Paranormal Activity is the movie The Blair Witch Project wanted to be and Cloverfield didn't even try to be.

Rating: 8/10 (11 October 2009)

So, is Paranormal Activity any good? The movie was slated to start at 10pm on a Thursday night. On a hunch, I decided to show up at 8:30 just in case there was rush, and ended up being about 75th in line. Yup, lots of people in little college towns like free movies.
Once they let folks in, every seat had a butt in it "the little movie that could" (with the help of a healthy dose of marketing acumen from DreamWorks) had sold out the house. The air was abuzz with electricity teenage girls were giddy with nervous excitement teenage boys had their chests puffed out and their swagger on. Everyone was ready for "an experience". Would it be a self-fulfilling prophecy? A few trailers for upcoming horror/thriller type movies ran ahead of the film, each one eliciting wild screams and hoots and howls from an audience so adrenalin pumped you'd think we were waiting for a prize fight to start. We could tell this was going to be a crazy night.
When the film finally started (easy to tell, as per the choppy hand held home movie image) the crowd let out a scream as though The Rocky Horror Picture Show was rolling.
And then the next ninety minutes were spent listening to teeny bopper girls squeal and scream and teeny bopper guys yell "Oh sh*t, oh sh*t, oh sh*t!" about every 90 seconds. Now I get it, it's a scary movie, screaming will happen. But seriously, screaming when a character turns out a light? Narrating the film with "Oh f*ck she just went outside!"? Please. Grow up.
But was it scary? In a word, yes.
In more words, it's very scary. I had anxiety and adrenalin pumping through me like hasn't happened in a long long time. The film does a great job of building tension, of offering cues to impending action in the form of a Jaws-theme-esquire rumbling baseline as something "paranormal" is about to happen. It does a great job of developing characters, their relationships, and the destructive effects the growing threats have on them. And it does it all in a way that does probably the best job of any movie employing the "auto-chronicled narrative conceit" (yes, I believe I just coined that term, tell a friend) has done to date.
Paranormal Activity is the movie The Blair Witch Project wanted to be and Cloverfield didn't even try to be. Discuss amongst yourselves the relative success or failure of The Last Broadcast, REC or its American remake Quarantine.
Read the complete review and more about auto-chronicling at: http://tinyurl.com/ychqqug