A Haunting in October: "Paranormal Activity"

by Nick Taylor

Disclaimer: This review was originally penned via Oujia board by a nigh-unspeakable entity which used me as the vessel to transcribe its words.

Hello, uglies of The Film Experience! I’m very excited to debut our Halloween series, A Haunting in October. We’ll be devoting extra-special attention to films about ghosts, hauntings, and phenomena from beyond the grave. To kick off the proceedings, I’ll be starting with Paranormal Activity, which premiered in 2009 after two years of festival debuts and studio juggling to become a smash box-office hit, the pandora’s box for the past fifteen years of found footage horror, the origin point of a seven-film franchise (they released one in 2021???), and potentially the most profitable movie ever made. It’s a genuinely astonishing feat for a film shot in seven days with barely a script to its name. The best part? It’s actually scary, even if I have nits to pick.

A quick summary of the premise: A young couple named Katie and Micah (played by Katie Featherston and Micah Stoat) have been dating for several years and recently moved to a new house in San Diego. Recently, Katie claims she is being haunted by an evil presence. Micah’s response is to buy a video camera to document the potential otherworldly interactions, even as he’s plainly skeptical about his girlfriend’s testimony. Katie’s response is to call a psychic named Dr. Friedrichs to examine the house and the footage they’ve taken the night before. While he’s there, Katie confides that these hauntings first happened when she was a child and have intermittently antagonized throughout her life, taking breaks for nearly a decade at a time before returning to move inanimate objects or leer over her bed.

Dr. Friedrichs tells Katie the entity haunting her is not a ghost of some dead human but a fucking demon, an evil creature who intends to torment her and feed off her negative energy. Attempts to communicate with it will only encourage its violence. Dr. Friedrichs gives Katie the contact info of a demonologist who can help her, then ollies the fuck out of that house as politely and professionally as possible. Katie takes this seriously, and has every intention of calling the demonologist until Micah talks her out of it. He prefers to wave around his big, high-quality camera, pushing it in his girlfriend’s face and leaving it on at all times, confident that seeing the demon will somehow help him vanquish it.

This dynamic will functionally retain itself throughout the film, fluctuating in volume and tone as things escalate without deepening. The gendered dynamic of the wildly arrogant boyfriend stampeding over his girlfriend’s concerns despite every single arrow pointing towards her being right is retreaded well enough, but Katie and Micah’s personalities never register as all that developed or central to the film’s scares, and they’re awkwardly stuck in the realm between archetypes and more specific characters. They’re stuck in too many scenes of Katie protesting against the camera being on while Micah finds new and exhausting ways to invite the demon’s attention. Even if the actors don’t fumble the ball, they don’t always keep this stuff engaging. They do respond memorably to the demon, and Featherston unveils some great, terrified reactions and bone-deep despair as things get worse - the look on her face when she suddenly feels it breathing down her neck made me catch my breath.

My one real complaint is that I hate the decision to transition from one scene to the next by fading to black. So much of editing elsewhere is impressively inconspicuous, creating a sense that events are happening in real time, especially if you’re sucked into the movie’s uncanny power. But the blotting imposes a bizarre sense of discretion to each scene, like we’re watching the lights go down on a play as the actors redo the stage and rush to their marks. The demon’s spooky momentum keeps getting interrupted by the couple’s fracturing relationship and flailing strategies for protection, rather than the strands of day and night bleeding and rushing into each other.

All of this being said, Paranormal Activity is fucking scary. The different scenes of antagonizing Katie and Micah, of invading their beds to move them around, are fucking scary. I’m so glad none of that happened to me. As much as the camera quality probably allowed for “invisible” effects I have no idea how director Oren Peli managed to stage some of the demonic manifestations we see. A door swaying on its own is unexpectedly creepy, given how cliched as the image is. A character seemingly standing in front of their bed for over two hours, either staring at their partner or simply being held up like a puppet, is so upsetting, and that’s not even the most upsetting thing to get someone out of bed. The repeated, static shot of the couple in bed is eventually enough to put the viewer on edge, making you look around the empty space to see if anything is coming. We're not quite at taking Akerman-y domestic slow cinema into horror territory, but it's on the horizon if we can live long enough to see the sun rise.

Hopelessness weighs increasingly on the couple as things get worse, and it makes every simple gesture they take to comfort themselves feel like thin admissions of defeat. Sure, sleeping on the couch after the latest demonic activity in the bedroom makes some primal sense - if bad things are concentrated in a specific place, go somewhere else! - but we all know it’s futile. Katie is haunted, not the house, and her failure to act combined with Micah’s failure to act properly has doomed them both long before the credits roll.

So in the end, who cares if the demon mythology bullshit makes less than no impact on the film once it’s introduced? So what if Peli’s amateurishness isn’t always productive? He has a great sense for how this tale should look, sound, and move, and he create more of an impact with seemingly no money than films these days can create with too many millions of sludge. Paranormal Activity plays like fucking gangbusters. Even if I got annoyed, I got scared like I haven’t been in a hot minute, and boy does that count for a lot.

Paranormal Activity is currently streaming on Netflix, Paramount+, and Prime Video, and can be rented on most major digital media platforms.

Comments

[Travis C]

I saw this at a preview screening, and then managed to get two more tickets to another preview a week later, spo i could take a fellow horror freak to what i was describing as "one of the freaking scariest films i had seen in a long time". And I think my anticipation of that money shot scare near the end was worse than experiencing it for the first time!

[Mike in Canada]

Pretty sure this is the last time a movie genuinely kept me up at night.