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Basically the first act of The Exorcist shot on a handheld camera, Paranormal Activity will have Hollywood directors who think they know how to make horror movies scratching their heads.
For starters, how is it that a bedroom door opening mysteriously on a video playback from the middle of the night gets people's hearts pounding more than, say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface pulling intestines from a still-living victim?
One difference is the line between verisimilitude and outlandishness. You will probably win the lottery before you find yourself captured by yokel cannibals.
On the other hand, the notion of opening your eyes in the middle of the night to find your spouse has been standing there staring at you spookily for hours seems somehow more tangible and therefore truly frightening.
In fact, Paranormal Activity -- the famously DIY (do-it-yourself) $17,000 movie that Paramount is rolling out ingeniously slow (it made $22 million last weekend in limited release with only one screen in many large cities) -- squeezes most of its scare juice out of a single, oft-repeated shot.
That would be the "video monitor" in which Micah (Micah Sloat) sets his camera on a nightlong recording of himself and his girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston) asleep (mostly) in bed. Around them, doors open and close. There is independent action around the blankets.
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And then things get really scary. The shot can be on fast forward (indicating hours of inactivity) or real-time. It is the money shot of Paranormal Activity, an approach rooted in the vulnerability of sleep. And without it, this movie would not be the phenomenon it is.
And thank God for it for another reason. These are the only scenes in which our intrepid videographer Micah uses a tripod. By now, the "shaky camera" is a hoary cliche of this young genre (including The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and George Romero's Diary of the Dead). These days, people's kids know how to shoot video with steady stands, so this is one area where realism has begun to be strained.
The conceit also means at least one character has to be such a video nut that he hangs on to the camera with the tenacity of Charlton Heston and his guns.
Micah is of the male stereotype school that says guys never ask for directions or read instruction manuals. Apparently, when the situation screams for it, they never ask for help from demonologists either. As a lifetime of nightmares starts to coalesce around Katie, Micah goes from skeptic to obsessed, and still strangely bemused, participant. But his insistence that, hey, I can deal with this myself, is both the movie's driving force and its least credible aspect.
Still, one more character might have increased the budget by an onerous $1,000 or so. As it is, Micah barely consents to a cameo visit by a psychic (Mark Fredrichs), who promptly informs the couple they're in big trouble, and leaves.
Still, forget gaps in logic. Paranormal Activity is all about the night-frights, caught on night-vision video. Suffice to say, we get a piecemeal picture of what Katie and Micah are dealing with (culminating in a shocking final scene). And those pieces not only set the table for that scene, they tighten the knot that forms early in your stomach and stays tied throughout.