Paranormal Activity (2009)

Alfred Hitchcock once opined, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” The latest in the shaky-cam horror genre, Paranormal Activity, consists of a lot of anticipation with a feeble but well-intentioned bang at the end.


We have 1999’s The Blair Witch Project to thank for this new subgenre of horror flicks, in which the camerawork is as much of a character as the actual people in the film. This is the genre that brought us Cloverfield (good), Quarantine (bad) and of course Blair Witch (ugly despite its inventiveness). Paranormal Activity falls somewhere between good and ugly, sadly falling short of its “scariest movie ever” hype (nice try, Time magazine).

New faces Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat play fictionalized versions of themselves in a seemingly haunted house. We quickly learn that Katie has been haunted since the age of eight, and the house is just the latest dwelling for something more demonic than a mere ghost.


The star of the film isn’t Featherston, who does a more than serviceable job being frightened out of her wits. It’s not Sloat, who brings a fun and slightly cynical attitude to a genre that sometimes takes itself too seriously. The real star is the camera that Micah purchases to document the titular paranormal activity that’s running rampant in the house.


Consequently, the nighttime scenes punctuated only by a timestamp are the most compelling in the 90-some minutes of the film. Katie and Micah prop a camera by their bedside before turning in for the night, and the ensuing footage forms the emotional backbone of the movie. The special effects shine (to reveal these effects would be to spoil some of the film’s more terrifying surprises), and you’ll never again look at those things that go bump in the night the same way.


If the film put more of an emphasis on these nocturnal hauntings, it might very well have been the scariest movie of the year (and heck, it might be anyway, when we consider that horror flicks tend to put more of an emphasis on chests over deaths).


But Paranormal Activity suffers from the same tendencies that irreparably hurt Blair Witch - namely, scenes in which characters recover from hauntings and try to explain what’s happening to them dominate the picture. Katie and Micah spend far too much time being afraid and not enough time being frightened; there’s a semantic but important distinction, and it makes all the difference as to whether the audience is bored or terrified.


For comparative purposes, look to 2008’s The Strangers, in which masked murderers stalked Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman in their cabin retreat. There the protagonists spent the entire movie terrified, and so did the audience. Where Paranormal Activity lets us breathe between frights, The Strangers never let up, with its omnipresent killers crouching in every shadow. The ghost/demon/whatever-it-is haunting Katie and Micah only comes out at night.


But it’s not all boring. The film hits a few great bangs, sometimes literally. Footfalls, creaks and tricks of the light (especially an ominous blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shadow) are more terrifying than anything you’ll see in the Saw series, in which the only thing left that’s still frightening is that the franchise hasn’t been euthanized.


But if Paranormal Activity marks the death knell of the shaky cam genre, it’s an appropriate bookend. Blair Witch wasn’t scary at all, but it showed some potential. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, cashes in on that potential but still leaves something to be desired as far as quantitative scares go.


At least, that’s what I’ll tell myself until the next time I hear a creaky floorboard in the middle of the night.



Paranormal Activity gets a spooky "R for language," which includes a few heat-of-the-moment F-bombs but does not include the bangs and jump moments for which the film is infamous.