I finally got around to “Paranormal Activity” last night, which has been scaring audiences nationwide for about a week now. The film sat on a shelf for two years, terrifying Steven Spielberg, awaiting a release of some sort, primed for a remake at one point, and finally made its way into the marketplace last week with an innovative, experimental distribution strategy. All the inside baseball was covered well in this 9/20 John Horn piece in the Los Angeles Times.
I wasn’t going to write about it. It’s certainly not an awards film, of course, but I just kind of wanted to have a good time at a midnight screening and let it be that. But I was still wide awake at 3:45am last night, demanding my girlfriend to stay awake with me on Skype (which actually made things creepier given the cinematographic composition of a Skype video chat).
The film is repetitive on one hand, but that repetition lulls the viewer into a sense of foreboding that’s hard to measure. I’m interested in seeing the alternate endings, especially the original, which seems more in keeping with the film’s insistence on a grounded scare. But the Spielberg-suggested denouement (unfortunately featured in the trailer, leaving its truly jarring moment something to be anticipated rather than freshly experienced) is incredibly unsettling.
I wouldn’t say filmmaker Oren Peli fully capitalized on the potential of his concept. Like “The Blair Witch Project” (a film to which “Paranormal Activity” often finds itself compared), there are elements (specifically a moment involving a charred photograph) that feel forced and even betray a sense of anxiety on the part of the filmmakers (who do a remarkable job of letting practicality serve as visceral terrorist for the most part). But for $20,000, it’s an impressive accomplishment all around. And it got me thinking on the genre.