Paranormal Activity Review: A Marketing Masterpiece, But Stingy on the Scares
The story goes that in early 2008, Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio was trying to decide whether it wanted to be involved with a microbudgeted supernatural thriller. Spielberg had taken a Paranormal Activity DVD to his Pacific Palisades estate, and not long after he watched it, the door to his empty bedroom inexplicably locked from the inside. Spooked, Spielberg immediately summoned a locksmith. The next day, colleagues say, a still-terrified Spielberg brought the movie back to DreamWorks in a garbage bag.
Then, following two weeks of nationwide midnight-screening sellouts and more than a million people from around the country logging on to ParanormalMovie.com to demand that the film play in their city, Paramount Pictures (finally!) overcame their superstitious heebie-jeebies and decided to release the film nationwide — as if they weren’t going to do that all along!
Two genius marketing moves, if you ask me, because Paranormal Activity is not even the scariest movie of the decade (see 2007′sThe Orphanage for that), let alone the “scariest movie EVER!” Still, let’s extend well-deserved kudos to writer-director-producer-everything Oren Peli. This movie was shot over seven days in Peli’s house, on a budget of $15,000, and its domestic box office total is currently sitting at a healthy $38,564,750. And he even got the the lead actor to be the camera operator! Hard to argue with that.
The plot is astutely simple. Katie (Katie Featherston) and boyfriend Micah are disturbed by noises in their San Diego home. Micah (Micah Sloat) believes it is his responsibility as the man of the house to determine the source of these noises and get them to stop, so he sets up a night-vision video camera to monitor the room as they sleep.
These creepy nocturnal scenes are cleverly juxtaposed with claustrophobic yet mundane day scenes in the suburban home, which not only serve to deliver a post-mortem of the previous night’s footage, but also document the slowly unraveling relationship between the two 20-somethings. Discord is inevitable, as Micah’s enjoyment of his paranormal moviemaking adventure is in direct proportion to Katie’s concern that something really awful is going to happen.
Katie’s fears are confirmed when a psychic is summoned to the house and quickly determines that he is not qualified to deal with the presence because he senses it is demonic and not human. He hopes Micah will take to heart his warning not to antagonize it. But as the psychic leaves, Micah makes the judgment that the guy is “a fruit.” Let the games begin …
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the less-is-more strategy. I still think The Shining and The Sixth Sense are two of the scariest movies I have ever seen. But I can’t help but feel that, the final moment aside, the scares in this movie were a little too repetitive. After a really nice slow build-up in the first two acts, I wanted more jumpy moments and more violence in the final act and not just one moment of it before the credits.
Still, I don’t think that was my main issue with the experience. No, my main issue was the guy sitting behind me wolfing down popcorn and trying to verbally pre-empt the action on the screen. It took me out of the movie, reminding me that I was sitting in a movie theater and not in a creepy house. It reminded me that I had security in numbers, that I was in no immediate threat. Play me this movie again at night, alone, in an empty house with its own creaks and groans, and I might well upgrade its rank on the scare-o-meter.
And I’m sure that’s exactly how Paramount will market this movie, come DVD-release time. Ka-ching!
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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