Carnography

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)

Well, this is it. the final part of the official Paranormal Activity series. The Word of God itself - Oran Peli and Jason Blum - confirmed that there are to be no more episodes after this one, so I'm sure we're all expecting to get answers to all those unanswered questions, like what the demon army first brought up in The Marked Ones is for, or what the ultimate aims of Toby and the Midwives are. Oh, and it's also in 3D, because at some point nearly every horror series has to take a trip on that bandwagon, no matter how ill-advised. So welcome to Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension.

We start with a quick flashback to the end of Paranormal Activity 3, when poor Dennis got that free spine adjustment from Toby the demon. Toby then decides to do a bit of filming himself and picks up the camera as Katie and Kristi are introduced to another of Grandma Lois' friends, a man called Kent who says he's going to teach the girls how to use new powers to help Toby. We then jump to December 2013 and the family of Ryan and Emily and their daughter Leila. Also around is Emily's friend Skyler and Ryan's brother Mike (who's trying to rock a Tom Selleck moustache but doesn't quite have the face for it). While searching through boxes found in the basement, Ryan finds a whole lot of old VHS tapes and a strange video camera. the tapes are the ones stolen from Kristi's house that contained the story of Paranormal Activity 3, as well as new footage of the sisters being taught by Kent to apparently remote view into the future through Toby's eyes; the video camera is apparently able to capture ghosts on tape. At the same time, Leila starts talking to a new imaginary friend who goes by the name Toby, and her personality and behaviour begins to change dramatically. As the supernatural events start piling up Ryan and Emily try to find out what Toby wants with their daughter and how to stop him...

So then. After six movies and an increasingly convoluted plot (hauntings, possessions, covens with global reach who started in the Middle Ages, demonic armies, psychic powers and time travel) we finally get to find out what Toby's ultimate goal through all of this has been: he wants to become a Real Boy. I have to say, I'm not impressed. No explanations on the Midwives or the demon army they're building; no mention of how all this began, just Toby fulfilling his Pinocchio dream. And it's all been done in such a ridiculously complicated way. I'm pretty sure I could have come up with a far more efficient plan for this with 10 minutes and a pen and paper, but maybe Toby's an old fashioned sort and only believes in needlessly complicated rituals.

The big hook for this movie was that, at long last, we would finally be able to see Toby thanks to the magic camera (and the wonders of 3D). So what does he look like? Well, sometimes he looks like He Who Must Not Be Named, and the rest of the time he's a combination of evil Flubber and the smoke monster from Lost. that was something else that didn't exactly impress me, especially since they had Industrial Light and Magic onboard to do the effects - bumping up the budget to around $10 million in the process. Compared to the budget for the very first Paranormal Activity, that's a 10,000% increase in budget for a significantly reduced profit (The Ghost Dimension's box office was only $78.1 million worldwide. Ouch.)

In the end though, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is really just the same as Paranormal Activities 1,2,3 and 4 (The Marked Ones gets a pass for at least trying something new with the formula). There's a family, someone has a video camera, supernatural stuff starts happening, obsessive recording of everything happens, and everyone ends up dead or missing by the end. Even the majority of the jump scares are the same - oh look, there's a chandelier swinging. Oh look, there goes every cupboard and drawer in the kitchen at once. My kitten sat in front of the screen for several minutes while I was watching this, and I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything new during that time. Although I was mildly amused that the movie in which we are finally able to see Toby is the one where he finally gets himself worked up enough to inflict bleeding wounds on people.

There is one thing new in The Ghost Dimension, to be fair - an actual exorcism, by an actual priest... or at least a good attempt at one. No-one's head spins around or makes crude comments about what people's mothers might be doing in Hell, but I did feel a bit like they were trying to make a callback to The Exorcist. I did also feel a certain amount of glee when part of the exorcism involved drawing a Key of Solomon and using salt to try to trap Toby. In the end, their only flaw was that they didn't have enough firepower - I'm sure that the Winchester brothers and Castiel would have sorted Toby out with ease.

