Lives Up to All the Hype

Rating: Null/10 (30 October 2009)

Paranormal Activity (2007)
**** (out of 4)
By now everyone knows the story but a couple (Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat) begin to experience paranormal activity in their home so they set up a video camera to try and capture what's going on. As a die-hard horror fan I pay attention to all the news floating around year in and year out. Each and every year fans hype up the latest scary movie but more times than not that hype ends up being nothing more than the build up for a bad movie. That's certainly not the case here. I've had several people tell me this was the scariest film they had ever seen. I had people telling me they saw folks leaving the theater in tears. I had heard just about everything you'd want to hear about a horror movie but the most shocking this is that, even knowing the hype, the movie got under my skin like no other that I can remember seeing. I love a good ghost movie and this here is certainly one of the best. On a "critic" proof level the film is probably just a three and a half but the overall impact is quite remarkable and in the end this certainly lives up to the opinion of being one of the scariest films ever made. I'm not going to call out any of the scary sequences as to not ruin them for anyone else but I can think of three that had my blood turning ice cold. The film has been compared to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, which I think is fair because both movies take simple things that can frighten anyone. In this film we get a wide angle view of the bedroom and at first I didn't like this because you never knew where the "scary" part was going to happen so you were constantly looking all over the frame to pick up that moment. After a while I realized this was a masterful touch because, like the characters, you never knew where the scary moment was going to happen so by constantly looking around you were just building up the fright level in your head because you had no idea where it was going to come from or what they had in store for you. The performances by Featherston and Sloat were very good to say the least. This type of low budget movie usually doesn't feature this type of performances but it's another plus for the film. Another major miracle is the fact that the filmmakers could do so much with so little, which once again proves that you don't need money to show off talent. As with the previously mentioned hyped movie, I'm sure this one will take a lot of backlash but that's going to happen with any popular movie. For me, the movie worked marvelously well and certainly lived up to everything I had heard about it. Sitting here thinking back on a few of the scenes still gives me goosebumps.