Paranormal Activity: Movie Review

Direction: Oren Peli

Cast: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs

Genre: Horror, Thriller

Rating: ** 1/2

Much against the immense international hype, Paranormal Activity isn’t one of the scariest films of all times though it is spooky enough to leave you sleepless for sometime. Like its distant cult-cousin The Blair Witch Project, this too is a small-budget, single-setting, horror film shot in a docu-drama format with a hand-held camera.

The movie tries to induce a realistic effect with retaining everything from the actual camera frames to character names of the couple. Katie and Micah (those are their real names too) move into a new two-storey apartment in San Diego wherein Katie is disturbed by a demonic presence almost every night.

She claims it’s got nothing to do with the apartment but with herself since the entity has been haunting her since childhood. Micah buys a video camera to capture the proceedings of the entire night by leaving it on atop a tripod in their bedroom. Through the recordings they realize that night after night the paranormal activity in their house is increasing.

Paranormal Activity isn’t designed as a slasher flick that relies on blood, gore, sex or violence to induce horror. Neither does it resort to alarming your reflexes through standard shock tactics of sound effects or camera angles for the spooky effect. But then again it doesn’t scare you through its story.

It distinctly terrifies the audience with their sense of anticipation on the thought of what’s going to happen next. That works fairly well to the film’s advantage as you hold your breath with horror hopes every time the couple goes to sleep. Interestingly despite the lack of a defined storyline and the solitary bedroom setting, the film still keeps you riveted.

Apart from teasing your anticipation, the venue of the film can make you carry the horror to home. The inescapable bedroom setting makes you relate to the fear more and could give sleepless nights to the faint-hearted.

Every single scene in the film is the footage recorded on Micah’s camcorder, manually operated by him to the extent that the film doesn’t have a cinematographer on its credit list. Interestingly the confinements of camera and the static viewpoint it gives to the film never makes you miss on the horror. Also there is absolutely no use of background score with the sound only restricted to whatever is recorded on the camera. That adds to the authenticity of the film’s docu-drama feel.

But in upholding the docu-drama feel, the film intentionally steers away from having a cohesive and tangible plotline leaving the entire episode as an unsolved mystery. Though you see that coming, at the end it leaves a lot to be desired. The basic buildup given to the mystery through Katie’s background account, her charred childhood photograph in the attic, the inscription on Ouija board and a demonologist who never comes into picture do not contribute to the narrative.

The performance of the lead couple in the five-member cast is commendable. Both Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat are convincing as the troubled couple who don’t look one-bit fake or fabricated while facing their own camera. However they don’t look as paranoid as one would have expected them to after their continual creepy experiences. Perhaps director Oren Peli wanted to keep the shade subtle by showing the couple having come to terms with the entity in their house.

At the end, Paranormal Activity is an experiment without a conclusion.