So the Paranormal Activity series comes to an end after six episodes as a damp squib, having long-overstayed its welcome and gotten way too far from its roots as a genuinely unnerving zero-budget found-footage horror. Yet another example of how a series gradually decreases in quality as the number of its sequels increases.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

If I was creating a flow chart or otherwise trying to keep track of the timeline of the Paranormal Activity movies like I did with the Friday the 13th movies, then Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones would probably be the point at which my brains started to leak out of my ears. Because this movie is where someone, in their infinite wisdom, decided that what this series needed in its fifth installment was time travel.

Jesse has just graduated from high school, and uses his graduation money to buy himself a video camera to capture all of the exploits that he and his best friend Hector get up to. One of the things they manage to get on tape though is the strange behaviour of one of Jesse's neighbours, Ana, who is said to be a bruja, or witch. When Ana is murdered, apparently by high school valedictorian Oscar, Jesse and Hector break into Ana's apartment to investigate. Jesse suffers a strange bite on his arm, and soon after starts manifesting strange powers. Things seem fun at first, but they soon turn sinister as Jesse's behaviour starts to change and the supernatural activity increases and becomes more and more dangerous. It turns out that Ana was connected somehow to the coven linked to the previous movies, and Jesse and Oscar had been "marked" somehow -but for what? Can Jesse be saved, and what is the coven't ultimate plan for Jesse and others like him?

So yeah, time travel. Because things weren't convoluted enough already in this series, what with the covens and mysterious children and even more mysterious adoptions and so on. On the positive side, we get to see Micah get killed again, this time from a different angle, so not everything is bad... In all honesty, the time travel section of the plot is actually only a small part of the whole movie and they do try to keep things neat and (mostly) explainable, but it's also yet another supernatural addition to a canon that's already straining at the seams with them.

Honestly, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones feels like one of those episodes near the end of a TV series or season, where they're trying to tie up as many loose ends and plot points as possible before the big season finale. As well as Micah's brief cameo (and Katie with him, obviously), we also get to see Grandma Lois, her house, young Katie and Kristi and an appearance from Ali Rey from Paranormal Activity 2 - she's now apparently a demon hunter and on the trail of the coven at the centre of all this, which is also how we finally get some information on their background. The coven is apparently known as "the Midwives" and their influence is apparently global. They spend most of their time brainwashing pregnant women and selecting first-born sons to become the "Marked Ones" of the movie's title to become part of a demonic army. What's this demon army for? That's anyone's guess, because it's not mentioned here. Maybe we'll find out in the next movie. Until then I'm imagining it to be something like the KISS Army.

I think there were two main reasons why I never really became engaged with The Marked Ones. One reason was the basic plot - we've seen the "individual(s) get strange new powers via mysterious means; after initial fun it turns bad for them" storyline numerous times before, most notably in Chronicle and Afflicted - both of which did it far better as well. So it's hardly treading new ground. the second reason is that our protagonists, Jesse and Hector, probably couldn't outthink a box of hair. Now, the "idiot protagonist" trope is pretty common and is often used successfully to move a narrative along when people would normally not put themselves in specific situations, but in this case it's the protagonists' stupidity (breaking into a house that is not only a murder scene but is supposedly the former home of a witch that they were afraid of) that actually starts their problems. It's therefore difficult to feel too much sympathy for them. Personally I was more attached to two secondary characters - Jesse's grandmother Irma, who didn't speak a word of English but was a pretty badass grandma not afraid to do an exorcism when things got bad; and Oscar's brother and local gang member Arturo, who was ready and willing to suit up and pull a gang raid (of two people, but still) on coven headquarters with no questions asked. If a future Paranormal Activity film was the coven versus the gangs of LA, I'd certainly watch it.

