Em Magazine

By Matt Haviland

Some experiences, like “Angie” by The Rolling Stones, are purely visceral. You don’t have to know Angie to cry about her; Mick Jagger gives you enough of a desperate feeling to make you weep.

Same goes for Paranormal Activity. You don’t have to believe in ghosts (or demons) to scream when a door moves by itself. Some guy in the row behind me actually squealed, and everyone in the theater laughed at him; a few minutes later, most of them were gasping as some other household object moved.

You know a movie is scary if a swinging chandelier can make hundreds of college kids hold their breath. Most of this film is just bumps in the night. However, because of the mathematical precision director Oren Peli uses to build tension, sounds and subtle movements are made genuinely frightening. For example, Micah – the femininely named male lead – sets up his video camera in the same position every night: a simple shot of his bedroom. The door hangs open on the left, an increasingly agitated couple sleeps together on the right.

Each time they returned to this shot – the simple image of a bed and a door – you could hear a rustling go through the theater: people moved forward in their seats, sank backward, or tightened their hoody strings and whispered, “F*** this, man.” A door and a bed consistently had more response from the audience for just being there than, say, any killing scene in Halloween 2. Take your pick of modern horror films: I bet the furniture in Paranormal Activity was scarier than that whole movie.

As an audience, we were Pavlov’s dog. Something scary happened last time they went to this shot, so something even scarier must be happening this time. That’s how the tension is built. Step by step, bump by bump. It’s genius. By the end, everyone in the audience was part of the experience; the fact that most of the official trailer is just footage from a California test screening says a lot. This is a movie about being at the movies. While you do get personally horrified, half the fun is watching everyone else.

The acting is great, too. Aside from a funny psychic and a dull friend, we spend 99 minutes watching Micah and his girlfriend Katie live. They are essentially real people – two vaguely attractive, debatably clever twenty-somethings who interact on a level of familiarity damn close to that of a real couple. They joke around. They argue. They have intimate moments followed by moments of sheer terror. You could really believe that this is a series of home movies, if not for the invisible demon. This is all not to mention that Micah and Katie are the actors’ real names.

As low budget horror films go, Paranormal Activity is an anorexic masterpiece. Nothing should be taken out, and the special effects – though in some cases merely somebody banging on the back of a door or turning on a light – are abrupt, scary, and realistic. Everything about this film says horror classic, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it became one.

Therefore, and just this once, you can believe the hype. See it.