Last night’s midnight screening of Paranormal Activity, at the Coolidge in Boston, reinforced a few key points for me.

• Keep your feet tight and secure under your blanket, and definitely not dangling off the bed.
• Don’t sleep with your bedroom door open. It just leaves more things open to be afraid of.
• If someone personally gives you the number of a demonologist, you should probably take them seriously.
• Paranormal Activity is as scary as we’ve all been told.

Director Oren Peli jumps right into this 84 minute cut. We meet Micah first, who’s proudly unwrapping his brand new video camera, purchased to document the haunted happenings his girlfriend, Katie, worriedly (and he, enthusiastically) has began noticing around their home. She’s a grounded sweetheart, he’s an arrogant, but likable, day trader, and at first it seems their video camera is doomed to catch nothing more than Micah’s playful sexual advances on the more demure Katie. And a couple of strange noises, but that can all easily be blamed on air vents and ice machines, right?

At first, it holds to that. Noises, a misplaced set of keys, and a swaying bedroom door. But then Katie decides to call a paranormal expert, to the chagrin of Micah, and Katie’s past is revealed. This isn’t the first time Katie’s heard things that go bump in the night. Or seen them.

A video from Harry Knowles appeared before the screening, warning us we’d have a hard time sleeping that night and we may not want to go to bed alone. Agree on all points with the first warning. But the second one, not so much. After Katie’s revelation of a haunted past to Micah, I really had to wonder why he wouldn’t think there would be nothing safer than sleeping alone. Alas, the plight of the boyfriend, which gets into why Paranormal Activity is so successfully creepy.

Paranormal Activity is filled with dread. It exudes it, destroying Katie and Micah’s lives, and suffocating the audience with a hopeless sense of “no way out.” The movie takes itself and its plight seriously. Midnight audiences are taking the plight seriously as well, and allowing themselves to get wrapped up in this movie of minimal gore and unsophisticated FX. Micah and Katie give believable performances. If you tend towards the skeptic, Katie will seem obnoxious. If you tend towards the, well, more sympathetic, Micah may bug you, but either way, it’s hard to dislike either. Because of these performances, we’re again invested in this small story.

Society could kill Paranormal Activity. A snarking, laughing crowd could really rip this perfectly created bubble to bits, and I hope it doesn’t happen. But the nature of opinions will probably ultimately divide this into Blair Witch Project camps of “terrifying” and “ridiculous.” The movie isn’t perfect, but there are so many depictions of things simply… unnatural… that it’s utterly unsettling. The fear in the audience was so palpable that just the on-screen action of a character standing up made the whole audience gasp. And because of the dread, this action seems like the most unnatural thing in the world.

The story is told entirely through the camera, and mostly through Micah. Unlike Cloverfield, he’s a pretty steady hand, and the camera is mounted on a tripod at night monitoring the bed. Peli fast forwards through the dormant sleeping hours until the “paranormal activity” starts up. By the last third of the movie, watching the timer on that camera switch from fast forward mode to real time became like seeing the detonator on a bomb reach zero. I started to feel like I simply couldn’t handle seeing anymore, and that I wished we could just fast forward through the whole night. (Clearly, as a horror fan, I mean these are the best parts.) I wasn’t the only one. In those last 20 minutes of the movie, when it cut from daytime to the couple in bed, the audience became antsy with laughter, trying to diffuse the creeping feeling of, “This is all going to wrap up soon… And when it does, it’s going to be bad.”

So that was my experience with Paranormal Activity. At the end I had to uncurl my hands from gripping the seat to be able to join in with the rest of the applause. I’ve read of the three alternate endings, and I think the one they have attached now is certainly better than one ending, involving police, but am torn about my feelings on the other. This ending is pretty good. I can’t complain about it being winking because I was just too shot up with adrenaline from the whole experience to get into nit picking.

This is a fantastic ghost story. I would say that as a fan I was completely relieved to find it was actually scary, but as someone who always thinks there are shadows in my bedroom mirror, I can’t be relieved that I have new fuel to my imagination now. But what a cool feeling that is.

Tags: Paranormal Activity

This entry was posted by fallon on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.