There's a couple of new effects in The Marked Ones - mainly the warping of time and space for teleportation, a possessed "Simon Says" machine and a scene in which a chihuahua is pinned to the ceiling by a demon (since Toby's not in this one I'm calling this demon... Simon) and tortured (the dog survives), just for the hell of it. Seriously, these demons do not like dogs. But it doesn't really answer any questions and in fact leaves us with more than we started with - what is the deal with the demon army? Why are some males like Hunter taken as children, and others like Jesse taken as adults? Just how much influence does this coven have at this point anyway? Other than the shoutouts to the previous films, The Marked Ones feels like little more than a stopgap while we wait for the next film to come out and hopefully explain all this.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

I had to take a couple of days off from this for personal reasons, and when it came time to get back into things with the next film in the series I found myself really not looking forward to it. As I've already said, I thought that they had wrapped things up quite well with the ending of Paranormal Activity 2, and then again with Paranormal Activity 3. So I really couldn't see where they were going to go with the story with Paranormal Activity 4.

It's Halloween 2011, five years after the events of the first two films (and 23 years after the third, in case you're counting), and we're now following a new family, which includes six-year-old Wyatt and his teenage sister Alex. In a change from the previous films, this time it's a female protagonist who's obsessed with filming everything, although she's helped in this by her friend and would-be boyfriend Ben. When new neighbours move in across the road from them it isn't long before they meet one of them, Robbie, a somewhat odd child who nethertheless becomes friends with Wyatt despite Alex's misgivings. Robbie ends up staying with the family for several nights after his mother is allegedly taken into hospital, and once he's there strange things start happening almost immediately - from strange noises to disappearing and reappearing knives and falling chandeliers - not to mention Robbie's invisible friend Toby. Just who are Robbie and his mother, and just what do they want with Wyatt?

Well, I think we can safely say that the fridge has been well and truly nuked in this series now. It's ridiculously clear that we're all supposed to think that Robbie is actually a six-year-old Hunter, so no-one should be surprised at all when it turns out to be Wyatt instead. Regardless of any inevitable revelations in the film though, the plot to Paranormal Activity 4 is a hot mess: why has Toby and/or the coven (because yes, of course they're back too) waited five years before launching into the next stage of their plan, especially when they clearly had everything they wanted at the end of the second movie? The whole set-up for this movie seems ridiculously contrived and reliant on way too many variables to happen just right for things to work. How come no-one has recognised Katie for the last five years, seeing as she's clearly not hiding (she's even top billing in the credits)? How is Alex and Wyatt's mother so unbelievably and willfully blind to what is going on around her and neglectful of her children? And where the hell did Robbie come from? Does the coven rent out children for special occasions?

I could go on with these questions, but I think I've made my point. Tl;dr - the plot for this movie is a disaster.

This time around, Paranormal Activity 4 is shot mainly with webcams and chat windows, with one additional camera with night vision for that eerie green glow that we've come to expect from found-footage films. The movie's big tech gimmick this time though is the use of an XBox Kinect sensor, which makes everyone look like they have radioactive smallpox when the camera is in night vision mode, but also picks things up that the regular camera mode can't see. So we get glimpses of what we can assume to be Toby the unfortunately-named demon, and he appears to be either a tall black shadow or a small boy, possibly depending on his mood. To be fair, the Kinect-o-Vision is a nice touch and a clever use of technology, but it's also quite clearly nothing more than a one-off gimmick, to be used for this movie and then never spoken of again.

We also learn a few more things about Toby the demon himself in this movie. He now knows how to use a computer to change passwords (thus explaining away why no-one looks at the recorded footage of supernatural things happening and promptly runs out of the house screaming), doesn't seem to mind cats and strangely isn't too fond of gore, as shown with a sequence involving a kitchen knife flying up to the ceiling in one scene and then teasing us with the possibility of it falling down again and impaling someone for several more scenes, but it chickens out at the last moment. But at least that sequence actually does deliver on the promise of Chekov's Kitchen Knife; earlier on in the movie Robbie shows us his "special fork" that he's brought with him and I spent the rest of the film waiting for it to come back into play. Nothing. He doesn't even eat with it, let alone stab anyone with it, and we've talked before about the dangers of putting things into your film that you're just not going to bother to explain or bring up again. It only worked for the three seashells because that was the joke.

