Paranormal Activity -- DVD Review

You have to admire a movie like Paranormal Activity. For an alleged $15,000, filmmaker Oren Peli has taken the concept of a horror film using "found footage" and managed to mostly to deliver on the hype in a way that the similarly themed and promoted Blair Witch Project could not.

The movie focuses on an engaged couple, Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston), as they try to get to the bottom of the weird noises and events that Katie has been experiencing since a house fire when she was a kid. Micah documents their house over a series of days using his high definition video camera. As the events get stranger, Katie gets more and more concerned that Micah's investigation into what is happening is angering whatever is behind these strange occurrences.

Using a static frame, time manipulation, cheap special effects, and some creepy sound effects, Oren Peli does a masterful job of amping up the tension. He realizes that the fear of what MIGHT happen is often more scary than what you know will happen, and that what a director shows you is often not as scary as what you imagine he's going to show you. At its best, Paranormal Activity recollects the feeling a person gets sitting in a dark room alone and hearing sounds that he can't comfortably identify. Do you dare take a look? Do you want to know? Can you go back to sleep?

If Peli used the Blair Witch Project as his model, then it is obvious he learned from it. Despite the fact that there is a lot of handheld work in the Paranormal Activity, the framing is a lot more pleasing to the eye and does not create the nauseous feeling that Blair Witch Project had. He also has chosen actors who are able to more realistically improvise dialogue and build the suspense and tension within their own relationship over the course of the film. While Sloat and Featherston had not acted in a film prior to Paranormal Acitivity, both acquit themselves nicely. Unfortunately, the film suffers from a muddled sound mix that should have been cleaned up before Paramount released it. This problem is easily resolved, however, by turning on the subtitles of the DVD.

The problem with Paranormal Activity is that it has done such a masterful job of escalating the tension that the climax of the film would have to be spectacular to provide an adequate payoff. Unfortunately, it is not. According to the Wikipedia entry for the film, Paranormal Activity had at least three separate endings, two of which are presented on the DVD. Of the three, the theatrical ending is, in my opinion, the least fulfilling, substituting one final cheap scare for something that makes sense. The alternate ending supplied at least makes some sense in the context of the film.

In an age where anybody with a few thousand bucks can make a reasonably professional looking video, Paranormal Activity represents a triumph. With pocket change, Oren Peli made a blockbuster. The fact that he did this with tools that are more easily and cheaply accessible than any time in the history of film should be an inspiration to anyone with a camera and a dream.