Die Yuppie Scum!

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

I'd like to begin by offering a hearty "hear hear!" to Mr. Sendak.

Moving on, as I've said before, I'm by no means a horror aficionado. However I like to think that doesn't prevent me from being able to distinguish the good examples from the bad. I agree that, despite its weaknesses, Paranormal Activity is one of the good examples. For me, really the sole interest run-of-the-mill horror films have for me is the gruesome deaths, which are rarely, if ever, genuinely scary; they're so formulaic that you can almost always see them coming a mile away, so it's really about the sadistically gleeful anticipation of some hapless red shirt's demise. On the other hand, we have films like The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, Psycho, Alien, Carrie, Rosemary's Baby, The Orphanage, The Ring (I mean the Japanese original; I haven't seen the American remake), The Others, and del Toro's films, which earn their scares by slowly, carefully building suspense instead of just hacking apart a bunch of people the audience doesn't care about. As you note, however, films like these are much more the exceptions than the rule, with audiences—if the vocally unsatisfied theatergoers leaving Paranormal Activity as we waited for our screening were any indication—evidently prefering a rapid series of graphic kills to slow-burning tension that actually gets under your skin.

(As a side note, I don't see how you can claim that "horror" has become too denigrated to use as the name of this genre, especially when the name you suggest in its place is "scary movie." Now that's denigration.)

On the plus side, Paranormal Activity eschews a series of graphic kills and jack-in-the-box scares in favor of establishing characters in whom the audience can invest, setting it in realistic surroundings, preying on real-life anxieties (I think people are more freaked out by weird sounds in the night than by hockey-mask-wearing mutes out in the woods), and giving the film time to build genuine suspense. On the minus side, however, the scares are almost always even easier to see coming than in your standard slasher movies. I knew that something was coming each and every time we saw the late-night footage of their bedroom, and knew exactly when it was coming when the footage stopped fast-forwarding; I mean, after the second or third time I literally just watched the clock in the lower-right corner and waited for it to stop fast-forwarding. The only uncertainty at that point was what was going to happen each time, which the film generally did a good job with; I was genuinely surprised when Katie stood beside the bed for hours, and when she was dragged out of bed and down the hall.

Another problem with the film was the characters, Micah—your name's pronounced "My-cah," dummy, not "Mee-cah"—and Katie. They reminded me of the characters in Cloverfield, lazy, privileged, self-absorbed yuppies I couldn't care less about and in fact was actively rooting against. (My thanks to Patrick Bateman for this post's title.) This was only magnified by what an absolute tool Micah is in almost every scene of the film, going from poo-pooing Katie's fears and the psychic's warnings about antagonizing the spirit, to taking it so seriously that he seems to want to take it on single-handedly out of unthinking macho bravado. (I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd challenged the spirit to "throw down, chief!") Speaking of the psychic, I kinda couldn't blame Micah for not taking him seriously, with his talking about these phenomena with practically scientific exactitude ("It's a demon, not a ghost." "In such situations, what typically happens is..."); maybe there's a peer-reviewed journal he could refer them to (other than the picture book Micah was reading and treating like a scientific textbook). Katie was the best character in that I didn't actively dispise her, though I couldn't help but keep thinking of her as Pam Beesley with bigger breasts and no job. (Actually, it would've been great if we'd had Jim and Pam instead of Micah and Katie; a lot more wisecracking and mugging for the camera.) That's another thing, how contrived was it to have Micah be a day trader (remember those?) and Katie a grad student, just to give them an excuse to stay at home all day, every day talking to the camera? Are we seriously supposed to believe that an unmarried twenty-something couple can afford a beautifully furnished three-bedroom house in San Diego, a convertible, and a graduate-level education simply by trading stocks online (when he isn't following Katie around with the camera)?

These problems with the characters weren't helped by the actors' performances, which were basically community-theater level. I realize they aren't supposed to seem like "actors," but when almost the whole film is spent with the camera in their faces, I can tell the difference between "real people" and "bad actors." (There are plenty of examples of great performances by nonprofessional actors, such as the Italian neorealists (de Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D., Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew), Black Orpheus, Van Sant's Elephant and Paranoid Park, Bruno S. in Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, and Oscar-winner Dr. Haing Ngor in The Killing Fields.)

So I think that Paranormal Activity has a lot going for it, and I would recommend it to those tired of slasher flicks and torture porn and looking for a breath of fresh air in the horror genre. I wouldn't recommend it to those looking for good acting, enjoyable characters, or scary scenes in which you can't predict with pin-point accuracy when the scare is going to come.

P.S. — By "the classic that was filmed in our area," I assume you're referring to Body of Evidence (trailer), filmed in Portland and starring the acclaimed thespian Madonna.