Genuinely terrifying film made on a micro-budget

Rating: 9/10 (29 August 2014)

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Paranormal Activity is that it was made for only $15,000. This is truly about as low budget as you can get, it's nothing basically. When watching it, while it was obvious it was very lo-fi, I would never for a second have though it could have been made for so very little. The main reason being was that it was so incredibly effective. I'm fairly jaded in terms of horror movies, in that I have seen loads and don't get scared by hardly any these days. This movie actually genuinely rattled me. Whenever I saw that timer slow down on the video camera in the middle of the night I was immediately on edge. When it comes to gut reactions such as this it isn't always easy to say why they happen but this movie touched a nerve that is for sure. One reason I am sure was that it used its low-budget to its advantage and made the events caught on home video seem like the kind you could relate to; the banality of the day scenes added a definite reality that drew you into the situation much more than if the film had the distancing effect of cinematic gloss. The effect was one famously used by The Blair Witch Project (which incidentally cost four times more to make) but for my money Paranormal Activity is the better movie, in that its characters are easier to empathise with and their situation is easier to relate to, after all everyone experiences the atmosphere of a darkened house on a nightly basis.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to say very much more about this one, as it has already garnered a huge number of IMDb reviews already. But suffice to say, I would consider this to be a perfect illustration of how to make a very successful movie with very little money. It takes considerable skill to do so and the people involved in this nailed it. And thankfully the distributer DreamWorks did not go with their original idea of immediately remaking it and only releasing the original version as a DVD extra! Thankfully test screenings indicated that this micro-budgeted film was really getting to people in a way that would be simply hard to recreate with all the money Hollywood could provide.