There was already a huge amount of buzz surrounding Paranormal Activity when I saw it previewed at last year’s Frightfest all-nighter. As a low-budget, found footage debut feature, much of the praise understandably focused on the ‘heir to Blair Witch’ angle. That praise continued once it received its (perhaps unfairly limited) general release, with plaudits rolling in from genre devotees and general audiences alike. I’m thus a little perturbed that I didn’t particularly enjoy it.
Trying to put my finger on quite why I didn’t has increased my confusion. Taking its component parts in isolation, I should at least conclude that it was average. Plot = interesting enough. Cast = Adequate for the task. Script = Can’t really complain. Direction = Nothing stands out as atrociously bad. It’s only when these are gelled together than the flaws emerge, and I think they arise out of Oren Peli’s decision to use the found footage format.
I realise that criticising a horror film for implausibility is akin to criticising an apple for not being an orange, but the found footage genre demands an added level of believability. By casting the viewer as a direct participant in the story and turning the camera into their eyes, we rightly subject such films to a heightened level of scrutiny. You can forgive flights of fancy when you’re cast in the traditional viewer role of passively watching a story unfold on screen. There the space belongs to the cast and crew, and they can treat it how they like in telling their tale. When you’re brought into the action in the way that found footage films do, you can rightly ask “am I supposed to believe this?”
Paranormal Activity falls down in being implausible within its own terms of reference. We are expected to believe that our protagonists are both terrified but prepared to stay in their house. We’ve all cried out in frustration that victims in horror films never think to call the police when Michael Myers is clearly standing outside or just moved instead of calling in Father Damien Karras. In Paranormal Activity, we’re presented with a young, affluent couple who are prepared to suffer mental and physical harm instead of simply moving. As such, the entire endeavour lacks that credibility that is so fundamental to found footage films.
So we are left with a series of disjointed set-pieces revolving around the recordings taken of the couple as they are in bed waiting for the next attack, without the buttress of a credible conceptual framework. The interventions of a couple of demonologists come across as rather mocking to the audience as a result of this, like those video clips you often saw on old PC games when you progressed to a new level. Absent is any incremental ratcheting up of terror and subtle revelation of the hopelessness of the situation of the type that rightly distinguished Blair Witch. Contrast the scene where Heather breaks down in the tent on realising what was happening and what was likely to happen, to Micah’s synthetic anger at the demon in his house and you’ll realise how far short Paranormal Activity falls in properly utilising the found footage technique.
It never really recovers from those failings, and is ultimately constricted by a format it does not use but cannot discard. It might have been an entertaining enough offering had it done one or the other, but instead it plummets between two stools. The cast, particularly Micah Sloat, fall into a similar trap, having insufficient gravitas to carry the weak format but presenting as too polished to come across as credibly amateur. We are thus forced to endure what becomes a rather sedentary exercise in going through the motions accompanied by a rather unlikeable couple awaiting the inevitable. The resorting to use of a Ouija board midway through suggests that even the crew were getting bored, and has all of the feel of a game of horror film ‘join the dots’.
These flaws may have been ironed out in the sequel, but until then you’re better off looking to Rec if you’re after a decent heir to Blair Witch. Perhaps the nicest thing I can say is that it wasn’t the worst film we saw that night.