Paranormal Activity

Review by Jason Gaston

 

Ah, sweet simplicity.  Where bangs and eerie sounds replace needless CGI and ridiculous amounts of gore.  Where there is no latex, no music video editing, and no big name stars phoning it in.

By now, I'm sure how you've all heard about how this modest movie made for less than the price of a new car has made it big all over the world, but I'm sure that the words you are looking for are the sweet multisyllabic lexis that will soon pour from my amazing brain into my fingers and across the world wide web straight to your eyes.  Those are the only words that matter.

Of course, if you believe that, I have a fifteen inch penis and, let's be honest, I don't have a fifteen inch penis. What I do have, however, is my never-ending love of cinema and horror and, after watching Paranormal Activity, my love of both of them have been strengthened.

Paranormal Activity is such a deliciously simple movie -- a boyfriend and girlfriend living together are the target of a strange supernatural entity that has apparently been following around the girl for most of her life.  Armed with a video camera, they seek out to document the phenomena as it slowly grows worse and worse and more and more dangerous with each passing night.  Imagine The Blair Witch Project meets Ghost Hunters.

This movie - this beautifully simple movie - does everything that a good horror movie does.  It introduces some likeable people, spends an hour or so torturing them, and scares us all half to death in the process.

The story is fairly logical in its premise (as logical as a story about an invisible jackass ghost can be) and there is enough emotional investment in the characters to make the entire affair something to care about.

The most important thing, though, is that Paranormal Activity relies on primal fears to get a rise out of its audience.  Forget masked killers, monsters, and CGI smoke -- Paranormal Activity targets that internal fear we got from our petrified ancestors: there's something beyond the light of the campfire, it doesn't like us, it will eat us, and there's not a thing we can do about it.

Helplessness in the face of something powerful and beyond our understanding: Fear at its best.