Paranormal Activity 4 is the point in the Paranormal Activity series where all but the most die-hard of fans have probably stopped and said, "Yeah, this sequel didn't really add anything to the series." And aside from cash, it doesn't - it brings nothing new to the series mythos other than questions; it relies on characters being remarkably stupid and/or self-absorbed to move the plot along, and it's clearly coasting on the success of the previous films. And yet this isn't even the end...

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

I have a confession to make. Until I started this franchise review, I hadn't watched any of the Paranormal Activity movies after the first two. They just didn't hold any interest for me after the second one, which as I said in my review of it felt like it wrapped things up quite neatly and didn't leave too many unanswered questions that would necessitate the series continuing. So I wasn't impressed when Paranormal Activity 3 was announced, although I did think that it was good that it was at least a prequel rather than a sequel, because really, where else could they go with that story?

(Foreshadowing, ha ha ha.)

So, it's September 1988 and this time we're following the exploits of young Katie and Kristi, along with their mother Julie and her boyfriend Dennis. Dennis shoots wedding videos for a living, which gives the film the excuse to have cameras all over the house constantly filming everything. After Dennis thinks he captures something strange on one video though, he decides to set up cameras throughout the house, and so of course it isn't long before he's catching strange and supernatural activity on tape. The vast majority of it seems to centre around the two girls - Kristi in particular. She has an imaginary friend named Toby who might not be all that imaginary, and who develops quite the mean streak as time goes on. Add to the mix Julie's mother Lois who may or may not be connected to the witch cult/coven that was brought up in the last movie and the questions become: just what is Toby and what does he want with the girls, and just how connected is this mysterious coven to everything?

Being a prequel, Paranormal Activity 3 fills in a lot of background details of the series and its characters. For example, we learn that Katie and Kristi probably both ended up in relationships with men who liked playing with cameras because their mother dated a guy like that; and we learn that the demon terrorizing this family for decades is apparently called Toby. That's right, Toby. Not Pazuzu or Azazel or Baghul or anything like that - Toby. No wonder he's in such a bad mood for most of the film.

There's quite a few sly nods to Poltergeist in Paranormal Activity 3 as well. Julie and Dennis smoke pot in bed; a TV turns itself on to just static in the middle of the night; and the closet in the girls' room abruptly becomes a vortex that trues to suck them in at one point. There's also a clever little scene in the kitchen that I thought was going to be a shout-out to the chair-stacking scene in Poltergeist but it most certainly wasn't, and it even gave me a bit of a scare.

Where Paranormal Activity 3 falls down, at least for me, is with some of its characters. The girls are fine, and Dennis deserves his own paragraph which he'll get shortly, but then there's Julie and her mother. Firstly we have Julie, a woman so deeply in denial that she's hopefully wearing some good waders. Despite experiencing some of the supernatural goings-on herself, she stubbornly refuses to believe that anything strange is going on, refusing to watch even a single tape, until Toby decides to give her a big demonstration (and why did Toby do that anyway? Surely it would have been easier for him to make sure she remained in blissful ignorance of everything?). It gets to the point where you have to wonder if she can't help but deny it - it gets brought up for five seconds that the mystery coven apparently brainwashes people to keep them silent when they're not drawing all over people's walls and meeting up in garden sheds with all the lights off. And then there's Grandma Lois, who only appears a few times in the movie but might as well be wearing a neon sign that says, "I am (not so) secretly a villain" when she does. There was just something so off about her that it really did threaten to ruin the film's inevitable climax for me.

On the other hand, there's Dennis, who is quite probably the most sympathetic male protagonist we've had so far in this series. At first he seems just like every other man-with-a-camera we've seen, just wanting to catch something supernatural on the tape because it would be cool, but as the film progresses we see that not only does he love Julie, he really loves the girls as well. He has tea parties with them, he stays in the house when things are seriously going down even though he doesn't really have to, and he's even willing to put himself in danger for the girls... Dennis, we salute you. It's just a shame that the life expectancy of male protagonists in this series is so low...

