Movie, shmovie, it still looks like a home video

Rating: 5/10 (24 October 2010)

It's a perfectly ordinary suburban house, and when Micah and Katie move in they seem to be a perfectly ordinary young unmarried couple. However, their nights are disturbed by things that go bump. There is an unseen presence in the house that seems increasingly malevolent. Then we learn it's not the house that is haunted, it's Katie. Apparently she has been stalked by this presence for about ten years, ever since she was fourteen. Or is it just the imagination of a disturbed young woman? Micah, brash and reckless, decides to investigate matters by making a movie of it (it's called "Paranormal Activity"), Either he or Katie is behind the camera, filming almost everything. There is a stationary camera in the bedroom that keeps them under video surveillance while they sleep. For all his puffed-up bravado, Micah is actually thoughtless and self-centered: He is less in love with Katie than he is with having a live-in girlfriend, and as Katie becomes increasingly frightened, Micah withdraws from her emotionally, becoming increasingly determined to finish his film. What to Katie is the threat of demonic possession becomes to Micah a project. The bedroom camera records bizarre, inexplicable phenomena while they sleep, which are all the more chilling because they occur in silence and stillness. The inevitable climax nevertheless unfolds suddenly and unexpectedly.
"Paranormal Activity" was "filmed" with a digital video camera held by the actors themselves, or fixed on a tripod for some scenes. It's meant to look like a home video much of the time, and it does, although the special effects, though minimal, are really quite effective and scary. Unfortunately, the filmmakers make the mistake of assuming that because it COULD be made that way cheaply and quickly, it SHOULD have been made that way. Forty or fifty years ago, "Paranormal Activity" would have been an innovative experiment in cinéma vérité. But in the age of YouTube and "America's Funniest Home Videos," with television sinking ever lower into the fetid ooze of banality under the weight of relentlessly proliferating reality shows, and with billions if not trillions of hours of home videos filling closets all over the world, a film made this way is just niggling. A number of scenes are also spoiled by the intermittently totally illogical behavior of the characters. However, one objection by other reviewers is unjustified: Why didn't the couple just up and leave when spooky things started to happen? Because, Katie explains to Micah, there's no point in leaving the house because the entity that is threatening her will just follow her wherever she goes.
Like a lot of reality shows that pad 10 minutes out to half an hour, and like a lot of home videos, the film is slow and draggy a lot of the time. I've just watched "The 4-D Man," a moldy oldie sci-fi movie from about 1960, and I noticed that the pace of the film was much slower than films made today. "Paranormal Activity" runs, or crawls, at the same slow pace. The filmmakers could improve it considerably if they hacked about 20 minutes out of it.