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 In cinemas Thursday [M]
Director: Oren Peli
Runtime: 86mins
Calling Paranormal Activity ‘one of the most frightening cinematic experiences of a lifetime’ is far from an exaggeration. This intelligent, indie-horror film will most likely scare the pants off you, and leave you sleeping with the lights on.
Written and directed by unknown Oren Peli and starring a crew of also unknown but incredibly talented actors, Paranormal Activity is the ultimate scary movie. Straying away from the usual mistakes horror films make and instead relying on what people are truly afraid of, Peli is a writer-director with an individual style and an ability to create something remarkable without big budgets and special effects.
Katie and Micha are being disturbed by bumps in the night. Convinced she has been followed by a menacing supernatural presence since childhood, Katie enlists the help of a psychic to help solve her ghostly problems. Micha, somewhat less helpfully, begins to videotape her as she sleeps. What he captures on camera is a series of escalating events as the ghostly being gradually becomes aggravated by Micha’s intrusion.
Peli knows what scares you. Filming people at their most vulnerable as they sleep, unaware of the horrors in the darkness around them, is extremely effective. In Paranormal Activity, it’s what you don’t see that scares you most.
Like The Blair Witch Project, it is filmed entirely in ‘home-movie’ style. However, Paranormal Activity thankfully avoids the overuse of shaky-cam, mounting the camera on a tripod to film the most frightening moments. The overseeing eye of automated camera as it records in the darkness gives the film more real tension than any building music ever could, and there are no cheap scares.
Peli doesn’t cram his film with gore and sex, Paranormal Activity is not an exploitation film; it relies on real scares and sympathy for its characters. The performances of Katie (Katie Featherstone) and Micha (Micha Sloat) are so convincing that it feels as if what you’re seeing is actually a home movie. There is nothing fake about either of them, and their honest performances make the film even more unnerving.
Like Blair Witch, there will be plenty of people saying this isn’t scary. There are no bloody deaths or hockey masks, but what Paranormal Activity offers instead is so much more real and frightening. It will stay with you as you go to bed at night, or as you arrive home alone, and that’s the mark of a truly scary movie.
When there’s something strange in your neighbourhood, you better hope it’s not whatever is terrorising Katie and Micha in Paranormal Activity. Even Bill Murray won’t be able to help you.
*****
BROOKE BURGESS
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