes that encourage us to constantly explore the entire frame for signs of ghostly goings-on while Katie and Micah sleep.

At first, the disturbances are subtle, the sorts of things you can't be sure are actually happening: did that bedroom door move? Was that rumbling sound really a spectral presence? But gradually things get weirder and more explicitly disturbing.

What's more, because the cheap jump-cuts of horror cinema have programmed us to expect jolts and shocks at every turn, suddenly being confronted by the fixed focus of a single camera intensifies the disconcerting atmosphere by constantly encouraging our minds to play tricks on us and doubt what we're seeing – or at least find rational explanations for what we're seeing.

Peli smartly reinforces this effect by including footage of Katie and Micah reviewing the footage that we've just witnessed. They effectively become voyeurs of their own life, and the damaging effect this starts to have on their relationship propels the film forward in fascinating ways.

When we're not watching the pair of them sleeping – or watching them watching themselves sleeping – what we get is a fascinating insight into the machinations of modern coupledom, one that also cleverly interrogates and subverts the traditional gender- delineated role of victims and villains in horror cinema.

When we're first introduced to Katie and Micah, for instance, it's through the lens of a top-of-the-line digital video camera that Micah has splashed out on – partly because he wants to help Katie determine what might be happening to her, but really, you suspect, because he clearly sees Katie's fears as a good excuse to embark on a gadget-strewn project with which he can have some boys-and-their-toys fun.

He wants to play the role of the cynical goofball and the heroic saviour, and even though Katie is clearly uncomfortable about this development, he uses the fact that she never mentioned her possible demonic possession to him before they moved in together to subtly bully her into agreeing.

When things start spinning out of control, however, Micah seems to regard the whole thing as a personal slight on his manhood and redoubles his efforts to confront the problem by documenting more and more of their lives together.

It's a neat way for Peli to justify why a supposedly ordinary person would keep a camera rolling when their life is possibly in danger, though credit must be given to Featherton and Sloat, too. Their naturalistic performances make it easy to believe Katie and Micah are a real couple, one just starting to discover all those flaws and irritations that have to be worked through if a relationship is to last.

Of course, no matter how realistic it seems, no film can now get away with fooling audiences into thinking it's actually real (a hoax Blair Witch briefly managed to perpetrate). To its credit, Paranormal Activity doesn't really try. Instead, it concentrates on proving that, when done right, horror films still have the capacity to scare us by playing on our primal fears in the simplest way possible.

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