I the end, Paranormal Activity 3 is better than I expected it to be; maybe even better than it should have been all things considered. Some people were angry that the movie's trailer was less a trailer and more of a brief clipshow of footage that doesn't actually appear in the movie, but look at it this way: if that's the case the trailer's not going to be a spoiler, is it?

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Related articles

Poltergeist (1982)

Paranormal Activity (2007)

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) - Carnography

Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night (2010)

Bonus time! While there are officially only six parts to the Paranormal Activity series, there are also a lot of parodies, spoofs and ripoffs as well. Most of these are just unfunny spoof "horror" movies (where the horror comes with seeing what passes for humour in them), or people hoping to cash in on the trend that the first movie started with a similarly-named film, but occasionally there's one that stands out. Like today's movie, a J-horror "sidequel" to the first Paranormal Activity - Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night.

Student Haruka Yamano comes back home to Tokyo after a car accident in America leaves her in a wheelchair with two broken legs. Her brother and father are there to look after her, but as her father has to travel for business it ends up being just her and her brother Koichi in the house. It isn't long before strange things are happening in the house, and so Koichi sets up cameras to catch anything supernatural going on. As events gradually get worse they call in a Shinto priest to do a purification ritual on the house; when that doesn't work they look into the woman who was involved in Haruka's car accident in the US - Katie Featherston, who was apparently attempting to escape after killing her boyfriend when the accident happened. It seems as though the spirit/demon that was attached to Katie has now set its sights on Haruka - but can they stop it?

Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night is really just what would have happened if, instead of events unfolding as they did at the end of the "official" Paranormal Activity 2, the demon had decided to take a holiday in Japan instead. It's certainly an interesting concept; a fusion of Eastern and Western supernatural horror tropes - the Western-style haunting/possession combined with the Asian concept of evil spirits attaching themselves to people who get too close to them, a la Ju-on. By the climax too, when Haruka has been (inevitably - don't tell me you didn't see it coming) possessed, her hair covers most of her face with only one eye visible - an image we've seen before in Asian horror. I also liked the little touch when, after the Shinto ritual has failed, Koichi goes online to research Western demonology, even using a wooden crucifix to try to keep the demon at bay (for all the good it does).

From a cinematic standpoint, Tokyo Night is shot very similarly to the original Paranormal Activity. It even starts with our male protagonist playing with a new video camera that he's just bought before going to film the arrival home of the female protagonist. After that, it's not too long before we have the fixed cameras set up in bedrooms - two this times, so we can utilise some split-screen technology - and we're once again viewing night vision footage where everything is tinted blue. Even certain scenes in the climax are almost exactly like the original, with bodies being thrown at the camera from open doorways - although to give the movie credit, it does add a good amount of original content in there as well.

But Tokyo Night does manage to generate the same dread that the original movie did - watching the night time footage and seeing the clock slow down to normal speed, we know that something is about to happen, trying to anticipate where the first sign of it will be - the door? The bed? A sudden noise? The cast is minimal as well, keeping us from getting distracted, and while Haruka only seems to have one setting when she's afraid and that's of a screaming hyperventilating woman, everyone else's responses are more or less realistic (put the damn camera down, Koichi!). The brief appearance of a psychic friend who is sent into a fit, foaming at the mouth, after only a few minutes in the house, is a good touch as well. On the other hand, one or two of the other supernatural events are little too drawn out - Koichi trying to use a crucifix to keep the demon at bay was a good touch, but after it's been dragged slowly around the floor for a minute or so, while windows smash all around it before it catches fire, all I could think of was the demon muttering something about how, in all the places in Japan, he manages to find the one place with a crucifix, and breaking the windows out of frustration.

