Like a grown man playing peek-a-boo with his mom

Rating: 7/10 (31 March 2011)

This movie is fun, creepy, excitingand I'm embarrassed at how much I liked it. I feel like a grown man who just enjoyed playing peek-a-boo with his mother.
To put it bluntly, Paranormal Activity is like a remedial version of The Blair Witch Project. If you loved the latter, you'll find the former less entertaining but still well worth seeing. If you're one of those types that has taken to ripping The Blair Witch Project to prove how smart and sophisticated you are, every single complaint and criticism you've made applies even more so to Paranormal Activity. So, your reaction to this movie will depend on whether you've taken the stick out of your butt.
Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a young, unmarried couple living together in a big house in San Diego. There are two other important things in the house with them. One is a video camera they use to tape everything that goes on. The other is an invisible demon who repeatedly torments them. The world's biggest psychic douchebag also shows up for some exposition, but it's mostly just Katie, Micah, the camera and things going bang or roar in the night.
This film is supposed to be the "real video" footage of what happened to Katie and Micah, just as the Blair Witch Project was supposedly "real video" footage shot by those kids in the woods. But unlike its late 1990s predecessor, Paranormal Activity puts up only the barest pretense at being "real video". It's less realistic, more obviously contrived and it's impossible not to recognize how the movie is deliberately manipulating your emotions. For all that, though, it's still pretty effective.
Let me give you an example. A lot of the movie is shot in Katie and Micah's bedroom where they have the camera set up to record things as they sleep. Their bed is on the right side of the screen and on the left side is their open bedroom door, leading out into a hallway and the stairs down to the ground floor. It's set up that way so you're constantly looking over at the open door, wondering and worrying and freaking out over what might come through it. I was completely aware of what writer/director Oren Peli was trying to do and how he was trying to do it and he still creeped me out.
There's something about hand held video and the possibility of the supernatural that hooks into your brain somehow and gets you to believe. The fact that the acting is just okay, the dialog beyond banal and the plot kind of tedious simply plays into your suspension of disbelief and makes it feel more true. That magic is the reason why there's 327 different shows on cable TV about people looking for ghosts with video cameras, even though every single episode of every single show is exactly the same.
1. The go somewhere to look for ghosts.
2. They don't find any.
3. The end.
Maybe it's because we grow up associating video footage with the news or with our own home movies and it programs us to involuntarily respond to all video footage as if it were actually happening. Maybe the first generation who grows up entirely with Youtube will react to video footage as merely another entertainment format, robbing films like Paranormal Activity of their power. But until that occurs, movies like this will be able to come along every few years and scare at least the socks off us.
And if you like Paranormal Activity, let me again recommend a movie called Video X. It's not about ghosts, demons or witches. It's about a white trash girl and an even whiter trash guy who video tape their cross country trip that goes horribly awry. I think Video X is the pinnacle of "real video" filmmaking. It's better than Paranormal Activity and better than The Blair Witch Project. That's because it's more than a trick. It uses the "real video" style to tell a genuine story of hope, fear, love and despair.
I can recommend Paranormal Activity, but Video X is a must-see.