Micah (Micah Sloat) and his girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston) have moved in together, but something is disturbing their domestic bliss, and that is some strange noises they hear when in bed at night and objects being moved inexplicably. He has got the idea into his head that this is some kind of ghost that is haunting them, so decides to undertake a spot of ghostbusting when he buys a video camera and begins to use it as much as he can in the hope that he can capture something paranormal. But he gets more than he bargains for - in fact, both of them do. Does something want to get its hands on Katie?
Stop me if you think you've heard this one before: a tiny budget horror movie, shot on video, benefits from a huge amount of hype courtesy of an advertising campaign which has people wondering how true it could have been, and goes on to break box office records for a film of its modest means. Nope, not The Blair Witch Project this time around, but Paranormal Activity, the brainchild of Oren Peli who shot this all in his house - the location rarely ventures outside, and when it does it's only to the garden - and tapped into precisely the same audience as the previous effort from a decade earlier had done.
The appearance of being genuine was what left many cinema viewers afraid to turn off the lights after they had seen it once they got home, but equally it was this style that brought the film its harshest critics. In fact, Paranormal Activity may have taken its cue from works like The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist, but its heart lay with reality television where carefully contrived documentaries used clever editing to create a narrative, and the thrill for those watching was that it was all true. Although in this instance there were few who believed what they were seeing was the honest truth, the found footage presentation did speak to the industry of TV channels whose bread and butter were those supernatural documentary series.
All we needed was an insistent narrator and Paranormal Activity could have passed for one of them, but as it was Peli never went too far, wisely allowing the drama to do all the talking: there were barely any special effects. Indeed, you could notice that not very much happened at all, though the semblance of something going on that we can only guess at was the strength here. A psychic investigator (Mark Friedrichs) shows up early on to tell the couple that they are not being haunted by a ghost after all, but a demon which has followed Katie from childhood, thereby establishing the threat that there is an unnamable and probably evil entity doing all that door slamming and footprint leaving.
If it were not for that scene, and the fact that Micah is meant to be more sceptical but is no such thing, then any number of mundane explanations could have been found for the disruption that the couple are suffering. But there's really no big twist here, as it does build up to an ending that plays out much as you would anticipate, and whether you found that encroaching menace unsettling was a matter of personal reaction. What was engaging was the way in which Peli utilised the everyday to offer his weird goings on a veneer of conviction, so if there seemed like too many scenes where Micah was shooting simply to have something to fill up the spaces between hauntings, these did strike a note of horror movie authenticity. Steven Spielberg, no less, suggested the ending be altered, and while either was fair enough, it was cheering to see a small film like this prove that the blockbusters didn't have it all their own way.
