Add Paranormal Activity alongside E.T. on the "Movies That Steven Spielberg Has Ruined" list

Rating: 9/10 (5 November 2009)

I want to be very clear right off the bat that my 9-star rating refers to the original director's cut of this film, which, before Steven Spielberg got his idiotic hands on it, was one of the most genuinely frightening film experiences I have ever had. However, the theatrical version of Paranormal Activity is a neutered homage to the original that deserves something much closer to a 6-star distinction.
The hype that went along with this film's wide release run set a bar that would be almost impossible for any movie to reach, so I'm not at all surprised that so many people have commented that Paranormal is not nearly as scary as they were expecting it to be. Had I not seen the director's cut of this film first, I'd be inclined to agree with that assessment. However, as it was originally screened for the festival audiences who helped generate the hoopla, Paranormal Activity not only reaches the fearsome crescendos hinted at in the marketing blitz, it handily exceeds them, delivering the most tense and harrowing horror blitzkrieg I've felt in years, or perhaps ever.
It's clear that Spielberg's aim was to take this niche indie thriller and dumb it down for mass audiences, who prove every time the weekend box office grosses come out that they don't enjoy films that require intelligence as a pre-requisite for enjoyment. By lobotomizing a unique offering like Paranormal Activity, which asks the viewer to draw upon the strange sounds and unexplained phenomenon we've experienced in our own lives to fully insert ourselves into the horrific miasma we find our characters in, the most terrifying moments in this film lose much of the punch they had in the original cut, and the dynamic of the film suffers immeasurably.
In the director's cut, we know that the demonic presence is gradually becoming more powerful because each new scene of night terrors features louder and more ominous manifestations, and the unseen entity's physical interactions with our characters grow more intense as the film moves forward. In the theatrical cut, in which all of the sound effects were re-dubbed, the loudest and most menacing audible phenomena actually occurs early in the film (in fact, the aspect of the original that scared me the most, the idea of some malevolent presence calling your name in the middle of the night, is omitted from the theatrical release). Instead of mounting scares guiding us through the enhancement of the entity's presence, the theatrical cut pauses to make sure that the idiots in the audience are catching on, offering them some newly-filmed and audaciously stupid Real World-ian confessional moments where our characters stare into the camera and tell us "it's getting worse" and "I can feel it watching me right now".
Other changes are so pointless that we have to wonder why time and money was even spent on them. On PA's journey from director's cut to dummy's cut, a foreboding and shapeless shadow appearing on the couple's bedroom door was removed, altered, and re-inserted, giving us... a different foreboding and shapeless shadow on the bedroom door. Even worse, an extended sequence delving into the demon's origin, accompanied by a very creepy back-story and some deliciously frightening video footage, is relegated to a post-script in the film's theatrical incarnation, and the deliciously frightening footage was left on the cutting room floor.
Let's truly consider the implications of watering down sound effects that already chilled the blood and axing a grisly and powerful scene that added further implications to the terrifying scenario... So, Spielberg's plan to make this horror film better was to make it LESS SCARY?
The biggest change between the two versions is, of course, the ending. While the theatrical ending adds a couple final "boo"s to the affair, the current climax of Paranormal Activity actually doesn't make any sense when you're forced to ask yourself why a demon that has gone the entire film without showing itself would suddenly decide it wants to play in front of the camera. Again, this device reveals that Spielberg didn't trust mass audiences to be satisfied with the more subtle and creepy ending that graced the original cut.
You know what? He was absolutely right... Most modern film-goers would have bemoaned the fact that we never see what happened to Mikah the same way they complained that we never saw a witch in The Blair Witch Project.
But the vision of this film so brilliantly presented in the director's cut is clearly not intended for that audience. Like Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity is built on the horror of what we CAN'T see, which, for anyone with an imagination, is far more frightening than anything that can be conjured on camera. We don't NEED to see what happens to Mikah because we can hear it just fine, and the screams that emerge from downstairs when his body is discovered off camera in the director's cut tell us everything we need to know about the nightmarish scenario we are then forced to picture in our minds.
Comparing the two versions, it's painfully clear that nothing added or subtracted in the theatrical cut does anything to make Paranormal Activity scarier or improve it in any way, and, in fact, every instance of change diminishes the power of this film.
This point will hopefully be moot when the film arrives on DVD, which should sensibly allow viewers to choose between the two cuts. I urge anyone who has yet to see PA to ignore the theatrical option and stick with the film that the director originally wanted you to see. And for those whose only experience with Paranormal Activity was the diluted semi-scary offering you saw in theaters: until you see the un-doctored version, you truly haven't experienced this astoundingly terrifying film yet.