Paranormal Activity

Don't see it alone? Don't see it at all...

Having recently set up an account at a postal movie rental service, I have decided to try and catch up on a few films I missed when they were released to cinemas, wether caused by not being born, inability to go to the cinema, or laziness. The first of these was Paranormal Activity (I think one of the latter two was responsible for missing this). Since I am over a year late on this particular movie I would expect most of you to know the general gist of the story, but for those who don't I shall quickly run through it. Basically an entity of some kind has followed Katie around since she was about 8. Now sometime in her 20s she is living with Micah and the entity is becoming increasingly badly behaved. The disbelieving Micah buys a camera so they can see what happens during the night. It is the footage from this camera that we see.

Now, I have been getting into horror movies a lot of late (mostly, it has to be said, dating back from the 30s through to the 70s) so I was really quite looking forward to it. It's been a while since I've been so disappointed by a movie. I was expecting a suspenseful tale of which Hitchcock himself would have been proud. I was hoping for a film to prove to the purveyors of torture-porn that gore isn't as scary as mood. Unfortunately, the filmmakers had only read a small part of the A-Z Guide to Creating Suspense deciding that the handheld camera would be enough to put people on edge. In modern cinema there seems to be just two kinds of horror movie, the ones where gore is thrown at you (Saw and the slasher remakes etc.), and ones where absolutely nothing happens till the last five minutes (this and all films in thrall to this). I'm sorry, but there's building suspense and then there's just boredom. The scare tactics consist of doors moving on their own and that kind of thing. That's all well and good, but there is no sense of menace or terror to accompany these small things. At no point did I feel at all scared. The Haunting is now almost 50 years old, yet is far more scary on every possible level. Speaking of which, this film is totally unimaginative. There are portions taken from The Haunting, there's the camera technique from Blair Witch, there are a few possession elements that are more than a little Excorcist-like as well as (SPOILER coming up now) more than a little of Ringu and the other Japanese avenging ghosts at the end.

And we haven't even talked about the characters yet. Initially Micah is the sceptic, whilst Katie believes. So why, then, do they swap roles on more than one occasion during the 90 minute run-time? Also, they are just unbelievably, unforgivably and unsympathetically stupid. Not only do they wander around for half the film trying to find the ghost/demon/whatever having already discovered that it cannot be seen, but they do so with the lights turned off. I mean, I don't know about you, but the first thing I do when I'm scared is turn all the lights on. At another point, they call a professional in and he advises them to see a demonologist. Micah decides that he can do a far better job, despite not knowing anything about this subject. But what's worse, is that he continues to do take this line despite the blindingly obvious fact that he is doing nothing but making it angrier.

I suppose the acting from Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat is perfectly acceptable, though nothing spectacular. And the Oren Peli's direction doesn't get in the way at all, it's just a really uninspired, overhyped 90 minutes of a door opening and closing and a couple running around with a camera around a massive house.

★★☆☆☆