After the much-hyped Cloverfield fizzed out at the box office in just two weekends, it seemed like the found footage genre was fated for a long period of dormancy. One year after Cloverfield's
release, however, Paranormal Activity came seemingly out of nowhere and generated over the course of a few weeks as much hype as Cloverfield's massively complex marketing campaign took months to accrue. Making over six thousand times its production budget at the box office, Paranormal Activity proved that found footage films are well and alive, and we can surely expect to see more than a few “shaky-cam” movies rolling out this very year. (Rumor has it that Paranormal director Oren Peli has already completed filming on his next project, called Area 51, and it should be released this fall.)
One of the marks of a great horror film is its ability to successfully imbue an ordinary object with an aura of evil. The Ring had its VHS tape, Poltergeist had its toy clown, and now Paranormal Activity has its bedroom. Given the monetary constraints of the filmmakers, virtually none of the scares in Paranormal depend on CGI or graphic violence. This restraint actually works to the film’s benefit, however, as it forces Paranormal Activity to adapt a style reminiscent of horror classics like Robert Wise’s The Haunting. Every creaking floorboard raises hairs, and the film’s biggest jumps come from slamming doors rather than perverse sadism. The movie also neatly sidesteps the problem most found footage films run into, which is why exactly a character in the film continues to record the madness around him. Rather than largely ignoring this problem as Cloverfield did, Paranormal Activity makes the insistence of its documentarian to continue filming a dramatic key point of the movie, as it drives its two leads further and further apart. The growing distance between Paranormal’s protagonists coalesces with the rising presence in the film of the supernatural, and the two themes meet in the movie’s emotionally draining final scene.* Although the ending is a gut punch, it’s not a heavy enough blow to make us forget how much fun we had during the rest of the movie. On old school scares, Paranormal Activity delivers.
original ending as well. The theatrical ending, I believe, is the superior one. The entire film has been building to a manifestation of the supernatural, and the original ending doesn’t provide this closure nearly as well as the movie’s new ending does. Either ending is overwhelmingly bleak though, a trend amongst recent horror films (The Mist, Drag Me to Hell, Open Water, Cloverfield, etc) that I am growing rather tired of.
