by Everett Jensen

Created on: November 07, 2009

Paranormal Activity
written and directed by Oren Peli
starring Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Ashley Palmer, Amber Armstrong

Most horror films hardly manage to do much more than entertain the sophisticated viewer who has seen just about every twist and turn so that the only thing that is left is a increase in gore content. There is certainly a market for films who revel in the splattering of blood and the mangling of limbs going back to D. W. Griffith through Herschell Gordon Lewis and countless other copyists. There is of course an entirely different sort of horror film that terrifies by extraction as it relies not on visual cues of mayhem but on the inherent creepiness of what cannot be seen. If done well, these films embody the Hitchcockian ethos that it is what you don't see is most effective. This film exemplifies this approach and is one of the few recent horror films to actually manage to terrify.

Paranormal Activity is by this time clearly a cultural phenomenon. Budgeted at a scant $15,000 it takes the premise of being antagonized by a presence that is unknowable, mischievous, and certainly exceedingly unsettling. Young couple Micah (Sloat) and Katie (Featherston) have been mildly affected by something that comes to them in the night. As the film opens Micah has purchased an expensive camera that he intends to use to capture evidence of whatever it is that is terrorizing them.

The film uses the shaky camera technique popularized by The Blair Witch Project, Quarantine [REC] and Cloverfield among others. Mostly, though it relies on a stable camera that Micha has set up in their bedroom and much of the film's footage is seen through this camera's lens. We see the couple sleeping and hear sounds, watch lights switch on and off, and see various other examples of something that is attempting to disturb the peace. These scenes are exceedingly disturbing simply because one cannot see or name whatever it is that is causing these events to take place. It's purely through this simple set-up that one is accosted by some force that remains out of the realm of rational understanding. We don't know so therefor we become progressively more wracked with fear. The result is a film that is as unsettling as anything that has ever been screened in theaters and the impact is visceral and very real. Afterward, every little sound upon exiting the theater causes unease and sleeping is exceedingly difficult.

Micha approaches the entity as something that is strictly

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