It was the Friday before Halloween, and I found myself squished into a high-backed theater seat, clutching my roommateís hand with a grip that proceeded to turn her fingers blue. Scooting down in our seats, we watched with our free hands clasped over our mouths as something very wrong happened on the flickering big screen. There in my chair at Wooster Cinemark 10, I witnessed one of the scariest events to ever happen on film. I saw Ö a sheet move.
Yes, the subtle shuffling of someoneís bed linens made me squeal like I was back in elementary school, and that effect is what characterizes the genius of ìParanormal Activity.” In a 90-minute movie that explores a cliched theme, what makes things go bump in the night?, I felt more genuine dread than I had experienced in a big-budget terror show. And I loved every second of it.
Absent from this film are the buckets of fake organs, clinically indifferent torture devices, and maniacal serial killers that have characterized so many of the high-budget studiosí recent Halloween movie offerings, giving the genre that boasts such works of horrific bloodlust as the Saw franchise and ìHostel” the trendy nickname ìtorture porn.” How quaint. For me, watching these kinds of films never produced fear so much as blatant disgust. I donít really want to know how far the human arm can twist, and the only thing such an image will probably scare me away from is the dinner I was going to eat after the show. Seeing so many special effects has left many a horror-film enthusiast anesthetized to that fun dose of terror that keeps audiences coming back for more. But instead of ratcheting up the gore ante, like so many directors before him have, Oren Peli takes his audience back to basics. The imagination is the most powerful scare-inducer, and Peli uses few effects and a whole lot of suggestive lighting to tell his audience that something is very wrong with his haunted house.
ìParanormal Activity” has a fairly simple plotline. Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat), a couple who have been together for three years, are troubled by strange occurrences in their new house. Micah decides to set up a camera to capture whatever action he can ó be it neighborhood pranksters or something more sinister. Thatís it. The audience watches as the nightly events begin to seem less like the rustling of wind and more like the movement of some sort of, well, ìparanormal” creature. Tensions rise with each nighttime shot of the coupleís bed room, and the effect is devastating for the nerves. There is an inherent sense of dread at work in this film which makes it easy to understand while a little movie made for $11,000 has grown from an underground phenomenon to a movie that got its stars on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. So many times with this amount of hype, peopleís expectations are somehow not met. I can honestly say that this film delivered on every bit of the excitement the previews promised.
In fact, this is the only movie I have ever been to where I actually screamed in the theater (as did half the people around me). The strange thing was I didnít see any primordial monster or gory murder. I saw the shifting of sheets. I saw a shadow move across a door. I saw the wind blow someoneís hair. And I still havenít stopped shaking.