Tokyo Night was made with Oran Peli's blessing, and it's an interesting alternate take on the story - made before things like deals with demons and witch cults had come into play. It's not a perfect film, but its attempt to take the story in a new direction has to be lauded, especially as it manages to keep things simple and yet retains much of the dread that made the original film such a success. And it also gives us the horrifying scene of a woman walking impossibly on broken legs a full five years before the Insidious franchise thought of it.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Related articles

Ringu (1998)

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

Paranormal Activity 2 was announced in 2009, shortly after the general release of the first film; Paramount was that convinced that they had a bankable series on their hands (see also what I said about the ending of the first movie being such obvious sequel bait). The movie also stands out in that it's sometimes referred to as a "parallel sequel" to the first movie - some events take place before the events of the first film, some take place at the same time as the first film, and some take place after (although as the two films do intersect, it's technically not "parallel"). So technically Paranormal Activity 2 is both a prequel and a sequel.

So this time around we're following the Rey family - Daniel, his teenage daughter Ali, his new wife Kristi and their new baby Hunter as they move into their new home in California. the connection to the first film is that Kristi is Katie's sister, and indeed we get little cameos from both her and Micah in the film once or twice. After their house is apparently broken into and ransacked (but nothing is taken) Daniel installs CCTV throughout the house for security, and so it isn't long before the cameras are capturing all the supernatural goings-on: from the minor - the pool cleaner removing itself from the pool every night - to the far more disturbing - an invisible force trying to pull Hunter from his cot at night. This time around the haunting seems focused on Kristi and Hunter, and as things get worse more of the possible background to all of this is revealed. But can it all be stopped before it's too late?

Being (technically) a sequel, Paranormal Activity 2 was in the situation of needing to deliver bigger and better shocks and effects than the first film, while still remaining true to the film's origins - no small task considering the reaction that the original Paranormal Activity received. So this time, instead of one unwieldy and mostly static camera that mostly covered one room, we now have multiple fixed cameras throughout the house so that we can follow the action in multiple rooms and various angles. We also get an uptick in the intensity of the supernatural goings-on; now we see furniture moving by itself and people and dogs getting attacked by invisible forces (the entity at the centre of all of this not being very fond of dogs, apparently). For the most part these evolutions of the series work well, although there are a couple of missteps.

The exposition dump is one of these missteps. Now it's fine for a film to reveal some details on the background of what is going on - even more so in a sequel. But the way it's done in Paranormal Activity 2 that's the problem. Suspicious of everything that's going on, teenage daughter Ali heads to Google and the explanation is pretty much the first hit. Now not only is this movie cliche convenient, it also takes away some of the mystery and dread of the situation, and not just because it's so easily discovered. Sometimes things are scarier when you don't know why they're happening; like whatever supernatural force haunting our protagonists decided to do so randomly out of boredom.

The second problem I had with Paranormal Activity 2 is the way they choose to deal with the problem/haunting. First of all, in the early parts of the film they have a Hispanic housekeeper, who of course is the first one to sense something is amiss and who ends up getting fired after she tried to cleanse the house with burning sage (zero tolerance towards funny smells in the house?). When things inevitably go south though, they bring her back, and her solution (spoilers for those recently recovered from comas again) is to pass the haunting on to someone else - specifically Katie. And Daniel Rey goes along with this with barely any hesitation. now an argument can be made that he's naturally more concerned with his wife and child's safety at this point and it's more of a Sophie's Choice situation, but even after he's done it he shows absolutely no interest in what he's done - Kristi and Hunter are fine, so it's just not his problem any more. He just doesn't give a crap that, by what he knows, he's damned his sister-in-law to demonic possession. It makes it very difficult to maintain any sympathy for him and his family after that, which we're supposed to have as they're the protagonists.

Aside from those two points though, Paranormal Activity 2 is still a good film. the atmosphere of dread is still there, heightened by the dramatic irony now as we already have a good idea of what is going to happen this time around. Following the rules of sequels too, the movie also ups his game with the ghostly happenings while still refraining from going hog wild with the CGI - my personal favourite is the scene where every cupboard and drawer flies open and throws its contents at Kristi when she's in the kitchen, which I'm pretty sure had my flying two feet off my seat. Overall, Paranormal Activity 2 is a good sequel, and manages to tie up the ends of the two films pretty neatly. Not that that was going to stop anyone from going forwards anyway...

