paranormal activity

Yesterday Snark and I had our first movie theater date, after almost two years of dating.

We saw Paranormal Activity. Snark had shown me the trailer for this film about a month ago and it looked scary, so I was pretty darn excited! I was even clapping in the car as we pulled into the parking lot. The movie has a Blair Witch quality to it and was submitted to Screamfest (a horror/cult film festival for homemade movies) after just 7 days of shooting. A low budget film, it was made for between $10,000 and $15,000 (depending on the source). Robert Ebert reportedly said it was "an ingenious horror film. . . . so well made it’s truly scary."

It seems I often beg to differ with Ebert's inflated admiration for movies and I wonder if he actually watches them before he writes up his opinion. I understand that the film was homemade, so maybe it needs to be given a little slack . . . maybe with a little more money, time, or something it could have been "truly scary," but in its current form, it just wasn't.

I didn't jump or flinch once and even crappy scary movies (Quarantine, for example) can usually get me to be surprised/freaked out at least once. More often I was bored as I watched Paranormal Activity. I kept glancing over at Snark to see what he thought. I daydreamed about asking for my money back.

Much of the film consisted of the main characters (Katie, who is being haunted, and her boyfriend, Micah, who isn't quite scared enough by the hauntings) 1) talking about what to do about the demon/hauntings (should Micah take care of it with his research and yet-undefined plan or should Katie call the demon expert who the ghost psychic recommended?), 2) reviewing film footage from the previous night and being surprised by what they see (even though the audience just watched it as it happened, and so the audience watches the scene twice), and 3) getting ready for bed, sleeping for a few hours before (at either one-something-in-the-morning or three-something) a strange noise occurs such as footsteps on the stairs and in the hallway or a door opening and closing, a light turning on and off, a loud clatter that wakes Katie and Micah from sleep, "breathing" on Katie's neck.

The plot is pushed by Katie's demands that Micah "leave it alone" because he is just making the hauntings worse with his video camera and his attempts to make contact with the demon by telling it to show itself, using a Ouija board to see what it wants. Micah doesn't listen, brushing off Katie's fears and concerns, making a joke out of the whole experience, exclaiming that he'll take care of it and they don't need to bring any strangers (who know how to deal with demons) into the house. Blah.

There were definitely some creepy scenes, which in another context would have been spine-tingling and goose-bumpy: for instance, when Katie gets pulled out of bed by her foot and dragged down the hall (by the demon that you can't see). Or the images of her sleep walking/standing over the bed in the middle of the night, staring at Micah for hours, in some kind of trance, without them realizing it until they review the video footage the next morning. Or the inexplicable, partially-burned photo of Katie as a child found up in their attic in the middle of the night, even though her childhood house and all of its belongings burned in a fire when she was about 8 years old.

But the reason why all of these creepy scenes didn't actually create a scary movie was because of the "filler" in between (Snark's word), which didn't move the scariness along quick enough (there's was too much downtime when suspense wasn't building and nothing very interesting was happening between the characters), and also because of the unrealistic reactions of the characters. Okay, so many scary movie's have unrealistic reactions from characters (you know, the part when you yell at the main character not to walk down the hallway because the bad thing is hiding just around the corner, but of course they do it anyway), but maybe I was thinking they'd add a touch of realism among the expected, stupid scary-movie mistakes (i.e. exploring in the middle of the night when surely something bad will happen) from a movie that was supposedly-trying to make itself look like a semi-documentary.

Here's the scenario: You're sleeping with your partner in the bed. It's about 3am. You hear a clatter downstairs or footsteps in the hallway, and the sounds wake you both up. What do you do? First, you'll probably pause and listen. You hear the noise again, so now you know you didn't just dream it. Then wouldn't you turn the freaking light on, so you can see what might be making the noise? If this starts happening every night, do you really, continuously, go off exploring the house with the lights off? I mean, couldn't you explore better with lights on?! Uggh. I think this was the part that got me the most.

So there you have it: my rant on what I hoped would be a fabulous scary movie. Oh well, try again. Two trailers for upcoming suspense/scary/creepy films that played before the movie looked intriguing to me; they were The Fourth Kind and Shutter Island. Maybe they'll be sucky or maybe they'll get me to jump a few times and glance behind my shoulder as if something were coming to get me.