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

Paranormal Activity (2007)

It's January 1st 2017, which means that not only is this blog now entering its fourth glorious year, it's also time for another franchise marathon. This time around we're looking at the series that started the resurgence in found-footage horror films - the Paranormal Activity series.

After a brief police disclaimer we are introduced to our protagonists, Katie and Micah. Micah has just bought a large and rather unwieldy video camera so he can try to document some of the apparent paranormal phenomena that have recently started happening in their home. Katie is less than thrilled with this, and not just because of the size and obtrusiveness of the camera - there were apparently similar incidents of paranormal activity in her life as a child which disturbed her greatly, and she feels that what ever haunted her then has come back for another go. Over the following few weeks we see Micah's footage as he captures various incidents on film - from doors opening and closing by themselves and light fittings swaying to far more sinister and dangerous goings-on. Just what is happening to Katie and Micah, and can it be stopped?

As I said above, Paranormal Activity started a resurgence (I debated whether or not to use the term "renaissance" there, but I think that term generally implies universally good content) in the found-footage horror subgenre. It might have started back in 1999 - or 1980 if you want to be pedantic - but it wasn't really until after the first Paranormal Activity movie that just about everyone with a video camera (bonus points if it had a night vision mode) wanted to make their own found-footage movie.

Part of the attraction for this was the incredibly low budget for the film. The director of Paranormal Activity, Oran Peli (who was also the writer, one of the producers, the cinematographer, the editor, the set dresser and the costume designer since it was his house they were shooting in), spent no more than $15,000 on the film: its eventual box office was somewhere around $193.4 million, making it one of, if not the, most profitable films ever made based on return of investment (it competes for the top slot with The Blair Witch Project, of course). Its release at Halloween 2009 also dethroned the Saw franchise as the Halloween horror movie king. Paranormal Activity really was the little zero-budget blockbuster that every film student dreams of making.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the making of Paranormal Activity though is that we very nearly didn't get to see it (in this form at least). After the film premiered at Sundance in 2007, it was bought up by Paramount, who had plans to remake it with a bigger budget and big-name actors, consigning the original to being nothing more than a DVD extra. They changed their minds about this, however, when they saw people walking out of the test screening because the film was too scary for them (reportedly Steven Spielberg had to stop watching it in his home and finish it the next day for the same reason), and decided to release the original film instead.

So what does make Paranormal Activity so effectively scary? Quite simply, it captures dread incredibly well. With minimal special effects, a (mostly) fixed camera and absolutely no "mood music" or anything to artificially set the scene, Paranormal Activity manages to make its audience hold its breath in terrified anticipation every time night rolls around. Never before had watching two people sleep been so nerve-wracking, as you know that whenever you see that sped-up recording slow down to "normal" time that something bad is going to happen. The fact that we're aware of these things happening before the protagonists do also effectively heightens the tension. Finally, director Peli understands how to properly use that old piece of storytelling advice - "less is more" - not only is there nothing else going on to distract us from the supernatural goings-on, but what we aren't shown of the haunting leaves us with only our imagination to fill in the gaps, and what we can imagine is nearly always worse than what we can be shown.

Paranormal Activity isn't a perfect film. Micah is probably one of the most annoying and unlikable protagonists to appear in film in recent years, and of the three potential endings that were shot (Katie committing suicide; Katie being shot by cops; and demonic Katie eating the camera), none of them were particularly brilliant and the one they eventually went for was clearly sequel bait (and if you've just woken from an 11+ year coma but haven't yet caught up on your movies, then sorry for the spoiler there), but it's still a good film, a genuinely scary film (something of a rarity in this age of CGI and jump scares) and, back when it came out, an original film. The fact that it spawned what it did should not be held against it.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Related articles

Poltergeist (1982)